Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture 9780231536301

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
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

Citation preview

Beyond Sinology

gloBal ChineSe Culture

gloBal ChineSe Culture David Der-wei Wang, Editor Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Literary and Cinematic Mappings of Violence in Modern China Alexander C. Y. Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: A Century of Cultural Exchange Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, editors, Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader

andrea BaChner

Beyond Sinology

chinese writing and the scripts of culture Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs in the publication of this series. This book has been published with the aid of a grant from the Hull Memorial Fund of Cornell University. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bachner, Andrea. Beyond Signology : Chinese writing and the scripts of culture / Andrea Bachner. pages cm. — (Global Chinese Culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16452-8 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53630-1 (e-book) 1. Chinese language — Writing — History.

2. Chinese characters — History.

3. Inscriptions, Chinese — History and criticism. 5. Chinese in motion pictures. 7. Chinese in art.

4. Chinese in literature.

6. Mass media and language — China.

I. Title.

PL1171.B25 2013 495.1'11—dc23 2013016490

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Lisa Hamm References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

ContentS

List of Illustrations vii A Note on Characters, Romanization, Translations, and Images ix Acknowledgments xi

introduCtion: SCript politiCS 1 1 CorpographieS 19 Death and the Sinograph 19 National Calligraphies 38

2 iConographieS 57 Poetics of Visuality 57 On (Not) Writing Chinese 74

3 SonographieS 93 Muteness Envy 93 Sinographic Glossolalia 110

4 allographieS 129 Crypto-Chinese 129 Graphic Parasites 146

5 teChnographieS 165 Radical Design 165 Under E(rasure) 183

ConCluSion: Beyond Sinology 205 Notes 219 Bibliography 255 Index 269

vi

contEnts

illuStrationS

Figure 0.1 Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 3.1 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 6.1

“Chinese Characters,” Beijing Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, directed by Zhang Yimou (2008) xiv Zhang Huan, “Family Tree” (2000) 41 Reading “Sword” in Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou (2002) 54 Poster campaign for Tsingtao Beer, San Francisco (2007) 92 Printing block for the title page of Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (1987) 172 Lu Boru’s pseudo-Martian “poem” 190 Hsia Yu, “The Disappeared Image” 195 The invention of REN, from BIG’s “Lost in Translation” 211

a note on CharaCterS, romanization, tranSlationS, and imageS

aBout CharaCterS Somewhat counter to the importance adduced to script specificities in this book, the need to limit typographic complexity made it necessary to settle on one set of Chinese characters. Since most sources consulted for this book are in traditional characters, traditional characters are used for all Chinese text, with the exception of examples that illustrate the difference between traditional and simplified characters.

aBout romanization This book generally follows the Pinyin system per scholarly convention in the United States, but uses other transcriptions if they are more common, for instance, in some names.

aBout tranSlationS Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. To ensure a smoother reading process for an audience in an English-speaking publishing context, as well as to limit the book’s word count, I had to omit most original versions of quotations not in English, though I still provide references for the original passages. Where appropriate and important, I include key terms in the original.

aBout imageS Pragmatic considerations have made it necessary to limit illustrations to a minimum. However, I generally provide references (often to websites) for images not reproduced in this book, though mentioned in my text.

x

notE

aCknowledgmentS

Beyond Sinology began as a side project. I had written about MalaysianChinese writing as part of a comparative work on figures of inscription in different cultural contexts (including Latin America and Europe) in my dissertation, but decided to let it rest and explore links between mediality and interculturality in Sinophone cultures during a postdoctoral fellowship year at Stanford University instead. The participation in a conference on global Chinese cultures in late 2007 at Harvard University served as a catalyst for what was to become Beyond Sinology, as Rey Chow, Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, Shu-mei Shih, David Wang, and others welcomed and challenged my claim that a reflection on Sinophone literature and culture needed its complementary other: a thought on the sinograph. Hence, what had begun as a project on Chinese medialities in general began to turn squarely to the question of Chinese script. In the following years, the book grew from a short theoretical reflection into a vast project with multiple chapters and a plethora of examples, before I rewrote it in its current, slimmer shape for the sake of conceptual emphasis and readability. The generosity of the Mellon Foundation accompanied the beginning phase of the book (during a postdoctoral Humanities Fellowship at Stanford University in 2007–2008), and allowed me to finish a draft of the manuscript, while I was working on a second project as a fellow at the Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010–2011. A grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation enabled me to conduct necessary research during several trips to Taiwan between 2009 and 2011. The Pennsylvania State University generously supported my year as a Humanities Forum fellow, as well as granted me a semester of teaching release in Fall 2012 so I could

concentrate on manuscript revisions. I would also like to thank Kirk Denton, editor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Sheila Sager from the Pennsylvania State University Press for their kind permission to use parts of already published articles in my book: “Graphic Germs: Mediality, Virulence, Chinese Writing,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 197–225; and “ ‘Chinese’ Intextuations of the World,” Comparative Literature Studies 47, no. 3 (2010): 318–345, respectively. I am also profoundly grateful to artists and editors for permission to reprint artwork, especially to Ah Weng, Hsia Yu, Daria Pahhota from BIG, Xu Bing, and Zhang Huan Now that the time has come to let go and release the book to a larger audience, I would like to acknowledge the many instances of dialogue, exchanges of ideas, and textual circulations, in person or virtually, that have nourished my book: with colleagues and students at Stanford, Ohio State, Penn State, and Academia Sinica, as well as during various conferences and talks and in personal conversations. Without the kindness, intellectual generosity, and critical acumen of all of you, Beyond Sinology would not exist in this form. Special thanks go to Peng Hsiao-yen, host extraordinaire during my various research stays at Academia Sinica, Taiwan, whose insights importantly shaped the structure and conceptual ideas of my project; to Wang Ban, who had the time for countless inspiring conversations during my Stanford year, and thanks to whom the project took a more political turn and includes more reflections on PRC culture; to Christopher Bush, who generously shared his own work and allayed my anxieties about European modernism and the publishing industry; to Tsai Chien-hsin, who has been a steadfast friend and staunch supporter of my ideas since our graduate student days and who creatively translated the book title into Chinese; and to Eric Hayot, without whose kindness, intellectual insight, and pragmatic common sense the manuscript might not have emerged from the de profundis of academic publishing. Though only the unwavering support and love of my family and my partner Itziar—for whom much of Beyond Sinology sounds either “Spanish” or “Chinese,” descriptors of all things arcane in their respective languages of German and Spanish—give sense to all my work, I would like to dedicate this book in particular to my teachers of Chinese literature and culture: Eileen Chow, who believed that I had something to contribute to Chinese studies from my first seminar on Chinese literature onward; Carlos Rojas, who never ceases to convince me by his own example that Chinese literature and theory go well together; and David Wang, whose kindness, erudition, and inspiration have allowed me to find a place at the intersection of critical theory, comparative literature, and Chinese studies. xii

AcknoWlEDgmEnts

Beyond Sinology

FIGurE 0.1 “Chinese Characters,” Beijing Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, directed by Zhang Yimou (2008).

IntroductIon ScrIpt polItIcS

On the auspicious date of August 8, 2008, the opening ceremony of the twenty-ninth Olympic Games in Beijing set the stage for an unexpected spectacle: the reinvention of the Chinese script. Under the minimalist title “Chinese Characters” (“Wenzi” 文字), a centerpiece of the lavish showcasing of the accomplishments of Chinese culture redefined China’s writing system as a medium uniquely suited for the challenges of the twenty-first century.1 While spectators might have expected to see Chinese writing celebrated as the aesthetic flow and refinement of Chinese calligraphy, “Chinese Characters,” part of the spectacle masterminded by the well-known film director Zhang Yimou 張藝謀, elected to portray a different facet of Chinese writing: its technological use. (See figure 0.1.) After a tribute to Chinese painting, embodied in the elegance of the Four Treasures of the Study—brush, ink, ink stone, and paper—as well as in the controlled grace of the dancers’ movements as they painted ink traces onto a gigantic scroll, Chinese writing, couched in mechanistic shape, introduced a sharp contrast between two aspects of Chinese culture that share profound aesthetic and philosophical links. True, the rhythmic chants of an army of scribes in outlandish costumes carrying bamboo-slip scrolls and intoning sections of the Sayings of Confucius (Lunyu 論語) that formed the soundtrack to “Wenzi” invoked Chinese tradition.2 But the Chinese script appeared in the hypermodern shape of a gigantic writing machine: a printing press with movable type. Flanked by archaic-looking scribes and framed by two LED panels, the apparatus at the center of the stage began to undulate as the individual type boxes moved up and down. Even though the type of the “printing press” featured individual

characters, difficult to distinguish in the mirror-reverse of print type, even though the pulsing of the machine ceased from time to time to shape Chinese characters—three different forms of the graph 和 (he), which designates peace, harmony, and unity—“Wenzi” put no emphasis on Chinese characters themselves. Rather, the spectacle mechanized writing and translated written signs into pixels, expressing the digital binary of 1 and 0 through a difference between raised and lowered types. The contiguity with the electronic patterns on the screens that flanked the printing press reinforced the link to new media. The way in which the machine produced the Chinese character 和— the two versions in ancient seal script and the modern one—did not differ in the least from how it shaped patterns or images, such as that of the Great Wall toward the end of the piece. Text there was not written, traced, and inscribed so much as virtually present as pixels upon a screen. Even though archaic script forms, such as seal script, and a traditional Confucian worship of learning were invoked, the emphasis was on tradition only insofar as it had been integrated into the present, and insofar as it represents a competitive edge for the future. What was showcased, then, was not merely, not even primarily, the millenarian accomplishment of a writing system, but rather, its technological potential. Not Chinese writing itself, but some of its specific medial possibilities, the material and technical means that embody a script, were at stake. Of course, writing, much as language in general, can itself be defined as a medium of communication, an instrument for transmitting knowledge. And yet, writing always comes in specific cultural shapes, it always needs concrete media for its expression. To our imagination, writing does not exist as an abstraction, but only as specific scripts, writing styles, typographies, and their material carriers: books, scrolls, papyri, steles, or computer screens. To talk about mediality in concrete cultural and material terms is of central importance to an understanding of writing. At least since Marshall McLuhan’s slogan “the medium is the message,” we have understood the intricate connections between content and carrier, indeed the impossibility of distinguishing neatly between them. However, speaking of the medium in the singular is yet another abstraction, since each mediated representation is really multiple. For instance, Chinese writing, and indeed writing in general, has myriad medial possibilities: each sign or group of signs teems with different “reading” possibilities for its semiotic content, its sound, and its graphic shape, even before we pay attention to historically specific forms, calligraphies, or writing styles on the one hand, and to its “media” in a more 2

introduction

literal sense, such as possible textual, visual, and computational avatars, on the other. Mediality understood in such a way plays a key role in the ideological makeup of a writing system, especially whenever one of its multiple facets is downplayed or highlighted. Frequently, the metonymic substitution of a writing system by one of its medium-specific expressions is crucial for its symbolic charge, since the “value” of a script has always been determined by its potential to fulfill specific social and ideological functions. Mediality, understood as multiple, lies at the heart of writing. The manipulation of writing’s mediality lies at the heart of script politics. Consequently, the performance of Chinese writing during the Beijing Olympics was not a reinvention of the script as such, but rather an attempt at changing the ways in which we visualize its medial form. Distancing the Chinese writing system from the prevalent imagery of its aesthetic, even esoteric, power and emphasizing its most technological embodiment—that of print with movable type—serves a clear ideological aim. A spectacular marriage of progress and tradition performed for the eyes of the world during the Beijing Olympics infused the Chinese script with new energy. It became a “living script” in its most literal sense: the Chinese term for print with movable types, huo zi yinshua 活字印刷, expresses the idea of movement as life, in contrast not only to immobility but also to death. In comparison with the prevalent symbolism that defined the sinograph for more than a century, namely, that Chinese writing was a script system unsuited to the challenges of modernity, this constitutes a radical change of attitude. In the era of modernization and nascent national awareness, from the end of the nineteenth century onward, Chinese writing came under harsh criticism. Under the spell of Western influences, as new social and political structures asserted their power, Chinese writing was increasingly perceived as failing to live up to the expectations that European models had produced. The comparison with the alphabetic script suddenly threw the shortcomings of the Chinese character into high relief: it had too many “letters,” took too long to learn, and did not accurately represent speech—typically, the phonetic components of the Chinese script were overlooked outright. Since Chinese intellectuals and reformers could not recognize their own country in the overpowering mirror of Western modernity and nationalism, the Chinese writing system ceased to be seen as an adequate medium for communication. In a turn from the veneration of Chinese culture to a sinophobic attitude in the age of imperialism, Western thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm Script politicS

3

Friedrich Hegel had already commented on the complexity of an ideographic system that compared negatively with the “rational” simplicity of the alphabet because of its small group of phonetic symbols.3 By the end of the nineteenth century, a similar view was prevalent among many Chinese intellectuals themselves. What led the Chinese to this negative appraisal, when contact between Europe and the Middle Kingdom from the thirteenth century onward has set the West to dreaming of the mysterious sinographs and their uncanny signifying power without causing a remotely similar attitude in China visà-vis alphabetic writing?4 What triggered the sudden change from cultural superiority to a sense of linguistic inferiority so strong that Chinese intellectuals developed multiple proposals of phonetic scripts to either supplant or supplement the sinograph at the turn from the nineteenth century to the twentieth?5 The change is typically attributed to the semicolonial position of China. Marked by defeats at the hands of Western imperial forces during the two Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860) and during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), as well as in contrast to Japan’s reinvention as an imperial power, China became the “sick man of Asia,” the example of a power in decadence, because of its inability to evolve. The Chinese writing system seemed to cause much of China’s inflexibility: it was out of joint with modernity, since it symbolized a venerated tradition that offered no answers to contemporary predicaments and was apparently unable to adapt to a radically changed situation. Language and its symbolic functions were crucial for modern nationalism according to Western standards. In the West, language became increasingly expressive of, even constitutive of, national identity. The bind between language and community that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was formulated most forcefully in the context of the nationalist agenda of German romanticism, for instance, in Johann Gottfried von Herder’s famous definition of Volk (the people) as a cultural and linguistic community.6 Of course, the knot that ties language and national community is not of the order of a spiritual essence, as Herder believed. Rather, it obeys the logic of contiguity, in which a partial, if always problematic, coincidence of a linguistic community with the prospective national territory leads to an identification of both. As a basis for nationalism, this proved compelling, since it forges and naturalizes the vital link between the abstract idea of the nation and its “real” body, its citizens, cemented by “the conviction 4

introduction

that languages (in Europe at least) were, so to speak, the personal property of quite specific groups—their daily speakers and readers—and moreover that these groups, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals.”7 Tying language to nation, however, has several important implications. The substitution of the different European vernaculars for Latin, a process so instrumental to the idea of national identity, also brought about the need to standardize the languages that were growing into their new “rightful” position. In the interest of print capitalism, the very medium that allowed a community to imagine itself as such, namely, a nation’s written language, had to be unified as much as possible. Benedict Anderson insists that “printlanguage is what invents nationalism, not a particular language per se.”8 The obverse is actually true: it is not language that defines the nation as a community of native speakers; the need for unification under the spell of the idea of nationalism predetermines what can count as a language, and what will be relegated to a dialect. Not the real languages of a nation’s citizens but the imposed ideal of one national language crafts the illusion of national community. The two inventions of language and nation underpin each other in precarious ways, stabilized by the phonetic mystique of the continuity between the living, breathing national bodies and the national language as transliteration of their speech. This made enough ideological sense in Europe. Beyond Europe, however, its tautological as well as paradoxical structure comes into plain view, without, however, losing any of its symbolic power. This holds especially true in a Chinese context, in which a multiplicity of spoken languages—both Sinitic and not—as well as regional dialects was pitted against a highly standardized written form: classical Chinese.9 What happens when we replace speech with writing as the foundation for the idea of nationalism? Can we claim, with David Damrosch, that “China has had a national script rather than a national language”?10 Throughout the centuries, Chinese writing had indeed come to symbolize an idea of cultural, but not necessarily ethnic, unity. Nevertheless, from the vantage point of a phonetic mystique, there is no such thing as a national script. Apart from the fact that the idea of a Chinese nation is a relatively recent importation, not much older than the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese script seems to constitute a rather dubious basis for an imagined community. On the one hand, the Chinese writing system had become the medium of a script world that stretched well beyond the boundaries of the PRC’s national territory today, including most of East Asia and parts of Southeast Asia.11 On the other, as the Script politicS

5

vehicle in which members of the cultural and administrative elite communicated with their peers, the Chinese script was relegated to a tiny fraction of society, rather than existing as a print language in which the community under construction could envision itself as such. But, from a Western vantage point, yet another compelling reason bars a script from becoming the vehicle of a national community: it cannot participate in the phonetic mystique necessary for nationalism’s illusion of communitarian presence—at least not in Anderson’s imaginary that synchronizes life and languages under the sign of the mother tongue: “What the eye is to the lover—that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with—language—whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue—is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.”12 For Anderson, written Chinese falls under the category of sacred languages of a prenational idea of community instead: the spiritual, transcendent medium that “creates a community out of signs, not sounds.”13 The affective sublime of the mother tongue cannot function for a writing system, and least of all for the sinograph. Instead, the embodiment of nationhood in a writing system threatens the phonetic mystique, and underscores the paradox at the heart of national language politics. While, in Anderson’s theory, only the idea of a shared, living speech can bring about the integration of a community, in practice the national language is always already written, since national unity assigns it the task of normalizing the different spoken languages that coexist and vie with one another in any given national territory. The perfect correlation between written and spoken language so crucial to a national ideology à la Anderson is thus, largely, an illusion, albeit a necessary one. It might be true that the alphabetic (or any other phonetic) script is better suited to register speech than the sinograph, but, in its coupling to a national language, its thrust is usually much more prescriptive of what proper, standardized speech should sound like than it is transcriptive of the actual, often regionally varied, subnational tones. In nuce, the question of the writing system plays a secondary role with regard to the real stakes of the prevalent type of national language politics, which lie in the creation of a hierarchical diglossia: between the standard spoken language, modeled according to its fixed, written form, and all other forms of linguistic communication. From a political perspective, the script used to write down a national language interests more on symbolic than on pragmatic accounts. In the interest of nation 6

introduction

building, the Chinese script does by no means prove too rigid. Rather, it lacks the power to regulate speech: its failure to transcribe speech matters only insofar as it is unable to notate spoken language unequivocally and thus cannot become an effective tool of normalization. Behind the harmony of the mother tongue, of the communion between national citizen and native speaker, lurks the dissonance of linguistic unification: seemingly, as most examples show, the nation cannot be dreamed or sung in more than one language. From this perspective, rather than treating the Chinese case as the example of a truncated language reform, we might want to reconsider it as the logical outcome of the parameters of national language politics. In spite of continued, often competing schemes to replace the Chinese script with phonetic writing systems well into the 1940s, the sinograph stood its ground.14 Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, its status is less at risk than ever. What did happen during the first decades of the twentieth century was a reform of the form—but not the script—of the written language. Reformers such as Hu Shi 胡適, Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀, and Lu Xun 魯迅, to name but some of the cultural heroes connected to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, replaced classical Chinese with a written vernacular, baihua 白話. Even though discussions about a reform of the Chinese language in the interest of modernization and nationalism went so far as to question the existence of the Chinese writing system itself, in the end, all reflections on the need to write the emerging vernacular—a written language modeled on the spoken language, no longer a mere vehicle for the communication of the elite, in theory, if not in practice—in an alphabetic or other phonetic system remained without consequences. Rather than making the written language really conform to any spoken expression, a standard spoken and written language was created that had not been in place before—a hybrid of classical and vernacular Chinese with influences from European languages and Japanese that gradually crystallized into the standard Chinese commonly spoken and written today.15 The very shift in names for this new language is revealing: eager to hide its roots in the “official language” (guanhua 官話)—the spoken language of administrators and officials, hence the Western term “Mandarin Chinese”—the newly fledging language claimed ties to the speech of the people as “vernacular language” (baihua 白話), showed its unifying aim as “national language” (Guoyu 國語), and finally aspired to linguistic sovereignty as the “common tongue” (putonghua 普通話).16 From the significant vantage point of 1949, after the Communist victory on the Chinese mainland, the Communist intellectual and Esperantist Hu Script politicS

7

Yuzhi 胡愈之 wrote in his retrospective appraisal of the May Fourth Movement that the script reform, though at the center of the reform movement as such, remained largely unsuccessful: The New Culture movement of May Fourth came out of the script reform movement. In truth, at first the “Literary Revolution” invoked by the journal New Youth was really a script reform movement. Its aim was to abolish the old Chinese characters (jiu wenzi 舊文字) of the feudal society and to create new letters (xin wenzi 新文字) suited for the masses of the common people; to abolish classical Chinese writing (wenyan wen 文言文), and to create a vernacular close to the spoken language (jiejin kouyu de baihua wen 接近口語的白話文); to abolish or reform the Chinese square characters (fangkuai zi 方塊字), and to create a new language (xin yuwen 新語文) that could be easily learned by the masses of the people.17

A possible reason for an outcome that disappointed many supporters of the script reform movement can be located in the divergent objectives of the reform movement, indeed of the national idea, itself: popularization and unification. In an earlier diatribe against Chinese writing in his essay “The Crisis of Script Reform” (“Xin wenzi yundong de weiji” 新文字運動的危機), published in 1936, Hu Yuzhi explicitly singles out these two ideals to critique the shortcomings of the Chinese script.18 And yet, in view of the paradoxical relation of nationalism to the speech of its citizens, both principles clashed in the Chinese context, since the propagation of phonetic scripts also seemed to involve the emancipation of different Sinitic languages and their advent to writing as a logical second step.19 Whereas classical Chinese presupposes— but does not linguistically impose—a standardized pronunciation, applying the phonetic principle to create a new Chinese script might radically challenge the idea of “Chinese” as one national language. This fear was especially warranted since many of the ideas for script reforms originated in the context of other Sinophone languages, for which Christian missionaries had set an example by using phonetic transcription systems.20 Where, according to many critics, the language reform had stopped short of complete success, from a different angle it had actually accomplished its aims. Prototypes of phonetic scripts had laid the necessary foundations for the idea of an official phonetic transcription system—a role that is now assumed by Pinyin 拼音 in the PRC. Not intended as an independent new script, phonetic transcription, used as a tool in language instruction and 8

introduction

dictionaries, implemented the Beijing dialect of Mandarin as the standard pronunciation for the new written vernacular. The fact that this phonetic “script” remained supplemental, however, in conjunction with the construction of a privileged tie between the sinograph and its standardized pronunciation (as the only truly legitimate way in which Chinese characters should be voiced), aborted a possible extension of a (phonetically) written status—as “real” language—to other Sinophone languages. From this perspective, it becomes understandable why the Chinese script seems to have become a linguistic “untouchable”—even under Communism, even under the influence of another “cultural revolution” decades later.21 The radical step of doing away with Chinese writing and its symbolic benefits of rejecting China’s political, social, and cultural backwardness as an antipode to modernity did not outweigh the menace of linguistic and regional disintegration. Consequently, the sinographic writing system as such was left intact, even as the introduction of simplified characters apparently satisfied the ideological claim of creating a language (both written and spoken) suitable for the use of the masses.22 What emerges after a closer look at the vicissitudes of language reforms in China’s age of modernization is consequently a complex constellation of language politics with and against the Chinese writing system. The conservation of the sinograph allowed Chinese nationalism to tap into an age-old cultural tradition, reconstructed as a cultural whole, as a basis for political unity.23 In contrast, the appeal to speech in the creation of the new written medium of vernacular Chinese satisfied the phonetic mystique at the heart of the idea of nationhood as community. On the one hand, the Chinese writing system bore the brunt of diatribes against linguistic rigidity—unjustly so, I would claim. On the other, under the sinographic cover, phonetic unification in the form of supplemental phonetic notation de facto elevated one Sinitic language—the one spoken around Beijing—to the status of national language. Consequently, for decades, Chinese writing has displayed a double taboo character: ideologically tied in complex ways to linguistic unity, yet disavowed according to the phonocentric values imported from the West— until recently. This background renders the focus on Chinese writing in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing particularly spectacular: here, Chinese writing has a comeback, albeit in a radically different garb. Whereas at the turn from the nineteenth century to the twentieth the Western model forced China to reevaluate its script negatively as not close enough to or Script politicS

9

sufficiently representative of spoken language, in the current digital age, the sinograph can be put on display as the perfect expression of writing transubstantiated into a computerized image on the basis of bits and bytes. The celebration of the printing press during the opening ceremony rewrites cutting-edge media, such as the computer, in terms of a secondary graphology, highlighting not sound, but graphics.24 It also rewrites, implicitly, the hierarchies operating in the contrast between the sinographic script and the alphabet. The performance during the opening ceremony contains a sly reminder that the Chinese invention of printing predated Johannes Gutenberg’s much-touted medial quantum leap by several centuries. In this context, the emphasis on printing with movable type is revelatory. It is true that China invented this method of printing as early as the eleventh century—actually a commoner named Bi Sheng 畢昇 developed individual, reusable character types made of ceramic.25 And yet, movable type printing in China was not widely used until after the (re)importation of Western print technology in the nineteenth century, whereas xylography, the method of printing entire pages from carved woodblocks, had already reached a high level of sophistication in the Tang dynasty and was used routinely. In a Eurocentric gesture, Western scholars of print history and theorists of the incipient field of media studies of the renown of a Lucien Febvre or a Marshall McLuhan were quick to dismiss China’s advanced technology as secondary.26 The imputed backwardness of China’s print technology—verily a strange twist to the genealogy of print culture—is anchored firmly in an alphabetic bias. Since China lacks the “ultimate” script technology, a script that consists of a small number of combinable letters (or so the argument goes), any technological advances remain inevitably truncated. From the vantage point of the Gutenberg era in the West, print with movable type counted (and still counts for many) as the all-important cultural achievement and elided the sophistication of woodblock printing more suited to fulfill its cultural and social functions in China at a given historical moment.27 In this vein, the alphabetic bias led Thomas Francis Carter in his reflections in 1925 on the possible influences of Chinese printing technology on European culture to conclude as follows: “It is a strange fact that the nations the symbols of whose languages present more difficulties to the typographic printer than those of any other languages in the world, should have been the first nations to invent and develop the art of typography.”28 Rarely did it occur to Western scholars to see beyond their bias and perceive a positive connection in which a supposedly backward 10

introduction

script enabled a so-called advanced technology.29 Even a technologized version of writing, such as typography, then serves to reiterate a phonocentric bias: only now the living presence of speech is symbolically transferred to the moving and movable letters of Western print technology. Even on the side of writing, it seems, some languages are more written than others. Small wonder, then, that the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics showcased the “superior” technology of print with movable type, rather than the tradition of woodblock printing looked down upon by the West. The gesture of having the sinograph compete on ground long claimed by the alphabet shows a new sense of cultural confidence. Long bygone are the days in which the Chinese script lived under the pall of a strange disavowal: both crucial to Chinese culture and the self-definition of a Chinese essence and shamefully unsuited to Chinese modernity, in the eyes of the West as well as through the Western lenses of Chinese intellectuals. Bygone, also, are the days in which the West could dictate the symbolic value of technological advances. Thanks to the digital interventions of the computer era, Chinese writing has rid itself of the burden of the oral principle. What is more, it can symbolically claim an implicit link between the image output of digital media and the graphic character of Chinese writing. As nonphonetic scripts were sacrificed to the juggernaut of alphabetic progress, the computer age is now frequently hailed as ushering in a new script era. The voice of one Chinese literary critic at the beginning of the 1990s, Zheng Min 鄭敏, who sees the computer as coming to the rescue of the hallowed tradition of writing, as having “gifted Chinese writing with the power of rebirth,” is by no means an exception.30 This assertion has a certain truth to it. In the context of digitalization, all languages are in need of translation, since all have to be equally broken down into sequences of 0s and 1s. When the notion of the pragmatic nonviability of other writing systems had become a deeply ingrained notion, another, even more “rational” system made up of pure binaries announced its reign, a language so “rational” that it is not (directly) suited for human understanding. In the face of the necessary translation of digital encoding, the Chinese script might well lose the aura of impracticality ascribed to it. Enter, once again, the alphabetic bias. According to William C. Hannas, instead of the “great equalizer,” networked and programmable media “are becoming the pro-Chinese character camp’s worst nightmare.”31 Whereas the alphabet is perceived by these voices as better suited to digital translation, because of its smaller number of discrete units, as well as its more Script politicS

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clearly defined word-boundaries, Chinese writing is relegated yet again to an impracticable medium, even and especially for computer programming and text editing. True, computer users normally input Chinese by way of phonetic transcriptions in which sequences of phonetic symbols (such as in the Zhuyin 注音 system of Taiwan) or alphabetic letters (such as in the Pinyin system of the PRC) are typed in, even though other input options exist.32 Furthermore, the computer itself needs an additional step of “translation” to process Chinese writing, since the characters that appear on the screen are encoded as sequences of symbols, according to different sets, such as Unicode or Big-5. Clearly, the assumptions that led antisinographic critics such as Hannas to predict the demise of the sinograph due to its purported encumbrance to creativity, namely, to take for granted that thought is linked only to speech and that the directness and speed in the transmission from the brain to a computer screen has a clear correlation with creativity, are profoundly biased. Of course, the Chinese script is neither a hindrance to creativity nor unsuited for programmable media.33 We could equally claim that the icon-oriented interface between computer and user and the tendency to mix graphic media as well as to use the screen not as a page but rather as an array of interactive, differently aligned windows—all characteristics of digital media—give a decided advantage to “readers” more trained to distinguish complex shapes, such as Chinese characters.34 However, what is important here—and what has always been important— is not primarily the real use and applicability of a certain script, what we might call its script technology, but much more its script politics. What counts in the example of the Beijing Olympics is not necessarily that Chinese input methods conventionally take two more steps (one mental, one computational), but that the output can claim contiguity to the technology of computerization, through its visual aspects, for instance. In the spectacle of the opening ceremony, a reversal of values in terms of script system is also marked by a new, symbolic connection between speech and tradition (the intonation of the classics, the wedding of script and orality) and writing and innovation (the printing press). These new embodiments of the sinograph also pave the way for new links between writing, cultural identity, and power. The Chinese script plays a major role in this national spectacle. As the performance of the Chinese characters on a new world stage contests prevalent symbolic economies that adjudicate the sinograph to a disadvantaged place in the script of modernity, it also plays with 12

introduction

a conventional view of Chinese writing of at least equal importance and seniority: the Western fascination with another, indeed the other, script. In a turn away from the radical antitraditionalism that characterized the PRC’s cultural politics in varying ways over the past decades, the sinograph seems to have acquired a new significance as national marker. In the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in August 2008, the Chinese written character—displayed there as both traditional and modern, in the guise of the cutting-edge technology of printing, as the medium of computerization, but also in its ancient seal-script form—was presented as defining China’s national character. The Chinese script has become tied, once again, to the idea of a national essence. But even as the PRC broadcast its claim on the sinograph as its national heritage, the medial multiplicity it invoked also precluded a disambiguation of the tie between script and national identity. As the script politics that center on the sinograph and the structures that bind language and nationalism show, a language can only convincingly shoulder the burden of identity politics, an additional layer of signification over and above its communicative function, when it is construed according to a symbolic economy tied to a specific medium. For instance, even though a national language is essentially written, or rather, printed, its symbolic function relies on the image of speech. When Western historians of the book elevated Gutenberg’s invention over the Chinese invention of print, they succeeded in doing so by highlighting the flexibility of the alphabet vis-à-vis the immobility of the sinograph. When the planners of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics decided to showcase Chinese writing, they chose to underline its link to movement, digitalization, and visual media. In other words, the ideological impulse of a certain script politics relies on the erasure of the various medial possibilities of a language or a script. It can eclipse them for a while, but they never really go away. A single embodiment of a writing system always invokes a multiplicity of meanings and symbolic values. Rather than symbols of any identitarian essence, languages and their scripts are embodied in multiple, changing media. Consequently, even as the multimedial show around the sinograph during the opening ceremony had a national agenda in mind, its excess of mediality—necessary for a symbolic reinvention of the Chinese writing system—also impeded a univocal expression of national identity. As a symptomatic reaction to the new mediascapes in the wake of the digital revolution as well as to the pressures and pleasures of interculturality in globalized power structures, this and other examples raise urgent questions Script politicS

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as to the new links between media, identity, and power. How do scripts and their medial projections renegotiate the local, the national, and the global in different transcultural scenarios? In which situations do languages and writing systems act as inclusive media of communication, and in which as exclusive, even oppressive categories? Where are the limits between a transnational script world in networked media and the national, even nationalist appeal of a certain language and script? In response to these questions, Beyond Sinology analyzes how the Chinese script, the sinograph, has been imagined in recent decades in literature and film, visual and performance art, design and architecture, both within Chinese cultural contexts and in different parts of the “West.” In spite of China’s new global importance, the challenges of new communication and information technologies are especially strong for the Chinese script, which relies more visibly on a multiplicity of signifying principles than the alphabet or other phonetic scripts. In recent decades, this multiplicity has resulted in a wealth of reflections on and experimentation with the sinograph. By tracing the most recent part of a long, multifaceted script history, Beyond Sinology uses the sinograph to analyze what binds languages, scripts, and medial expressions to cultural and national identity. It is a case study of the ways in which the confluence of the digital media revolution and the reshaping of global power structures impacts our understanding of the Chinese script in particular and of writing in general. The task of writing a comprehensive history of the sinograph and its uses is beyond the purview of this book. Instead, it engages in a cultural, medial, and, ultimately, political analysis that might be useful for the scrutiny of important sea changes in the development of writing at other historical moments, in different cultural contexts, and for other scripts. This book is divided into five conceptual units that theorize different interfaces between writing and other entities, systems, or media: bodies, images, sound, other semiotic systems, and technology. Through a constant dialogue between sinographic fantasies and performances in different Chinese and Western places, Beyond Sinology maps the paradoxical desires vested in the Chinese script in the face of the global and the digital: a desire for stability and a need for adaptability. On the side of stability lie the attempts of linking the sinograph with material realities—in the guise of corpographies, that is, by linking bodies and scripts, and in the guise of iconographies, that is, by fantasizing about privileged ties between Chinese signs and the things they express. On the side of flexibility lie reflections on a constantly changing 14

introduction

sinograph as allographies, as open to other scripts and cultural systems, and on technographic avatars of the sinograph, those that underline the protean adaptability of Chinese writing to different media. This tension reflects the structure of the book, its division into two parts with chapter 3 operating as hinge by proposing sonographic approaches, alternative ways of linking sound and script. In the end, as the argument comes full circle, one cannot be thought without the other. Chapter 1, “Corpographies,” explores how the human body becomes a metaphor for, a carrier and wielder of, and matter shaped by the sinograph. A first move analyzes the links between Chinese script and materiality under the signs of death and violence: from the equation of death and the sinograph by the Chinese language reformer Hu Yuzhi, to the fetishistic invention of Chinese as disruptive of signification in Western thought (Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Salvador Elizondo). A second move (in contrast to experiments by Chinese performance artists with bodies inscribed by writing) highlights a new interest in connecting bodies and cultural identity in a symbolic national calligraphy through an analysis of the bodyscripts in design and advertisement in the context of the Beijing Olympics and of the pedagogy of writing in Zhang Yimou’s film Hero (Yingxiong 英雄). Chapter 2, “Iconographies,” analyzes and complicates the symbolic link between the sinograph and visuality, most (in)famously embodied in the pictographic bias that equates Chinese writing and imagistic mimesis. It first scrutinizes early film and media theories that use ideographic and hieroglyphic writing to envision the new medium of moving pictures, giving rise to a whole tense critical tradition that attempts to keep image and text apart, while incessantly defining one through the other at the same time. It then explores examples of concrete poetry from Brazil, France, and Taiwan to show that the link between writing and visuality is not a simple equation, but rather a complex field in which different ideas about the visual and the graphic as well as different languages, media, and cultures interact. Whereas chapter 2 underlines visual media, chapter 3, “Sonographies,” is concerned with the interaction between phone and graphe. Its first part reflects on the frequent silencing of the Chinese language in Western theory by isolating script from its real linguistic complexity. An analysis of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 侯孝賢 film City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi 悲情城市) shows how the figure of muteness can also serve to contest just such a bias by staging a complex, nonconventional interaction between different Sinophones, Script politicS

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the Chinese script, and the medium of film. Its second part provides a critique of the media politics in recent theory that equate the sonic with resistance and marginality. As alternatives, the second part of this chapter looks at texts—such as Chinese glossolalic poetry and Han Shaogong’s 韓少功 novel A Dictionary of Maqiao (Maqiao cidian 馬橋詞典)—that avail themselves of the complex, flexible, and multifaceted interaction between script and sound in Chinese. Chapter 4, “Allographies,” investigates different examples from the margins of the Chinese tradition that render Chinese writing other to itself and therefore break the link between the sinograph and a monolithic imaginary of “Chineseness.” It showcases literary experiments that contest the absolute difference or identity vested in a script by pointing to elements that render Chinese writing uncannily strange, or allographic: from the playful equation of Chinese writing with the archaic “script” of tattooing by Zhang Guixing 張貴興 and Chen Li 陳黎, to Kim-chew Ng’s 黃錦樹 crafting of a cryptoChinese, to experimentations with punctuation marks and other script systems by the Taiwanese author Wuhe 舞鶴. The fifth chapter of Beyond Sinology, “Technographies,” addresses sinographic reactions to the challenges of the digital turn: the modular and combinatorial thrust in Chinese pseudographic art and poetry and the specter of the complete obsolescence and loss of writing connected to Chinese Internet language as well as expressed and countered in experimental poetry. It analyzes artistic or (in the case of Chinese Internet lingo) pragmatic ways in which the Chinese script is brought closer to digital principles or to its visual output interfaces, while, at the same time, being invested with a nostalgic and material power in excess of, or even resistant to, the digital media revolution. Via a reflection on ideographic architecture, the REN-Building by the Danish architectural firm BIG, the conclusion channels the different intercultural and medial uses of the sinograph into a critique of media politics and sketches the possibility of a different reading of cultural scripts “beyond signology.” Through a combination of different media and expressions, different cultural contexts, and different theoretical angles, Beyond Sinology provides a complex account of intercultural representations, exchanges, and tensions. By focusing on the concrete “scripting” of identity and alterity, it elaborates a theory of the links between medium and identity and formulates a critique of cultural and theoretical articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing. My analysis of sinographic script politics in 16

introduction

different cultural contexts and media shows that there is no “natural” link between national identity or cultural otherness and any one language or script. Rather, the privileging of a specific medium or language as a carrier of cultural identity obeys heavily conventionalized, codified, and overdetermined symbolic economies, both transcultural and culturally specific ones. Chinese writing—with its history of divergent readings in Chinese and nonChinese contexts, with its current reinvention in the age of new media and globalization—can teach us important lessons: how to read and construct mediality and cultural identity in interculturally responsible ways, but also how to scrutinize, critique, and yet appreciate and enjoy the powerful multimedial creativity embodied in writing.

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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 20

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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 corpographies

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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. 22

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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 corpographies

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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 more than modern, but also

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modern) we are in the presence of a signifying practice that far exceeds the predicative synthesis (the “symbolic”) in order to encompass vocal and gestural rhythm, the trace, always rigorously arranged in this very excess (the “semiotic”). Consequently, one does not understand anything about a message if one reads it merely as meaning: an operation that is possible, at the limit, or at least frequent in our culture. The semiotic stratum—tone, intonation, gesturality, or writing, especially as calligraphy—is a powerful, if not predominant, part of the signifying process.13

By way of a quick parenthetical elision of the difference between classical and modern Chinese, Kristeva puts the sinograph to work as an example of the semiotic principle, a term of her own coinage that designates elements of language disruptive of the communication of meaning. Chinese as a language, Kristeva claims, represents what Western languages have pushed to the margins. Its penchant for calligraphy and gesture as well as its tone-based pronunciation exemplify the materiality of signification Kristeva sees as erased in much of Western culture. Kristeva’s positive appraisal of the sinograph follows in the footsteps of Jacques Derrida’s book Of Grammatology of 1967. There, Derrida gives exemplary prominence to Chinese writing, as an alternative to the fixation on speech at work in the whole tradition of Western metaphysics. For Derrida, the sinograph, far from being the example of an aborted progress toward a phonetic script, as Western philosophers such as Hegel or sinologists such as Jacques Gernet sustain, becomes a prime example of a script that largely bypasses and exceeds phonetic principles. Logographic in nature, the Chinese script contests Western phonocentrism and confirms the importance of graphic, rather than phonetic, principles in signification in general. Both Kristeva and Derrida have been repeatedly criticized for their use of the cultural other, also, if not exclusively, in the form of the Chinese script. Their discussions make do with a kind of phantom Chinese: not only doubly or triply mediated through inexpert eyes, but also mostly extraneous to any specific historical or textual context. More often than not, Chinese words, rather than forming part of specific expressions, sentences, texts, and historical moments—which would anchor and determine their polysemic nature— become mere flotsam, drifting from one text to another. That theory is not exempt from orientalism is, by now, a well-discussed phenomenon.14 That this perspective, at its strongest, tends to be couched in terms of an inverse cultural chauvinism, a celebration of the other as that which questions corpographies

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Western civilization and philosophy, rather than in terms of a xenophobic dismissal, is equally well known—as well as self-reflexively avowed in Derrida’s book itself. Of course, we have to be alert to the dangerous ease with which theory—and poststructuralist theory is an especially strong case in point—enshrines the “other” within its abstract temple, claiming special sensitivity to and playing off difference, while remaining blind to divergences that might not be, or that are only partially, captured by poststructuralist games of difference. Yet, the fixation on Chinese writing in the context of French theory of the 1960s and 1970s is not merely another example of the use and abuse of other cultures, the production of a domesticated alterity with a view to cultural self-definition. Instead, the “Chinese” example is a symptom of a profound turn in thought: the reworking of signification under the sign of death. Upon the danger of oversimplifying: Most of the reflections on language in the context of the theory boom of the 1960s and 1970s in France frame signification in general as a process of death. What dies here is neither language (in general or as a specific script) nor bodies determined and obliterated by language. Instead, the necrotic process strikes roots at the very origin of language, at the moment of reference. According to French theory, the death of reality through significations happens like this: As soon as signs are appended to things and come to designate them, they supplant them, condemning them to a symbolic death. Once reality has been reduplicated as and through representation, it also has been reduced to a weak echo of its former self. In the form of signifieds that no signifier can adequately express, as referents reduced to a function of language, reality has been irreducibly lost in and to signification. This gives rise to a paradoxical doubling of violence in, through, and against signification, as explained by Jean-François Lyotard in Discourse, Figure (Discours, figure) of 1971: Signification entails a violent rupture between things and signs; a separation—Lyotard calls it death—between reality and representation is inherent in language itself. Language at once reduplicates reality through signification and excludes it as inaccessible to representation.15 Things ex-ist within signification: they become signification’s excluded other, the “real” objects never really captured in representation, and are, in the form of referents, inducted into the regime of meaning. However, by tearing asunder the material world in and as signification, the realm of meaning itself becomes prone to a violent intervention. Even as the object and the sign are apparently divorced, discourse is reshaped into a thing, invested with 26

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materiality: “The violence of tearing asunder does not place an object and a sign on different sides, but, symmetrically, it makes a thing out of discourse, it puts thickness there, it puts up a scene, in the articulation and the clarity of signification, at the same time at which, on the side of the object, it excavates its other face, its backdrops.”16 The logic that emerges here translates materiality into a material simulacrum, a kind of secondary materiality. A linguistic, indeed medial materiality that exceeds, interrupts, and disrupts communication at the core of language; a graphic, gestural, phonic force beyond any signifying task that takes the place of the thingness of reality. What matters for my argument here is the general logic attributed to signification rather than the details of theoretical execution within the conceptual edifice of each thinker, since each singles out different aspects of language supposedly in excess of signification, such as the visual and graphic force of signs (Lyotard calls this the figural) or rhythm and sound (often representative of the semiotic for Kristeva). This logic frames signification doubly as necroscript: on the one hand, signification as lethal force erases the presence of things; on the other, materiality reasserts itself violently in the realm of meaning and potentially disrupts signification, threatening it with death. To posit such a secondary materiality within discourse shifts the problem of reference, of the connection between object and sign, onto the terrain of the sign itself. Materiality is supplanted by a material fetish thanks to the conceptual abyss between things and signs. In analogy to Sigmund Freud’s reflection in “On Fetishism” (“Fetischismus”), the erasure of things in signification is as much a hallucination as the expectation that the mother has a penis—or that the penis is the all-important norm.17 It is not that the absence of the real object (the penis or the material world) is replaced by a fetish (such as the foot or secondary materiality); the construction of the fetish actually creates the absence of the real, as well as the expectation of its constantly deferred presence, as its necessary preconditions. From this vantage point, the split between things and signs is not a “natural,” inevitable given, but rather a theoretical construct very much at the heart of the socalled linguistic turn in theory: only once language has erased reality, once reality is split into represented reality and an ineffable “real,” can the focus on language replace a concern with the world, since this is presented as the only way of being concerned with the world. We can see this at work in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of sign systems and signifying logics in The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses) of 1966. Foucault’s book translates the erasure of things from a general description corpographies

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of signification into a historical sequence, constructing a prehistory of signification as the erasure of things. At times, The Order of Things reads like a swansong to a past epistemic regime in which a connection between reality and signification has not yet been lost, in which resemblance, contiguity, and correspondence anchor signification in reality. Foucault invests with a great deal of nostalgia his vision of the prehistory of modern thought, one in which the “Prose of the World” (the title of the second chapter of Foucault’s book) allows for a different correspondence between objects in the world as well as between objects and the language that expresses them, but does not yet represent and supplant them, as will be the case in what Foucault calls the classical episteme.18 This dream of a motivated reference, of a correspondence between words and things, of a system of signification built on resemblance and presence, rather than difference and absence, has been a mainstay of Western cultural desires. In his book Mimologics (Mimologiques), published in 1976, Gérard Genette explores this tradition under the name of mimology, namely, “this train of thought or imagination that supposes—rightly or wrongly—that there is a relation of analogy between the ‘word’ and the ‘thing,’ as a reflection (of imitation) that motivates, that is, justifies the existence and the choice of the former.”19 Starting with Plato’s Cratylus, Genette traces the mimological dream of a phonetically or graphically motivated system of signification throughout the course of Western culture. Of course—though Genette’s theoretical travels do not really take him there—the Western fascination with the Chinese script is one of the imaginary fuels of just such a desire, especially with respect to a conceptually or graphically motivated mimologic. It emerged with a vengeance when Western culture dreamed of the construction of a universal language, for instance, in the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz or John Wilkins, then again in the era of modernism with Ezra Pound’s fascination with a pictographically understood sinograph in Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.”20 It does not come as a surprise, then, that Foucault’s nostalgic construct of another logic of signification nourishes itself from references to Chinese culture. These references, however, are profoundly paradoxical, multiply refracted through different perspectives, and thus, from the outset, identified as dreams or hallucinations. On the one hand, the Chinese script becomes the prime example of a closeness between things and words supposedly lost to the West. According to Foucault, the China of Western dreams is not only the realm of space par excellence, since the West imagines it as outside 28

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of time, but also the mainstay of the connection between things and signs, since “its writing does not reproduce the fugitive flight of the voice in horizontal lines; it erects the motionless and still-recognizable images of things themselves in vertical columns.”21 Here, the dream of a motivated language or script comes to life—as already lost to Western culture—in the double guise of a prehistory of modern signification and the logic of another culture. On the other hand, via Foucault’s famous reference to the categories of “a certain Chinese encyclopedia,” the hallucination of another logic actually disavows any stable connection between words and things, rendering all logical constructs and categories that aspire to “naturalness” relative and open to suspicion: “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”22 Foucault’s reference to a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” constitutes only one step in a chain of quotations and references. He takes the passage from Jorge Luis Borges’s short text “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (“El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”), in which it appears as the quotation of a quotation: by Franz Kuhn of a (supposedly fictitious) Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge (Emporio celestial de conocimientos benévolos). The “Chinese” text becomes, in so many respects, a pretext, its cultural marker never more than a fabrication in the service of a philosophical machine of difference. The monstrous (non)structure of the (de)categorization of animals in the “Chinese” encyclopedia invests in the exotic charm of another thought. Another culture’s logic allows us to transgress for a moment the limits of our way of thinking and serves as a reminder that systems of knowledge are by no means simple mirrors of any truth or reality out there, but are historically and culturally specific norms that shape our perception and construction of such a “reality” instead. The “Chinese” encyclopedia is set up as a necessary fiction that allows Western metaphysics a space of nostalgia, a crevice in the temple of discursive power so seamlessly thought out to enclose us. And yet, the complex mediation of reference and the inherent contradiction in the construction of Chinese culture—as a motivated sign system on the one hand, as the embodiment of the relativity of all signifying logics and systems of reference on the other—actually disavow this very nostalgia. Foucault’s reference to Chinese culture and writing replicates, and, I would corpographies

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add, facilitates, the double logic of nostalgia: much as Chinese culture at once stands in for a (Western construct of) a system of correspondences and resemblances lost and for the relativity of all signification, the death of things at the hand of signification induces theory’s signifying nostalgia. It takes the form of melancholia, the supplementary introjection of materiality—once it has been sacrificed—into signification. The primal scene of theoretical constructs that we now refer to as poststructuralism consists in the construction of an origin as erasure. The origin is salvaged in the form of a loss of origin. Signification embodies both the death of reality and the mourning for its loss; and Chinese writing becomes one of the key metaphors of this paradox. The role Chinese culture in general and the sinograph in particular play is highly contradictory and, consequently, highly amenable to theory’s deadly logic: On the one hand, Chinese is the prime example of the deadly force of signification, for example, in Derrida’s praise of Chinese writing as a counterexample to phonocentrism or in Foucault’s use of Borges’s “Chinese” encyclopedia. As the other script par excellence, the sinograph figures as the supreme example of what signification is all about—including and above all the Western system of signification as (re)constructed by French theorists at the time—namely, a network of gliding signifiers predicated upon the absence of any stable reference. On the other hand, the Chinese script is part of the remedy, as an example of what signification has been, can be, or should be: either as the dream of a motivated reference or as a script that highlights a resistant materiality erased or neglected in Western theories of signification. A theoretical climate that has elevated the pervasiveness of textuality to the level of accepted dogma thus still partakes of the melancholy fascination with a closer—not merely arbitrary and conventional—link between the objects in the world and their representation in language. After decades of celebrating the demise of the referent by precipitating signification into the maelstrom of ceaselessly gliding signifiers, theory still both disavows and craves another logic, the sacrificed dream of a link between things and words. Different regimes of signification reenter the theoretical world—stamped with the mark of alterity, either temporally or spatially—precisely so as to underpin by contrast the signifying status quo, characterized by an inescapable self-referentiality and a lack of relationality with the material world. What emerges in the twilight zone of the distant past or under a gaze that remains obliquely riveted to the cultural other are signifying economies that carry a heavy libidinal charge. Even as the copula between words and things is relegated to an inaccessible (cultural) chronotopos, its very inaccessibility 30

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reifies it by disavowal. The invention of a diachronically or interculturally organized dichotomy between signifying systems does not erase that which comes to symbolize another economy of signification, but creates it to begin with. This creation assumes the form of a fetish. And the sinograph is one of its most compelling avatars. In Seminar XVIII, delivered in 1971, Jacques Lacan accompanies many of his explanations on the connection between the unconscious, language, and jouissance with sinographs. Much like his usual recourse to mathematical equations, schemata, and graphs, the Chinese characters that appear in the text—Lacan originally wrote them on the board during his lectures—are less illustrations or examples than enigmatic shapes. The title of the seminar, Of a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance (D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant), foregrounds the question of semblance, of appearance and resemblance, in signification. In tune with Lacan’s theory, the semblant of the title is no more than a lure: discourse for Lacan is not of the order of semblance, and Lacan’s own discourse is about non-(re)semblance. In Seminar XVIII, Lacan explores the status of language and writing in depth. If, as Lacan proposes, the unconscious is structured like a language, then signification is inevitably a process of indirection, if not misdirection. Much as “I” is never there where the “I” says “I,” the referent in language never is the “real” referent. Or, in other words, the referent is “real” (in the Lacanian sense of the word) precisely in that language cannot express it. Language, then, is always metaphorical, but never (directly) referential. Language never just designates—or only puts up a semblance of designation. Instead, it always points elsewhere, converting the thing (la chose) it transports into a nonthing (l’achose).23 Lacan uses the deictic marker ça (“that” or “it”) in order to explain the indirection of referentiality even in the supposedly privileged case of designation: “The signifier That (Ça) to which discourse refers here, when there is discourse— and it seems that we can hardly escape discourse—this signifier might well be the only support of something. It evokes, by its nature, a referent. However, it cannot be the right one. It is for this reason that the referent is always real, because it is impossible to designate. Thus one can only construct it. And one constructs it if one can.”24 Ça can only point to a referent, indeed, its function exhausts itself in this pointing, but the referent remains elusive, since the general and flexible indexical function of ça precludes any stable link with a specific referent. Throughout Lacan’s discussion, Chinese signs become prime examples of the indirection of referentiality. For example, Lacan highlights the (at corpographies

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least) double meaning of the character “為” (wei) as it is used in classical Chinese—his reference is, above all, to Mencius (Mengzi 孟子)—both as “to act” and as a conjunction that signals a metaphor, “like” or “as.” “為” thus becomes the perfect expression of the metaphorical and nonreferential character of language. In this vein, Lacan uses Chinese characters precisely to reinforce the nonsemblance of writing and of signification in general. Making reference to both Western dreams of motivated reference (especially to Leibniz) and to Xu Shen’s 許慎 Explanation of Simple and Compound Characters (Shuowen jiezi 說文解字), an early Chinese dictionary that subscribes partially to a pictographic idea of the sinograph, Lacan ridicules the idea that a sign resembles its referent. Playing with his audience, Lacan urges his listeners to read “人” (ren), the character for man or human being, through a resemblance of the sign with its referent, only to discredit any such reading as hallucinatory. First, Lacan playfully points out his own association when looking at the character: “That is evidently a man for you. What is represented there? How is this the image of a man? There are the head and the legs. Fine, and why not? There are always dreamers. Me, I rather see it as a crotch. Why not?”25 Then, by referring to the different forms of the character “人” throughout its history, he further underscores the relativity and fallacy of a mimetic reading.26 Taking a character that really emerged as a pictograph— one of only a small number of all Chinese characters to be generated from abstracted images of their referents—to disclaim the connection between referent and written signifier shows the great lengths to which Lacan goes in his crusade against (re)semblance.27 And yet, the constant fixation on Chinese characters in the guise of sexual references reveals another use to which the sinograph is put here. The first Chinese character to appear in Seminar XVIII is “陽”—the yang, or the masculine principle of the yin-yang couple. It serves Lacan as “the example for referents that cannot be found.”28 In accordance with Lacan’s theory that the sexual relation, much like linguistic designation, is predicated upon misdirection, “陽” as a written sign stands in for an absence: that of the symbolically castrated penis-as-Phallus. The logic of castration in Lacan’s theory is one of generalized fetishism, where—for signification as well as for sexuality—the desired other (the referent, the object a, the Phallus, woman) is always deferred, never there, where we seek it. This constant delay is not an accident, but rather the necessary basis of desire, as well as of the order of signification and sexual difference. Paradoxically, at least in Seminar XVIII, the sinograph that Lacan had spent so much time and effort on placing within 32

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the logic of the indirection of signification in general is precisely the sign best suited to signify lack. Here the other sign—much like, in other instances, mathematical graphs or word play—emerges as a master-signifier in the form of a fetish: at once a prime example of the nonsemblance of signification and the embodiment of the fetish of signification. Lacan’s use of Chinese writing in conjunction with and as the sign of castration and fetishism must be read in tune with the basic logic of much of the fascination with the sinograph in French theory of the 1960s and 1970s. What manifests itself in slightly different form in each example sustains a generalized structure in which Chinese writing embodies, as well as facilitates, the fundamental paradoxes at the heart of French theory’s fascination with and reinvention of textuality. Seemingly, only the other writing system—or, alternatively or concurrently, other media—can encompass and manage the theoretical contradictions of signification. Chinese writing, at once the same and the other of signification, both underpins the erasure of reference and comes to the rescue of things: a carrier of death as well as a medium that allows for the specter of materiality to haunt meaning. These “Chinese” corpographies all link the sinograph with death in a complex logic of embodiment and disembodiment. They at once treat the Chinese script as absolute exception and burden it with the responsibility to represent signification as such. Hu Yuzhi and his fellow language reformers blamed the Chinese script for its dead materiality and its destructive force. Rhetorically, they denigrated the sinograph by granting it a metaphorical body in contiguity and, thus, as a threat to the real bodies of the Chinese and the not less real, though equally figurative nation body.29 Such a metaphorical sleight of hand, however, involves, paradoxically, the very erasure of the vital role of human bodies as users and crafters of language—precisely the linguistic use value that said reformers strove to salvage against the corpse-like abstraction of Chinese characters. In contrast, French theory of the 1960s and 1970s affirmed the materiality of the Chinese language, mostly represented by its script, as a counterexample to the suppressed yet desired traits of signification in general, namely, to go beyond mere communication of content. Its supposedly destructive vitality, as disruptive of the circulation of “pure” meaning, becomes a positive feature. Yet, the material force at work in and against the system of signification, often rendered in corporeal metaphors, also relies on the disembodiment of linguistic communication. Because of the purported severed tie between things and signs, medial thickness has to supplement the corporeality of living bodies. In the form of a corpographies

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fetish, Chinese straddles both sides of this paradoxical equation: at once representative of linguistic materiality and resonating with the nostalgic echo of another, conceptually sacrificed type of representation. Allow me to close this subchapter with an extreme example of the conceptual sacrifice of the sinograph: the treatment of Chinese writing as a script of death in the novel Farabeuf: Chronicle of an Instant (Farabeuf: Crónica de un instante) by the Mexican writer Salvador Elizondo, published in 1965. Profoundly fascinated with all things Chinese, Elizondo experienced a traumatic encounter with Chinese culture, one that would haunt him for life, a type of vision so mind-shattering that it was “capable of subverting and unhinging any conception of the world”:30 the famous photograph of a Chinese execution included in Georges Bataille’s posthumously published work Tears of Eros (Larmes d’Eros) of 1961. The photograph referred to lies at the heart of one of the most morbid infatuations with Chinese culture, the fascination with the Chinese execution technique lingchi 凌遲, known in the West as “Death by a Thousand Cuts.”31 Influenced by Bataille’s morbid enchantment with the picture, Elizondo constructed his first novel, Farabeuf, as a multiple reenactment of lingchi, converting the photograph into the centerpiece of his novel.32 The novel reproduces and fictionally reframes the photograph as the product of the famous French doctor Louis Hubert Farabeuf, author of a treatise on surgery, A Short Operating Manual (Précis de manuel opératoire, 1889), but not, as in Elizondo’s novelistic attribution, of a treatise on Chinese torture. In Farabeuf, Bataille’s lingchi photo serves as the focal point or visual prism for the fragmented narratives that place the photographic artifact in different contexts of reception and exotic identification. Inspired by the photographed act of violence, the two ever-shifting protagonists of the text reenact the execution in the form of a vivisection (real or imagined on the textual level) by the male protagonist onto the body of the female protagonist. Rather than directly exoticizing the photograph and thus repeating the commonplace of Chinese cruelty, Elizondo’s novel reflects critically on a Western gaze infatuated with the cultural other.33 The body in pain in the photograph is a suffering Chinese body, cut apart by the hands of Chinese executioners. Yet, the suffering of a Chinese body initiates a series of perspectival shifts, as the execution photograph is activated in different situations of reception and invested with different meanings: from the body of the original victim in the photograph, to the gaze of the camera, to the reenactment in the novel, to the reader’s gaze on the atrocities given up to the readerly eye. 34

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Nevertheless, the novel puts Chinese writing at its center, by way of violence. In Elizondo’s novel, the tortured Chinese body in an old photograph becomes both a sign par excellence and the symbol for the impossibility of all signification. As Elizondo argues in his essay “On Violence” (“De la violencia”), violence is the site where “language un-signifies itself. There are no modes or forms of violence; violence is sudden and formless; as such it has the mode and form of a rupture, an unhinging, an interruption; the abrupt interruption of language, the silence of the impossibility to judge, of having been silenced.”34 Of course, theoretical reflections from Ernst Jünger’s “On Pain” (“Über den Schmerz”) to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain variously underline the incommensurability of pain and signification.35 But instead of using pain as an avatar of the ineffable, a realm inamenable to as well as freed from meaning, Elizondo recognizes it as the site where signification comes into its own, as crisis. There where language begins to unravel, the tortured body is still a sign: “A tortured or violated body is a very specific, unequivocal sign, one of a testimony that can only be formulated in terms of that same body.”36 The sign status of the body in pain is paradoxical, since it both is a sign in a strong sense and exists at the antipodes of meaning. As a concretely embodied signifier, each body in pain as unique sign, expressive only of itself, bears witness to specific, untranslatable suffering. This is signification at its most extreme. Much like the ideal signifying logic of the name, here a sign—not oral but visual—is exclusively tied to one concrete referent, a body in pain. At the same time, however, the apparent exclusion of any possible connection between sign and referent, crucial to signification as abstraction, generalization, and figurative use that allows the creation of a system of communication in which not every singular phenomenon is in need of its own specific name, leads to a breakdown of meaning: sign and referent collapse into one body, creating a black hole of signification. There where an absolutely proper sign emerges, in which the graphic shape of the symbol is materialized as its own content (the body in pain), meaning breaks down. A sign is most cryptic, most alien as a proper sign. Consequently, in order to “read” and represent the body in pain, the tautological loop of signification has to be interrupted. The sign has to become other to itself in order to be written and writable. The sign, ineffable precisely because it is absolute, cannot but seek other embodiments to construct meaning. It has to engage in the most radical process that characterizes what it means to signify: its own gliding. Of course, as exemplified by the fragmented and multiperspectival character of Farabeuf, corpographies

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signification here comes at the cost of designification, since the sign in question is broken open, transmuted into a series of interchangeable signifiers. In Farabeuf, the body in pain becomes a strange ideogram, a cluster of signs constantly in motion between different types of signification: The arrangement of the executioners is that of a hexagon centered around an axis, the torture victim. It is also the equivocal representation of a Chinese ideogram, a character that someone has drawn on the moisture of a windowpane. There can be no doubt about that. It is one of two things: an ideogram or a geometrical symbol. The ambiguity of Chinese writing is marvellous, and from the form which materializes into the image of the victim, we can deduce all the thoughts necessary to turn this torture into an unforgettable act. If you learn to say that name, you will know the ultimate meaning of torture. Look at this sign: 六 It is the number six and is pronounced liú [sic]. The arrangement of the strokes which comprise it is reminiscent of the position of the torture victim as well as the shape of a starfish, am I not right?37

The body in pain as impossible signifier becomes the node of two different series of signifiers, one iconic, the other numerical. The iconic series functions through gestaltic similarity, linking the shape of the tortured body to that of the Chinese character for six, “六” (liu), and to the image of a starfish with its five pods. Whereas the first series connects different shapes through their common figurality, the second series operates with numerical and geometrical symbols. “六,” taken not for its numerical value, but for its constellation of strokes in the first series, reverts to its mathematical meaning in the second series. Here, the narrative voice suggests that the reader’s gaze should no longer distinguish images but segue into counting, for instance, the group of executioners positioned around the torture victim that forms a hexagon, another incarnation of “six,” the geometrical expression of the numeral. Because of its double readability, “六” serves as a point of bifurcation. As a (false) pictogram that activates a reader’s analogical vision, it is emptied of meaning, reminiscent of the five pods of a starfish, but not directly readable as the number six. As a numeral, “六” becomes a symbol, unmotivated by any connection between the graph and its content beyond an arbitrary and conventional assignation. The series of signs that proceeds according to principles of similarity— though never reducible to bringing the referent directly to presence—evokes 36

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the different scenarios of the text as quasi-simultaneous events. In each of the recurring scenes of Farabeuf, another incarnation of the master ideogram appears. As the novel’s female protagonist waits in a house in Paris for the arrival of the male protagonist, she traces a sinograph onto the window: “六.” In a beach scene in which the romance between the protagonists begins to turn into a darker kind of desire, the woman picks up a starfish and tosses it into the sea, disgusted with its dead and decaying flesh. The tortured body in the photograph is a signifying vestige of another scene, that of Farabeuf ’s fictitious activities in China at the beginning of the twentieth century. The signs, connected by the superficial similarity of their graphic forms, stitch together the narrative fragments of the novel and underline the presence of the execution photograph in every scene, as a material picture, as a memory that haunts the protagonists, or in the form of other signs that end up pointing back to the impossible sign of the body in pain. The “ideogram” of the tortured body becomes a creative kernel that shapes the text through permutation. The effect of folding the linear medium of text into a virtual simultaneity in the act of reading is doubled by way of the second series. The mathematicosymbolic insistence on the number six has its counterpart in a generative principle based on the Yijing, or Book of Changes, one of the Chinese classics concerned with divination. Each movement in Elizondo’s multifaceted text can be read as the outcome of processes of divination carried out by a woman who may or may not be equivalent to the female protagonist, and thus as dependent on aleatory constellations. With concrete references to specific hexagrams, it is suggested that at least part of the textual fragments and the scenes represented are the outcome of processes of chance.38 Ultimately, the two signifying series of Farabeuf, already closely linked by the node of the impossible sign of the tortured body, converge in their generative function. They forge a text that allows the copresence of different (possible) scenes. The convergence of the two series, an iconic one that tends toward the symbolic and a mathematico-symbolic one that tilts toward the virtual, frees mediality from the immediate question of representation. The tortured body as impossible sign embodies the paradoxical nature of signification in general: concretely visible, and yet cryptic, expressive of as well as part of reality itself. In his aphorisms, Elizondo repeatedly singles out Chinese culture as a model of a general quandary of signification, namely, that “[language] can only express the impossibility to express.”39 Much like the impossible sign of the tortured body that is both specific and general, that corpographies

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transports both its meaning with the speed of shock and the eternal enigma of the cultural other, the two series, an ideograph with a complicated and diversified iconicity and a numerical symbol ripe with the virtual generativity of the hexagram, remain (dis)connected in a paradoxical loop. And yet, what holds the paradox together is a double equation: that between the sign in general and the sinograph, and, more importantly, that between the sinograph and the Chinese body in pain. The sinograph stands in for the sign both at its most lifelike and at its most dead(ly): it sacrifices reality by freezing a moment into eternity, as well as by giving life to a slice of the real. As a cruel sign for Western eyes, only Chinese writing can bridge the paradoxical chasm of representation.

national CalligraphieS If the concern with the medium of the Chinese script was wedded to the nightmare scenario of a sickly nation, prone to death at the hands of other national powers because of its backwardness at the beginning of the twentieth century or because of the fetish of the materiality of writing in French theory of the 1960s and 1970s, artistic expressions in the People’s Republic of China toward the end of the twentieth century gave vent to a growing reflection on another dangerous link between writing and bodies. In the aftermath of national violence on an unprecedented scale—during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, but also during the Tian’anmen Incident of 1989—the nation itself was suspected of wielding its deadly power over individual bodies in order to subject them to its rule. The consequences of such a perspective find artistic expression in the much-discussed wave of experimental art in the PRC that emerged in the 1980s and resurfaced after 1989. With its strong focus on the subjection of (the artist’s) body to suffering and abjection, much of Chinese performance art at the time battled with the link between the individual and state power through the medium of corporeality. Experiments such as Zhang Huan’s 張洹 ordeal of sitting in a public toilet for one hour, smeared with honey and fish oil and thus exposed to the onslaught of flies and mosquitoes (“Shi’er pingfangmi” 12 平方米, “Twelve Square Meters,” 1994), quickly became famous examples of the conceptual daring of art in the context of political repression.40 In this context, Chinese writing, as well as other sign systems associated with Chinese tradition or PRC state power, reemerges, yet again, in the form 38

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of a necroscript. Here, the connection between corporeality and the sinograph is reshaped—in no less morbid ways. Instead of the form of written or spoken language that renders language lethal to the nation body, as well as to the individual bodies of its citizens, the emphasis lies on the hold that language—as ideological discourse connected to the nation body—has on individual bodies. It is not language, as a sick medium, that endangers the nation by way of individual bodies. Language as deadly instrument of state power endangers the bodies of its citizens. This finds expression, above all, in the form of bodies inscribed with meaning, covered with signs, tattooed with the insignia of power. Corpography turns into an instrument of subjection, as power, in the form of writing, incarnates itself on bodily surfaces. Of the multiple examples of such corpographies in Chinese performance art, two related performance pieces by Yang Zhichao 楊志超 in 2000 foreground the link between corporeal inscription and state power in particularly explicit terms. During the performance “Bronzing” (“Shai” 曬), Yang “burned” the characters “流氓” (liumang, “tramp”) onto his chest and back by exposing his body to the sun after applying sheets with the characters cut out onto his body.41 Through this act, Yang styles himself as a subject at the margins of and undesirable to the state powers that be—both in the form of the phenomenon of the liumang, a criminal category encompassing hooliganism, homosexuality, and indecent behavior, and in that of the drifting population of illegal workers who move from rural into urban areas, through reference to the inverted homophonic neologism (mangliu 盲流). Yang’s piece “Branding” (“Luo” 烙), in cooperation with his fellow artist Ai Weiwei 艾未未, has the artist submit to the imprint of the number of his identity card onto his shoulder with a branding iron. Both pieces complement each other as concrete reflections on the working of state power. Through an assisted self-pigmentation of the skin, “Bronzing” reclaims marginal identities by visualizing the stigmas of the rural-to-urban drifter and the hooligan that subject the individual without granting it full subjecthood. “Branding,” on the other hand, restages citizenship in all its violence: as a reduction of individuals to (identity card) numbers, but also—reminiscent of ancient punishment methods and stigmatizations—as a painful process of corporeal marking and subjugation.42 These and similar examples highlight writing as a force that takes hold of bodies and subjects them to meaning and power. As a script imbued with power, writing hurts the body, it painfully reshapes and resignifies it, even to the extreme of corporeal obliteration or death. corpographies

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One of the pieces in Qiu Zhijie’s 邱志傑 “Tattoo Series” (“Wen shen xilie” 紋身系列) of 1994 comments strikingly on the negation of the body and its expressive powers through inscription. The photograph shows the artist’s naked upper body, covered by the oversized Chinese character “不” (bu, “not”) executed in bloodred paint.43 Larger than the surface of the body it is written on, the strokes of the character continue on the white wall behind the artist, reducing the body to yet another background, a blank canvas ready to be filled with signs. The fact that the upper horizontal stroke of “不” covers Qiu’s mouth, much like a gag, highlights the impression of negation and erasure. Body and sign are clearly at odds—as are writing, as the imposition of meaning on the body from outside, and speech, as the barred self-expression of the body. Although most of the corpographies of Chinese performance art foreground the negation and erasure of the body, from a different vantage point, they also affirm the dependence of writing on material embodiment. In 2000, after having left China for the United States in 1998, the artist Zhang Huan provided an example of the complexity of bodily inscription in his performance “Family Tree.” (See figure 1.1) During the course of several hours, Zhang had three calligraphers inscribe his face with a series of names, proverbs, and phrases. The series of photographs, taken at different moments of the inscriptive process, show how his face gradually disappears under a thicket of Chinese characters, to the point where it is covered entirely by a layer of black ink. In the context of Zhang’s transcultural experience of leaving China behind and establishing himself in the United States, the process of having his face marked with Chinese characters—expressions of cultural stereotypes as well as of his family’s genealogy—bespeaks a difficult, even contradictory process of intercultural renegotiation, as noted by Sheldon Lu: “Layers of black ink destroy signification and meaning, but at the same time they thicken, solidify, and condense a cherished cultural tradition.”44 The inscription of the body with cultural meaning ends up creating such a dense text that each single inscription becomes unreadable. In “Family Tree,” the paradoxical link between script and body emerges in the repeated act of inscription on one single medium: a surplus of signs fills the writing surface, to the point where it ceases to exist as contrastive background. With the disappearance of spacing between sign and sign, signification itself ceases to function; with the obliteration of the face and the body through writing, writing itself dissolves into a sea of black ink. 40

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Figure 1.1 Zhang Huan, “Family Tree” (2000). Reprinted with permission from the

artist.

For bodies covered with marks, inscribed, and intextuated, the encroachment of signification cuts both ways. On the one hand, writing obliterates the body; on the other, the mortality or medial limitations of its carrier infects signification: with the death of its organic “medium” (the body), signification is also threatened by death. On the one hand, like living tomes in an archive, organisms become surfaces for writing; on the other, due to the perishability of these human “pages,” they also consume meaning.45 Corporeality and textuality are, so to speak, inevitably connected, but invariably at odds. Bodies prone to inscription can also resist signification, not only belatedly, as meaning dies with their disintegration, but also during the very act of being written upon. If the organic, and thus pliable and perishable, materiality of bodies challenges writing, materiality and writing are also in opposition if the material surface about to be written on resists inscription. In 1996, the Chinese concept artist Song Dong 宋冬 based his performance “Printing on Water” (“Chongya shui” 沖壓水) on an illustration of the material resistance of inscriptive surfaces. He used an oversized wood-carved stamp to imprint the surface of the Tibetan Lhasa River with the character “水” (shui, “water”).46 The repeated act of imprinting “water” onto water—documented in a series of photographs—is predicated upon a reflection on the materiality of writing. “Printing on Water” fails to produce an imprint of the character “水” because the material surface in its liquid volatility admits no permanent mark. Song Dong’s performance celebrates material resistance to inscription. The vanishing of the sign becomes an escape from the pressures of signification. The act of wanting to “brand” the referent as “water” by imprinting it with its written signifier can be read as the desire to create a univocal, indelible chain of signification in which referent, signified, and signifier are eternally linked. For this purpose, the referent itself is fantasized as connected to writing, recognizable and readable, since it visibly bears its own name, since the sign that represents it has become a part of its body. However, water proves too pliable and therefore not amenable to bearing the mark of writing. The referent’s materiality resists the compulsion to mark, the imposition of a regime of signification upon the world that nothing (and nobody) can escape. These performances raise complex questions concerning the embodiment of writing. By drawing attention to the medium of writing—“medium” understood here as the material with which and upon which written words are produced—they reclaim the specificity of written signification. Writing is dependent on its medium in order to become materialized. This also means that, divorced from its incarnation, writing itself is not material, indeed it is nothing at all. 42

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But inscription, a body’s “branding” by state power, is only a weak representation of the ideologically charged tie between individuals and writing, only part of the violence of writing. Writing’s other power works in less obvious ways, impacting individuals not only as passive surfaces of signification, but actively, through script pedagogies. Signs are carved into bodies, but bodies are also constrained by the rules of orthography and calligraphy, concretely and figuratively bent over in writing practice. The other, complementary side of the coin of state power that manifests on bodies, as inscription, consists in the production of citizens through an imaginary of writing pedagogy, indeed of a national calligraphy. And the logic of national calligraphy thrives on an imaginary of living bodies, bound by rules, that produce a dynamic script, rather than on morbid metaphors of decaying scripts and festering bodies. The imaginary of Chinese necroscripts has a spectacular counterpart in the uses of the Chinese script as part of a new calligraphic identity politics in China’s recent national and global spectacles. The “Chinese Characters” piece of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, as well as the ubiquitous Olympic logo, announced this “program” as clever pieces of graphic engineering. The logo of the Olympics, at first sight an abstracted icon of a body in motion, actually consists of the redesigned Chinese character wen 文. This sinograph, part of such terms as “culture” (wenhua 文化), “literature” (wenxue 文學), and “civilization” (wenming 文明), also designates Chinese writing as such, as wenzi 文字, or simply as wen: the umbrella term for all that has to do with (Chinese) writing as a synonym for cultural refinement.47 The logo combines different meanings in one iconic message: Not only is the idea of sport emphasized as a form of culture, through the typographic sleight of hand of a running or dancing wen. Not only does the event of the Olympics find itself resituated in China, by being translated into “Chinese.” The very design also converts Chinese writing symbolically into a living, dynamic script, a medium in motion.48 Of course, typographic design loves to play with bodies and letters, both alphabetic and not. And yet, some of the more interesting contemporary Chinese examples mark a paradigm shift in imaginary not unlike that of the intricate body alphabets of Europe’s early modernity—in which writing had to be nostalgically reinvented in bodily form before it began to dematerialize in the face of writing’s emancipation as signifying technology.49 The Chinese script is not only reimagined as a dynamic medium; its (re)designers also avail themselves of Orientalist dreams and project them back to an corpographies

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international audience in exotic yet modern garb: for instance, in the design of the official sports icons for the Olympics that, as icons, tarried with their closeness to Chinese characters. The official sports icons pose as pictographs, as abstracted pictures of the different disciplines, and thus as readable for an international audience. At the same time, however, their round shapes cite the font of traditional seal script, not coincidentally the script of the first empire seen as the symbolic precursor of the nation body of today’s People’s Republic of China.50 That the official icons pose playfully as Chinese characters and are read as such by a Chinese audience is further evidenced by the fact that different graphic designers “rewrote” them in other script styles.51 Of course, these are not Chinese characters. And yet, where Western eyes had tried to “read” the sinograph for centuries for its pictographic and pictorial value, today’s Chinese designers, via formal references to specific typographies and script types of Chinese, are not afraid to recode these iconic symbols as “Chinese writing.” It is, ultimately, irrelevant if these allusions to specific scripts are readily visible to an international audience or not—most probably they are not. But, as intended by the designers, in the context of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a Western audience was most likely inclined to read a vaguely Chinese element into these icons anyway. For once, but probably not for the last time, exoticism actively played into the hands of a new Chinese script politics. But, questions of cultural coding set aside for the moment, what becomes of the bodies that “animate” the sinographs here? When a letter is embodied as a human figure, what does this tell us about the script politics in play, especially with regard to the forces that connect a script, a nation body, and the bodies of that nation’s citizens? What is at stake here is a more specific bind between mediated language (as and beyond code) and body than the one Kittler formulates in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter. In spite of the uniformity of the digital, not all codes are equal, at least not until the human interface has become completely unnecessary. Until such a day, code, in its specific shape, carries more than just information. Its very form—as national language or script—programs individual bodies so that they constitute a nation body, both symbolically and pragmatically. In other words, language, both in its spoken and written form, can become a biopolitical technology. By discussing the showcasing of the Chinese printing tradition during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing as cages of script in the introduction, I invoked a potentially nefarious, since totalitarian, use 44

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of script politics. At the same time, however, I also painted a somewhat triumphant picture of the comeback of Chinese writing and celebrated it as the emancipation from the symbolic pressure of the alphabetic script. Most often the real outcomes of script politics lie somewhere between the extremes of language as authoritarian determinism and language as a tool of individual agency and free intersubjective communication. The question of language and of script can unite and divide—for instance, in the script discussions that accompanied the war in Yugoslavia. Writing in its specific cultural and material forms is a medium that can be put to different uses, but it has its own character. This means that it is not simply a tool that can be bent any which way. Even in its most totalitarian uses, language still harbors the potential of saying otherwise, if only in small ways. The sheer multiplicity of designs that combine body shapes and Chinese characters in the years leading up to and during the Beijing Olympics can be read as the symptom of a critical moment for Chinese script politics. It indicates that it is timely to think about the Chinese character as a script technology in the context of a renewed effort of defining what it means to be Chinese. In many of the examples at hand, the sinograph signifies the “Chinese” element par excellence.52 In harmony with the predominant tendency of portraying Chinese characters as living, moving letters, most designs in the context of the Beijing Olympics gift the sinograph with energy and dynamism, such as the design “Eternal” (“Yong” 永) by the Guangzhou-based Dingli 鼎立 Advertising Company, which won second prize in the category of graphic design at the “Chinese Element Awards” of 2008.53 In “Eternal,” Chinese calligraphy merges with the athletic beauty of bodies in motion: as parts of the character “永” (yong, “eternal”) the sportsmen and sportswomen are poised in poses that underline the elegant stroke lines of this sinograph in one of its most readable script forms (kaishu 楷書). There is an ulterior motive behind the choice of this character, apart from its literal signification in the four-character phrases on the posters of which it forms the beginning, and which are continued by the white characters on red ground, such as “never give up” or “never acknowledge defeat.” Yong embodies the master character in Chinese calligraphy. Since it features the eight different stroke forms of Chinese writing, it is the landmark of good writing style, and the incessantly repeated example that would-be-calligraphers practice—in China that still means almost everybody who aspires to more than basic literacy. The small characters in circles underline this reference to writing pedagogy, since they cite the eight laws of the character yong, the corpographies

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ideal of good calligraphy.54 The other three characters on red ground equally reinforce the reference to calligraphic art, mimicking the customary seal imprint of the calligraphic artist. Aesthetic perfection—of writing and of corporeal movement—so these images seem to imply, can only be achieved by unceasing effort. And this means, for both calligraphy and sports, to discipline one’s body according to preset rules and expectations. Both types of motion—that of the writing hand and that of the whole body in gymnastics—are at once scripted and produce and reproduce scripts. Potentially, these physical exercises are rehearsals for other body scripts: those of a flag-waving mass audience enraptured by national spectacles, or the interaction of a soldier’s eye and hand, possibly technologically assisted, in the act of shooting at a target.55 However, the emphasis on the aesthetic principles of calligraphy also brings light into the dark scenario of violent regimes that script and subdue a body according to the power vested in and expressed through writing. Calligraphy relies both on rule-based conventions for emulation and on individual styles and innovations. If writing pedagogies constrain the body—according to Roger Chartier, expression of the extreme violence inherent in writing— bodily acts also form, maintain, and potentially change such pedagogies.56 What I want to point to here, then, is not always already an alienation of the human body through a (totalitarian) script that assigns each body a place and actively shapes it. On the contrary, these examples make visible some of the normally hidden relations between identity, body, and media. These body scripts allow for a reflection on, maybe even a redefinition of, the relation between individual, nation, and script. In the context of the Beijing Olympics, this also implies a reevaluation of Chinese culture in communication with other (nation) bodies and scripts, translated in and through the common language of sport. Of course the Beijing Olympics was a huge showcasing of China’s national pride, a not-too-subtle reminder of Chinese economic power.57 But I also do not want to read this merely through a biased lens, thus replicating the false consciousness of many Western viewers who enjoyed the spectacle, but were happy to jump at the least possibility of a “chink” in the dazzling façade. The various body scripts of the Beijing Olympics showcase a new symbolic renegotiation of the Chinese script. As ways of rewriting the national character, they also allow deeper insight into the biopolitics of script technologies. This is especially significant in a global context in which national identity is becoming an ever more complex category. What is at stake today 46

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is not, as some critics purport, a postnational scenario, let alone the demise of nationalism. Nor does national identity merely dissolve into a nostalgic charge, a symbolic capital of rootedness and belonging for the privileged.58 Rather, nationalism, far from vanishing as a symbolic and real dispositive of power, is ever harder pressed to manifest itself visually and aurally. In an age of unprecedented transcultural flows, ethnic hybridity, multilingualism, digital media, and integrated economic circuits, neither language nor situatedness nor ethnic profiling—categories that at their best (or worst) conjured up some credibility only in conjunction with the willing suspension of disbelief enforced by national ideology—constitutes credible guidelines for a national hermeneutics any longer. How can a national script become readable as such, as well as physically reproduce itself, today? Contemporary Chinese culture has a remarkable, culturally specific answer to Emily Apter’s question of how national characters become virtual subjects in a multicultural world (yet are still captured by nationalism): as national calligraphies.59 For the most part, the bodies in the examples of body scripts, such as the one under analysis here, are unmarked: they either are icons anyway or cannot be easily decrypted as of any particular race or ethnicity, even when the designs use photographs, since they are colored a neutral black through the ink of Chinese calligraphy.60 Instead of bodily markers, the Chinese script itself becomes the rallying category of a national symbolic. As such, national China is no longer primarily imagined as a community connected by phenotypal similarities, national territory, or a shared language. Apart from the many ethical and logical pitfalls of such categories, they have never had much purchase in a multiethnic, multilingual China, and less so in the age of globalization. The renewed investment in the Chinese script as a marker of participation in a national community is at once extremely postmodern in logic and profoundly premodern with regard to media technology. On the one hand, the imaginary of Chinese calligraphy foregrounds the logic of nationalism, which, as discussed by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, is both pedagogical and performative, both archaic and modern, both timeless and momentary: The people are not simply historical events or parts of a patriotic body politic. They are also a complex rhetorical strategy of social reference: their claim to be representative provokes a crisis within the process of signification and discursive address. We then have a contested conceptual territory where the nation’s people must be thought in double-time; the people are

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the historical “objects” of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past; the people are also the “subjects” of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principles of the people as contemporaneity: as that sign of the present through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive process.61

In other words, the idea of the nation relies both on a prescriptive imaginary of unchanging, age-old stability and on the unceasing performances of nationhood that keep it dynamic, changing, and up-to-date. The calligraphic model of Chinese nationalism that I am deriving from recent uses of script politics here resembles Bhabha’s concept almost too literally, by embodying national identity in a pedagogy and performance of the Chinese (written) character. As with the timeless ideal of the nation, incessantly reproduced through its living practitioners, calligraphy as a supposedly timeless script exists only in and through the practices that write out characters again and again, emulating, reproducing, and updating an existing aesthetic ideal. But this identity politics by script encounters yet another challenge. In the face of a devaluation of the Chinese character under global alphabetic pressure, Chinese nationhood needs to update its medial imaginary. The resulting dilemma: while the Chinese script might work as a hermeneutics and pedagogy of national identity, as a media technology it seems seriously outdated. Bhabha’s temporal rift in the relation between nation and bodies thus reappears on the symbolic level of national calligraphy as the contradiction between the unchanging tradition of Chinese writing and its interaction with or transformation into new media, communication technologies, and codes. While this is true to some degree for all scripts, the sinograph is particularly susceptible to charges of inflexibility and outdatedness, from both Western and Chinese perspectives. Consequently, the Chinese script itself becomes a battlefield of the pedagogical and the performative: invested with a tradition of millennia, and yet always flexible enough to interface with new media technologies. Hence, the imaginary of the moving, living letter has a double edge. On the one hand, it highlights the bind between nation and bodies as a script in which the Chinese written character and Chineseness, as a national character, become intertwined. In this guise, the sinograph elicits both a haptics and a hermeneutics of identity. Only when performance and cognition interact 48

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in the scripting and decrypting of the same message can a national subject emerge. On the other hand, the medially challenged sinograph constantly gives way to nonscript media of sound and vision, as well as to digital code, and thus to mediated embodiments that are less easily decipherable in their cultural specificity. In the twofold national translation of the sinograph—as a link between the nation and its individual bodies, between writing and other media—the contradictions between the performative and the pedagogical are also doubled, and the national calligraphy of Chinese writing potentially destabilized. It is here that a national script politics cannot always capture its object-body, especially when the haptics and hermeneutics of nationalism diverge in the process of symbolic translation, in the interstices between the performative and the pedagogical. Before revealing its human mechanism, the “printing press” during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games displayed one last vision: a stylized image of the Great Wall of China. As an attempt at circumscribing a unified territory, the Great Wall has even more symbolic potential than other architectural markers of identity, since it embodies the exclusion of the other (non-Han tribes) as well as serves as a symbolic rallying point of Chinese identity.62 As a massive project begun after the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi 秦始皇帝, unified part of what is now called China in 221 bce, from a latter-day national perspective, the Wall is an enduring mark of the primal scene of Chinese nationhood. Not coincidentally, Qin Shi Huangdi went down in history not only for his ambition to bring about territorial unification, but also for his role in Chinese culture: as the ruler who initiated one of the most radical purges of the cultural archive, resulting in a massive, if selective, destruction of knowledge. Qin Shi Huangdi also unified the written language, reducing different character variants and standardizing the script in the official form now known as small seal script (xiaozhuan 小篆). In this context, the incessant invocation of harmonious unity (he 和) during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics seems ambiguous: much as it appeals to the Olympic idea of transnational cooperation and exchange, it also references symbols of a more nationalistically oriented idea of unity. Through a similar reference to the first emperor, the artistic director of the opening ceremony, the Chinese film director Zhang Yimou 張藝謀, had already connected nationalism and script politics in suggestive ways in his blockbuster hit Hero (Yingxiong 英雄), released in 2002. Zhang’s first venture into the genre of martial arts films—yet another version of the much-beloved story of the failed assassination attempt against the first emperor—roused a corpographies

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wave of criticism.63 According to his critics, Zhang shaped the filmic rewriting of the symbolically charged primal scene of Chinese unification under Qin Shi Huangdi as an apology of empire by having the assassin Nameless (Wuming 無名, Jet Li) desist from his attempt at murdering the sovereign, because he understands that the apparent tyrant actually aims to achieve the greater good of all.64 For too many, the vision of general peace in “all under Heaven” (tianxia 天下), to be achieved only through conquest, smacked of China-centric nationalism, even though the concept tianxia has widely differing meaning in the Chinese traditions of Confucianism and Legalism and can be read as a neutral, national, imperialist, or even global category.65 The totalizing thrust of the ideological message of Hero was not mitigated by its brilliant cinematic aesthetics or its narrative structure of flashbacks that present different versions of the same event, a technique reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon of 1950. In Hero, these flashbacks, coded by different color schemes, give different accounts of how Nameless was able to defeat three famous fighters who threatened the life of the King of Qin, Sky (Tian 天, Donnie Yen), Flying Snow (Feixue 飛雪, Maggie Cheung), and Broken Sword (Canjian 殘劍, Tony Leung Chiu-wai): either by killing them through a combination of fighting skills and intrigue, or because of their collaboration, which assures that Nameless can get close enough to the king for a successful assassination attempt while claiming his reward. In the end, however, for all their powerful visual magic, the different versions are less competing forms of reality than steps in an almost dialectical structure, a learning experience not only for the film’s nameless hero, but also for the viewer. Its synthesis recodes the king’s empire-building ambitions as a largescale ethical mandate that warrants bloodshed as a necessary sacrifice of the few for the good of the many. In a work seemingly preoccupied with the national—the idea of the nation is of course anachronistic to the era the film describes, though not for its supposedly contemporary allegorical content—the focus on the Chinese written character as an essence of Chineseness is hardly surprising. This becomes evident when the assassin presents the future emperor with a scroll written by Broken Sword, one of the supposedly defeated enemies. According to Nameless, Broken Sword’s calligraphy embodies the last of twenty versions of the character “劍” (jian, “sword”). Immediately, the ruler advocates the standardization of the Chinese script—one of the achievements attributed to the historical Qin Shi Huangdi: “How odd to write one character in nineteen ways. It makes the written language impossible to comprehend. Once I 50

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have conquered the six Kingdoms and the Northern tribes, I will eradicate this problem by mandating one style of writing. Wouldn’t that be ideal?”66 Empire-building thus also involves a discursive deployment that aims at the unification of writing.67 Consequently, the standardization of the script curbs undesired multiplicity with a view to both administrative pragmatics and cultural identity as a basis for national unity. For the sinograph to become a national “character,” it seems, it has to be tightly controlled, even to the point of regulating its writing style. In spite of its global production team and film crew, in spite of its actors from a variety of Sinophone places, Zhang’s film has not elicited the same positive reading as Ang Lee’s 李安 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long 臥虎藏龍), released in 2000. There, the presence of different pronunciations of the standard Mandarin led Shu-mei Shih to read the film as linguistically subversive, since it makes different Sinophones audible, at least in variant pronunciations of the standard Mandarin.68 For both Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the actors were selected no doubt for their international fame, rather than with a view to presenting the different Chinas and their cultural variety. As Sheldon Lu suggests, the aim was to create “a pan-Chinese, pan-Mandarin world in the Greater China area,” while linguistic authenticity was not at issue.69 Indeed, for global audiences who watch the films in subtitled versions, differences in pronunciation in a language they do not understand matter little. The fact that Hero, despite displaying divergent pronunciations of Mandarin similar to Ang Lee’s film, has been read overwhelmingly in terms of an ideology of national unity has everything to do with its script politics, and almost nothing with its speech pragmatics. The idiom of the film, as in many historically themed television series, is a pseudoclassical Chinese that is not invested in linguistic authenticity, but rather in creating a conventional archaic effect—a fake readily readable for and accepted by a Chinese-language audience. In the same way in which the different plot versions merely underwrite a linear trajectory, the pseudoclassical Chinese of Hero, coupled with its sinographic identity politics, appears to construct its national allegory at the expense of all multiplicity and undecidability. But is this really the only way in which we can read the film’s treatment of Chinese? The obsessive conjugation of calligraphy and swordsmanship, of wen 文 and wu 武, in the movie emphasizes the fact that both sword and brush are instruments of conquest, reiterating the bind between military and discursive power.70 The movie foregrounds this conceptual link visually in a variety corpographies

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of ways, often by exchanging writing instruments for arms: when the kingdom of Zhao is under attack by the Qin army, Broken Sword, his writing stick broken by an enemy arrow, continues his writing exercises in sand with an arrow that he snatches out of the air and breaks. Later, he uses his broken sword to convince Nameless of the king’s mandate by writing “天下” in the sand. In one of the most powerful visual sequences of Hero, writing and fighting are at the center again: when Nameless and Flying Snow, Broken Sword’s lover, ward off the myriad of arrows of Qin’s attack on Zhao to shield Broken Sword, while he is doing calligraphy. Their martial dance is intercut with images of Broken Sword, whose movements while writing the character for “sword” with an oversized brush in red ink differ little from their artful sword-wielding. The pairing of “excellent writing” and “excellent fighting” in the mutual approval of Nameless and Broken Sword after the scene further underlines the connection between calligraphy and swordsmanship in Broken Sword’s words to Nameless: “Without your sword this character would not have come into existence.” Nameless goes so far as to claim that he can glean the secret of Broken Sword’s fighting technique from his calligraphy: “Calligraphy and swordplay are similar. One must comprehend their true essence.” Here writing is not primarily signification, but practice. It is not the meaning of a sign but the practice of its production that forms a link to the material, as well as ideal, world. The emperor who sees in Broken Sword’s calligraphy only an ordinary word, and in writing only a pragmatic tool of empire, has to learn this philosophical as well as ethical lesson that draws deeply from the tradition of Chinese thought. According to Taoist as well as Confucian values, “the calligrapher,” as Jean-François Billeter writes in The Chinese Art of Writing, “gradually extends to his whole manner of being, to all his movements and all his doings, the principles of economy which he has discovered in his art. The practice of calligraphic gesture transforms the structure of his activity—in writing to begin with, then beyond it.”71 From this perspective, calligraphy as a practice, and not the meaning of any given text, allows access to the world, since it is in tune with all things—in traditional Chinese thought as well as in Zhang’s Hero. It is from calligraphy that the calligrapher-philosopher Broken Sword comes to the conclusion that the King of Qin cannot be killed. In the perfection of calligraphy, so he claims, the ultimate rule is simplicity, which prescribes this principle on all other levels of reality—in swordsmanship as well

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as in statecraft. With regard to the order of government, this rule imposes the unity of empire over and above a structure of competing small kingdoms. As an illustration, Broken Sword traces the characters “天下” in the sand with his sword: two of the simplest characters of the Chinese language, which are meant, through their own form, as proof of the truth they express. It is also true, however, that the drawn-out sequence in which Broken Sword pens (or rather swords) these characters in sand in front of a breath-taking mountain scenery far exceeds the simple strokes of “天下”—to the extent that a spectator cannot make out Broken Sword’s message to Nameless, which will be revealed only at the culminating moment of the film. The connection of all things through the prism of calligraphy recodes scenes in which fighting and writing stand in opposition to each other. In retrospect, the heroic act of the disciples in the Zhao calligraphy school of continuing to write under the attack of the Qin forces as well as the abbot’s emphasis on the enduring value of Zhao culture in the face of Qin domination appear merely as the failure to gain insight into the true way of the world. Unlike Broken Sword, they have not mastered the highest level of calligraphy, since they have not learned the ideal of simplicity. Similarly, the tests with which Nameless convinces Broken Sword and Flying Snow to collaborate with him pit martial art against writing. In both versions, Nameless’s skills are directed against books and writing implements: he cuts through the bindings of bamboo slips and pierces a writing brush with his sword. Again, the different links between writing and fighting represent mere steps on the way to a national truth; the different versions of Chinese characters are merely interims on the way to graphic perfection. In Hero’s national allegory, empire and writing are thus doubly connected. On the one hand, imperial power is invested in the sinograph, forcing it into a standardized form and harnessing it to an administrative apparatus. On the other, the practice of calligraphy, as one form of self-perfection, underwrites imperial unification as the natural order of things, according to its mandate of simplicity. And yet, it is precisely here, through an excess of coupling between writing and empire, that a double bind between both economies becomes visible. Paradoxically, multiplicity, in the form of necessary indeterminacy, has an important function in the film, beyond and against its national and totalitarian thrust. When the King of Qin, in the key scene of the film, turns again to Broken Sword’s calligraphy, he begins to grasp its meaning (see figure 1.2.):

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Figure 1.2 Reading “Sword” in Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou (2002).

This scroll of Broken Sword’s is not about sword technique, but about swordsmanship’s ultimate ideal. Swordsmanship’s first achievement is the unity of man and sword. Once this unity is attained, even a blade of grass can be a weapon. The second achievement is when the sword exists in one’s heart, when it is absent from one’s hand, one can strike an enemy at one hundred paces even with bare hands. Swordsmanship’s ultimate achievement is the absence of the sword in both hand and heart. The swordsman is at peace with the rest of the world. He vows to not kill and to bring peace to mankind.

The hermeneutics that moves on three different levels in order to decode Broken Sword’s message as well as the ultimate ideal that legitimizes the king cannot be distilled from just any character for “sword.” Instead, it builds on a direct correlation between writing style and ideal reality. In contrast, the referentiality of the character becomes endangered. The exegesis of the character for “sword,” so central to the film’s national allegory, depends on 54

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referential indirection, a possible ambivalence of signification at the center of writing. Only once the signifying economy that links a written sign directly and unequivocally to its meaning—the referential transparence at stake in standardizing a script in the interest of empire—is broken can one sinograph express its opposite—the character for “sword” hence can stand for its own negation, the absence of the sword. But if a sign can designate the opposite of what it says, according to two different economies of expression—one significatory, the other performative—what guarantees the stability of signification? Rather than absolute, it becomes ambivalent, like the character “殘” (can) in the name of Broken Sword: is the sword’s power here broken (canpo 殘破) or does it linger on as a remainder (canyu 殘餘)? Split between performance and signification, the sinograph in Hero can only express the mandate of simplicity through indeterminacy; it has to be multiple in order to be simple, even though the content thus expressed negates its possibility of existence. What does this imply for the function the sinograph fulfills as a “national character”? As Hero suggests, it is precisely the attempt to cathect the sinograph unequivocally to a cultural identity streamlined in the interest of nationalism that foregrounds its referential ambivalence. If the sinograph for “sword” ultimately signifies its opposite, what guarantees that the sinograph can stand for a totalized, standardized, and nationalized notion of Chineseness? The strategic deployment of “劍” that exceeds its aim through participation in the ambivalence of referentiality parallels the overdetermination present in the logic of intending or reading the sinograph as a “national character.” When the sinograph is called upon to articulate Chineseness, apart from, beyond, and in addition to its signifying powers, the use of one linguistic medium itself is invested with meaning: writing in Chinese characters (apart from any content expressed through them) already signifies Chineseness. But whenever two referential economies are spliced together in such a way, the problem of representation at the heart of representation comes into full view. In the signifying excess with which the Chinese written character is charged in its function as a “national character,” the doubling of economies of signification and levels of reference finally questions any unequivocal ascription of cultural identity. Even as the connection between the sinograph and human bodies—making of Chinese writing a corpography—aims at anchoring signs in a material, indeed, bodily, reality, multiple, competing interfaces emerge instead. Even as it embodies Chineseness as “national character,” the sinograph destabilizes this very referent. corpographies

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2 iconograPhies

Poetics of Visuality Another way of hallucinating about a privileged link between sinographs and material reality, apart from fantasies of “Chinese” corpographies, equates Chinese signs with images. For Chinese characters to sustain a motivated tie with their referents—not merely one ruled by arbitrary though conventional designations—sinographs have to become icons: shorthand pictures of the things they represent.1 Under the thrall of what we might call the pictographic myth, philosophers, writers, and artists sweepingly attributed to Chinese writing a pictorial quality supposedly mimetic of reality, though actual pictographs compose only a small fraction of the Chinese lexicon. Of course, such pictographic biases, sustained by cultural ignorance or strategic interest, intentionally or unintentionally misread Chinese writing. And to unveil the falsity of such claims, though necessary, proves intellectually unsatisfactory. Instead, we might want to reread such moments of pictographic myth for their media politics, as symptoms of anxiety in moments of media changes or crises in representation. For much of Western philosophy, Chinese writing embodied the dream, or nightmare, of another system of representation as a necessary negative or positive foil for Western concepts of mediality. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for instance, the advent of the moving picture revolutionized optic media and triggered a new fascination with Chinese writing. The link between new media and Chinese writing found expression in Ernest Fenollosa’s famous essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” At the same time that the throes of nationalism led Chinese intellectuals to disparage the Chinese character, Fenollosa constructed

the “Ars Poetica of our time,” on the basis of the representative powers of the sinograph.2 Based on lectures that the American scholar Fenollosa drafted in the first years of the twentieth century, the text itself reached the reading public mainly through the lens of Ezra Pound’s edited version of 1919.3 As the rich tradition of criticism on the piece shows, no discussion of the script politics of Chinese writing can bypass this short essay.4 The text has had a long history as the bone of contention of criticism that disparages Fenollosa’s misreading of the Chinese script in terms of the pictographic myth (mainly by Chinese scholars or Western sinologists), celebrates his vision of a new poetic language (mainly by Western poets and scholars of poetry), or, more recently, tries to find a more balanced appraisal of Fenollosa’s comparative intercultural project.5 Fenollosa’s text itself allows for multiple readings, as we contemporary readers revisit it inevitably through the lenses of the discourses to which it has given rise. While its fantasy of a poetic language that bridges the gap between words and things has been an important catalyst of different traditions of Western poetry, from imagism to concrete poetry, I will explore a slightly different path in my analysis here, one that gives more prominence to one term of its title, “medium.” Of course, the medium highlighted in the title of Fenollosa’s essay is language, more concretely, the Chinese script, understood as a model for a new English diction to come. And yet, the choice of examples, as well as the text’s argumentative thrust, suggests that a more general preoccupation with mediality lurks in the background. Fenollosa’s text stands at the center of a tradition of Western thought that has struggled to make sense of media innovations. New media have always tended to define themselves through adopting the parameters of older media as their conceptual basis.6 For instance, the technology of the moving picture that was to revolutionize the media landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century was frequently framed and understood in terms of writing. However, the interpretive shift in the incipient discussions of film was not merely one across different media, from film to writing, but also a transcultural one: the writing in question here does not draw on phonetic or alphabetic scripts, but on scripts that supposedly infuse writing with iconic force, such as ideographs or hieroglyphs. When Ernest Fenollosa formulated his thoughts on “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” in the first decade of the twentieth century, the intellectual world was engaged in a struggle to redefine what it meant to represent reality. The nineteenth century not only had seen major 58

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developments in media based on sound, such as the gramophone and the telephone, but also had laid the basis of a revolution in optical media that was to challenge intellectuals at the turn of the century to reinvent their entire world view.7 Whereas the invention and perfection of photography throughout the nineteenth century represented an unprecedented technological feat, it was not until there was the possibility of visually recording and simulating movement that traditional modes of perception underwent the profound changes that intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin attempted to describe and comprehend throughout the first decades of the twentieth century.8 The possibility of producing moving pictures questioned basic assumptions about representation, as the status of reality experienced an unprecedented shift: technologically assisted vision proved superior to that of the eye. Of course, by then the telescope and the microscope had been in use as optical prostheses for some time. And yet, unlike the production of moving pictures, they merely sharpened the gaze rather than challenging its veracity altogether. As Benjamin underlined in his multiply rewritten essay “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”), film, with its powers of dissection and montage, revolutionized the perception of reality.9 One of the most famous episodes in the history of optical media, Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic experiments, used new optic technologies to fill in the gaps of human perception. He captured a series of images of a galloping horse in order to answer the question of how many legs remained on the ground at any given moment. Visual media became a means of glimpsing a truth unavailable to the unassisted human eye. Muybridge’s combination of different earlier visual inventions, such as instant photography and the magical lantern, culminated in his Zoopraxiscope (1879), which claimed to represent life itself by dissecting movement into images and recombining them back into motion during projection. After Muybridge’s experiments, only a few more innovative steps led to Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope and the Kinematograph of the Lumière Brothers, and cinema was born as the full-fledged art of the moving picture.10 That the representation of visual movement hinges upon sequencing, upon the isolation of visual units and their recombination, is hardly a surprising insight; that this also led to attempts at redefining language might be less evident. Whereas Ferdinand de Saussure’s revolution of linguistics is beholden to sound—and thus, we might want to add, somewhat behind the media innovations of his time—I want to read Fenollosa’s often-critiqued IconographIes

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essay as an attempt at taking stock of the new, visual medialities in a reflection on language. In spite of what some call his bad linguistics and worse cultural bias, Fenollosa offers something beyond a pictographic bias and a naturalization of the Chinese script: a medial take on signification. The medium under discussion in Fenollosa’s text is writing, the generic context in which said medium unfolds its power that of poetry. And yet, as an echo that subtends the essay, especially its first part, more visible in the early drafts of the text than in the version used by Pound, another type of medium emerges, that of moving pictures. This is best illustrated by a closer look at Fenollosa’s technique of illustration, especially his one privileged example that lies at the core of an argument about language as a dynamic medium, one expressive of nature immersed in unceasing motion: 人見馬 (ren jian ma, “man sees horse”). Fenollosa illustrated this example with the help of different “media” in order to fit the bill of the genre he envisioned, the lecture. The sentence was to appear as the visible text of the Chinese characters, as an oral translation, and as a photograph representing the act described—in the form of a lantern slide intended to visually supplement the lecture.11 Ultimately, however, the medium that asserted itself, figuratively, as the vehicle of illustration was that of moving pictures in its equation with the Chinese written character. Fenollosa’s description has something of the cinematic, since he parallels the three Chinese characters not so much with three different images, but rather with three movement sequences, or three filmic takes: But the Chinese method [proceeds upon] natural suggestion. First, there stands the man upon his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space—a bold figure—represented by moving legs drawn under the modified picture of an eye. Third, at the end of the eye’s journey, stands the horse upon his four legs. The thought-picture, [therefore], is not only as well called up by these signs as by words, but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all these characters: they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture. (80)

Especially when we think back to the tradition of Eurocentric China criticism that culminated in an imperialistically motivated negativity in the nineteenth century, the equation of Chinese culture—at least in one of its aspects—with motion is extraordinary. Whereas theses such as Hegel’s verdict of China’s unhistorical (since stagnant) history or the heavy materiality 60

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of the sinograph were inexorably deployed in order to fix and transfix China in the Medusa gaze of an eternal, unalterable past, Fenollosa redefined Chinese writing as moving letters or moving images, imbuing it thus with the “quality of a continuous moving picture.” Consequently, for Fenollosa, Chinese writing itself crosses different media in that it transcends the conventional Western generic boundaries that ascribe the dimension of space to iconic media and that of time to language. In contrast, the sinograph, like the moving picture, combines the axes of spatiality and temporality: “The untruth of a painting or photograph [lies in this,] is the fact that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the element of natural succession. One superiority of verbal Poetry rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of time. [Now] Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both [these] elements. To speak, at once with the vividness of Painting and with the mobility of sounds” (80–81, emphasis Fenollosa’s). Fenollosa’s view of the sinograph as moving letters identifies movement at different levels of poetic Chinese. Firstly, each individual character, pictographic or not, according to his claim, expresses a verbal idea: it designates actions rather than representing things. This is also true for ideographs that are combinations of different components, such as the word “見” (jian), the sign for the verbal concept of “seeing”—consisting of “目” (mu, “eye”) and “儿” (er, “legs”)—which shows the eye quite literally in motion. In a draft of the lecture written in 1903, we can see that Fenollosa quickly settles on the verb “to look” as the action that is to connect the man and the horse of his example. The suggestion of “to beat” is discarded (see 106). On the one hand, this allows him subsequently to underline motion in all three sinographs of the example, since he sees all three as possessing “feet.” On the other hand, the choice of verb enables a reflection on mediality, since the verb of action present here is one of perception. Secondly, according to Fenollosa, Chinese syntax, with its hostility to the copula “to be,” which merely equates two things or states, is fundamentally mobile. All in all, written Chinese simulates a reality always in flux, never at rest. To Fenollosa, it embodies the pulse of nature, of whose incessant combinations, breaks, and recombinations—nature’s infinite syntax—it can but give an excerpt: The man who sees, and the horse which is seen, will not stand still. The man was planning [for] a ride before he looked, and the horse kicked [up] when the man tried to catch him. The truth is that acts are successive, even continuous; one causes or passes into another. And though we may string never

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so many clauses into a simple compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processes in nature are interrelated; and thus there could be no complete sentence but one which it would require all time to pronounce. (84–85)

As the essay rehearses the example of “man sees horse,” in its discussion of language, visuality in general, and, mayhap, Muybridge’s breakthrough on the way to full-fledged film, especially the photographic series of “The Moving Horse” of the late 1870s, are important references. Whereas the mention of the “moving picture” does not pertain to a specific technological medium in the draft of the lecture written in 1906, references to early examples of visual media are much more marked in the synopsis of the lecture written in 1903. In the passages at the beginning of the essay that will later develop into the discussion of sinographic mediality as the succession of images that combine time and space, Fenollosa explicitly mentions the Kinetoscope, by designating that the phrase “man sees horse” is “as near as possible to a shorthand Kinetoscopic picture of the process itself ” (106).12 In a marginal comment, Fenollosa further underlines this comparison by describing sinographs as gestures, made “visible just as one sees it in a Kinetoscope” (106). Pages later, when Fenollosa delivers a critique of the abstract, analytic character of Western languages, he returns to visual metaphors, now in terms of photography: “Nature is like a splendid pageant / The method of the dictionary is like that of an old fashioned photograp{er} with slow plates; who calls each figure out to step up & sit for his photograph. But the poet & philosopher takes such shots with instantaneous plates. He may get only a part, but he gets it living & full” (110). In Fenollosa’s essay, a question of medium enters a poetic treatise—not in the figurative terms of ut pictura poesis, where poetry is likened to the visual medium of painting, but quite concretely, at least if we are to believe Fenollosa. This emphasis on the medium exonerates Fenollosa from the accusation of worshipping the sinograph as a pictographic fetish. True, Fenollosa points at the pictographic substrate of the Chinese script; true, he highlights the sinograph’s visuality in contrast with the sonic character of poetry in English. And yet, the “naturalness” the essay ascribes to the Chinese written character is mimetic without claiming a direct link between the written signifier and its referent. In other words, for Fenollosa the sinograph is not a privileged medium for poetry because it re-presences rather than represents reality, the written sign serving as a mimetic image of an actual thing. Instead, Chinese as a written language functions like reality 62

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in that its basic principle is movement rather than stasis. For all its “natural” dynamics, though, it is still very much a medium, a technology of representation that gives us a mediated, not immediate, account of reality. Of course, Fenollosa’s prescriptive thrust only barely hides behind its descriptive façade: an account of poetic Chinese, seen through a Western as well as Japanese lens, serves as a model for poetry—at once multimedial and natural. The multimedial evocation of the sinograph proposed in Pound’s version of Fenollosa’s text is an imperfect one, since it eclipses sound, quite in contrast to the draft versions of the lecture that reserve an important place to the voicing of Chinese poetry. Of Fenollosa’s reflections on sound, Pound’s version retains little more than some observations that do nothing if not emphasize that the difference between phonetic languages, such as English, and Chinese lies in the overwhelmingly visual character of the latter. And yet, Fenollosa’s arguments on visuality allied with the sinograph are revelatory on their own, since they reach beyond signification, beyond static iconography, into the realm of moving pictures. A closer look at the images and illustrations culled from visual media in Fenollosa’s essay recodes the text as part of a tradition that tarries with the multimediality of the sinograph. It is the complement, or maybe the antipode, of a Western tradition that thinks text and image together, as moving media. Fenollosa sought to give an ideal of English writing not only through a different script tradition, that is, Chinese, but also through a different medium, that of moving pictures. Other thinkers at the beginning of the twentieth century actually reversed the analogy. It is not that poetic language, as modeled upon the sinograph, should be as vivid a way of representation as the moving pictures that were just beginning to assert their place; but the medium of moving pictures was in need of being explained in analogy to written text: whereas Fenollosa spoke and wrote of “visible hieroglyphics” (79) in terms of poetry, early critics of film saw the analogy as a possibility of making film readable and intelligible to the critical gaze.13 As early as 1915, in The Art of the Moving Picture, one of the first books dedicated entirely to a discussion of film art, the American poet and scholar Nicholas Vachel Lindsay treated the new visual medium as a hieroglyphics.14 For Lindsay, describing film as a series of “picture-writing” establishes a method both for reading and for constructing cinematic narrative.15 The pictorial basis of the hieroglyphs, such as the images of a throne, a hand, or a duck, to select but a few examples of Lindsay’s, however, is but one level of filmic meaning. Apart from their purely iconic expression—namely, that the IconographIes

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projected celluloid images stand in for and make present real objects—they also have to function on a symbolic level, on which the cinematic image signifies beyond its representative value, mainly by activating metonymically or metaphorically motivated meanings embedded in a conventional vocabulary of connotations: a throne refers to authority, whereas a lioness symbolizes terror. The iconic possibilities of the new medium are thus framed largely in terms of their rhetorical iconicity. In other words, Lindsay’s film hieroglyphics do not differ drastically from the signification proper to language. They work by reimaging and reimagining the tropes by which ornate language has invoked the concreteness of reality throughout the tradition of Western rhetoric. These pictorial symbols, arranged in text-like sequencing, are a kind of script. As a series of film hieroglyphs, they eventually spell out filmic meaning as a sentence would.16 Lindsay envisioned film as a new medium of instruction especially accessible to the lower rungs of society, to, as he writes, the “cave-men and women of our slums” (199). Picture-writing is at once primitive and progressive, given that “American civilization grows more hieroglyphic every day” (21). Even though Lindsay sees the vast potential of film, actually envisioning America’s future as a culture of the image and likening it to such noble arts as painting, sculpture, and architecture, his view still tinges film hieroglyphics with a sense of social, if not intellectual, inferiority, thus foreshadowing the paradoxical iconophobia of much of critical theory. The hieroglyphic images of film are at once inferior, superior, and equivalent to the written word. Lindsay’s dream of this “new universal alphabet” (203) as a “moving picture Esperanto” (205) presupposes the intelligibility of the symbolic value of a given image throughout all cultures. Of course, this might be true for the purely iconic meaning of an image, but certainly not so for its symbolic meaning, which is largely contextual and culturally specific. When Lindsay speaks of the filmic medium as a hieroglyphics, he both endorses and negates the textual character of the ancient Egyptian script. On the one hand, hieroglyphs produce meaning like any other written language, by crafting a sequence of signifiers representative of their signifieds. On the other, their superiority over the alphabetic languages in whose footsteps Lindsay has them follow lies in the potential supersession of signification based on an arbitrary and conventional code. As a universal “language,” everybody has to be able to read them, even more easily and effortlessly than Ezra Pound presumed could be done with the Chinese script. Lindsay’s view on the readability of the hieroglyphs proper is ambivalent. On the one hand, 64

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he describes hieroglyphs as easy to learn, especially for the avid movie-goer who has his gaze honed by pictorial series. On the other, he expresses skepticism as to ever mastering hieroglyphs without a translation at hand (see 20–21). This seeming contradiction reflects the two levels of hieroglyphic writing: the image as graphic form and its phonetic value that communicates each graph’s meaning. In short, hieroglyphs are images that are not supposed to act (merely) as images. The paradoxical desires vested in film hieroglyphics become especially salient in the following passage: “Let us hope that our new picture-alphabets can take on richness and significance, as time goes on, without losing their literal values. They may develop into something all-pervading, yet more highly wrought, than any written speech” (211). The unstable relation between text and image, negotiated through an oscillation between a literal and figurative understanding of the term “hieroglyph,” enables Lindsay to posit cinematic iconography between sophistication and simplicity, between pictorial image and deeper meaning, between diachronic development and timeless essence. Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture, albeit admirable for its early attempt at giving an account of a medium in swaddling clothes, might look like a crude equation of writing and film. However, it is also profoundly revelatory of the use of the sinograph for the renegotiation of mediality at home. Rather than questioning the boundaries between image and text as fixed by Western tradition, Lindsay’s approach to film through hieroglyphs illustrates the transposition of differences in medium onto another script that unites iconic and symbolic principles. In this way, image and text can be recoded as text—this is, as letters of another script—even though the difference between image and (alphabetic) text is never opened up to scrutiny. That the two cannot be mixed is underlined by Lindsay’s resistance to intertitles, claiming that “the ideal film has no words printed on it at all, but is one unbroken sheet of photography” (14).17 Image is both text and its other. In the new medium of film, the age-old, though far-from-stable, boundary between image and text is breached by infusing the iconic principle with the temporality of sequence.18 Both Chinese writing and Egyptian hieroglyphs, often treated as virtually interchangeable, even though the combination of iconic and symbolic principles in them differs, became metaphors for a general ideography. In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound describes the difference between hieroglyphs and sinographs as follows: “The Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, the Chinese ideogram does not try IconographIes

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to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing.”19 This is a fairly accurate account of hieroglyphics, known since Jean-François Champollion’s famous letter to Dacier in 1822, which revealed hieroglyphs to be largely based on phonetic principles, and not on the pictographic code with layers of esoteric meaning with which Western thinkers had been obsessed for centuries.20 And yet, the term “hieroglyph” had already become a general way of designating a sign system that had both iconic and symbolic qualities, the other of alphabetic writing. The contrast between hieroglyphs and sinographs allows Pound to erase the phonetic components of Chinese characters, while underlining their ideographic principles. For a poet who pursued the dynamic image in his work, the sinograph in its guise as a near-natural iconic system was far more compelling than the double-layered hieroglyph. Yet, it was this characteristic that lent itself particularly well to the paradoxical marriage and divorce of image and text in other authors, such as Lindsay or, much later, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno.21 In either case, another writing system became the terrain on which a new medium could be digested on safe grounds: still within the realm of writing, able to invest the cultural other with medial difference in forms that have been crafted over the centuries of (often unequal) contact and intercultural fantasy. Lindsay stood at the inception of a long tradition of “ideographic” film theory that continued well into the twentieth century. In Language and Cinema (Langage et cinéma), Christian Metz systematizes the different ways in which film and written language can and have been linked, mentioning the concept of ideographic film as one of the persistent myths of early film theory, from critics such as Victor Perrot, Georges Damas, or Marcel Martin to Jean-R. Debrix or Abel Gance.22 One of the most famous example of filmic ideography is Sergei Eisenstein’s essay “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” published in 1929, also known under the title “Beyond the Shot,” which first appeared as the afterword to N. Kaufman’s book Japanese Cinema. Throughout the essay, Eisenstein writes, with some knowledge, about the sinograph, in the form of Kanji, the Chinese characters used in Japanese writing, as another kind of filmic “hieroglyph.” Even though he touches in passing upon the pictographic origin of part of the Chinese script, Eisenstein quickly dismisses the pictographic principle as only applicable to a small number of Chinese characters, and as largely having been erased by changes in graphic form and writing material. He concludes his rant against the pictographic myth with an uncanny reference to a sinograph dear to 66

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Fenollosa: “In short, it is already impossible to recognize in the enthusiastically cavorting hieroglyph ma (a horse) the image of the little horse settling pathetically on its hind legs in the calligraphy of Ts’ang Chieh [Cang Jie 倉頡, the mythical inventor of the Chinese script], the horse that is so well known from ancient sculpture.”23 Eisenstein considers the sinograph as a medium shaped by historical and social processes, as well as by the material circumstances of its production. With a view to laying out the principles of cinematic montage, he is less interested in the representative qualities of Chinese characters than in the combinatorial possibilities inherent in Chinese ideographs proper, the so-called 會意 (huiyi, “ideographic compounds”)—hence such famous examples as “ear” (er 耳) + “door” (men 門) = “to listen” (wen 聞); or “knife” (ren 刃) + “heart” (xin 心) = “sorrow” (ren 忍). This, as Eisenstein is quick to assert, is montage, since each sign no longer refers to the separate object it represents, but to a complex concept. The ideographic sign is bigger than the sum of its components. According to this principle, namely, representation for the sake of denotation, Eisenstein’s hieroglyphs form a language that expresses concepts, through, but also beyond, the iconic power of its signifying components. However, with a closer look at the principles of montage, it becomes clear that the Russian director swerves away from text toward image. After a short glimpse at Japanese poetry, especially Haiku and Tanka, Eisenstein draws attention to Japanese visual and performance art, such as Sharaku’s prints, Kabuki Theater, and Japanese painting, in the remainder of his essay. Montage has to be freed from the mimetic principles of spatial coherence and absolute scale. Unlike the Kuleshov principle of montage, which Eisenstein dismisses as the mechanics of a brick-by-brick method, cinematic montage is to resemble Sharaku’s prints in using different scales (that is, shot distances) and Japanese painting in its endorsement of the fragment. Like those he gives of the ideograph, Eisenstein’s examples here—with the exception of Kabuki Theater—tend to underline spatiality. They illustrate collage principles rather than the temporal sequence of montage. The idea of collision that is to organize the montaged fragments is drawn from dialectics rather than grounded in a discussion of Japanese composition techniques. While Eisenstein thus acknowledges a creative principle of sequencing beyond Lindsay’s cinematic writing with hieroglyphic letters, his account of an ideographic method of montage—which he critiqued shortly after—failed to infuse the image itself with movement. Quite unlike Fenollosa, who saw the single IconographIes

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characters themselves alive with movement, Eisenstein’s hieroglyph of the prancing horse as such is frozen in space, in spite of the shared metaphor of the horse in motion. Eisenstein’s cinematic montage is not meant to capture the dynamic movement of nature, but rather to produce a sequence of images that, in the viewer’s mind, reassemble themselves into a composite image expressive of a concept. The cumulative effect of an image glimpsed in a sequence of snippets makes film significant for Eisenstein, where the instant photography and sequence of Chinese poetry makes language expressive of nature for Fenollosa. What aligns Eisenstein and Fenollosa, two thinkers of mediality through the sinograph, in spite of their different purposes, is their method. Both formulate an aesthetic advance within their own cultures—in the fields of poetry and film, respectively—through discussions of another cultural tradition. Fenollosa bridges the gap between Chinese poetry and a future poetic diction in English by drawing on visual media, especially that of the moving picture. Eisenstein selects static, nonsequential media, such as the single ideograph or Japanese painting, as examples for a theory of montage, thus recoding (textual) sequentiality into the complex stability of the icon (as concept). The sinograph enters the intellectual and artistic radars of both thinkers in a different cultural, and consequently medial, context: both come to Chinese writing through their contact with Japanese culture. Fenollosa learned of Chinese poetry mainly from Japanese teachers during his stay in Tokyo, fully espousing the theory of a translatio imperii from China to Japan then in vogue in an atmosphere of Japanese nationalism.24 As for Eisenstein, Hugh Kenner dramatizes his initiation into Chinese writing as follows: “And in 1920, within earshot of guns near Minsk, a Red Army poster artist shared freight-car lodgings with a former instructor of Japanese. The teacher talked; the artist applied himself with passion, and learned 300 ideographs: knifeand-heart, ‘sorrow’; water-and-eye, ‘weep.’ His name was Sergei Mihailovitch Eisenstein.”25 I emphasize these Japanese “detours” not as proof of a further distortion of the image that the “West” makes itself of China, not as one more step removed from the “real” character of Chinese writing. What is at stake for me is precisely the freeing of the Chinese writing system from any burden of cultural essence and purity. Like any language and writing system, Chinese is a medium only conventionally, though not essentially, expressive of cultural and national content. That does not mean that cultural context is unimportant, only that we have to closely scrutinize the shape that the sinograph 68

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takes in any given context. From this perspective, the Japanese connection of Fenollosa and Eisenstein is significant, not only because it adds another layer of transcultural movement of and through the sinograph. More importantly, the hybridity already inherent in Japanese writing itself invites an iconic reading of the sinograph. In a script that mixes phonetically based components—the Japanese kana—with characters taken from Chinese, the latter stand out by contrast, radiating the fascination of another script logic, both alien and proper to Japanese culture. As Yunte Huang points out for the case of Fenollosa: “Japanese nationalist discourse and the concomitant interpretation of the ‘foreign’ origin of Chinese characters have given shape to Fenollosa’s studies. . . . But the methodologies adopted by Japanese scholars of Chinese poetry have often produced . . . a defamiliarized version of Chinese poetry that foregrounds the characters’ iconicity rather than their phoneticity.”26 This lens, in addition to a century-old tradition of Chinese dreams in the West, could have easily been conducive to a renewed interest in the iconic qualities of the sinograph, particularly in the context of the contemporary revolution of visual media. The reflections of another early film critic, Liu Na’ou 劉吶鷗, add an interesting counterpoint to the Western strategy of taming the alterity of a new medium through a comparison with another script. In the early 1930s, Liu, a Taiwan-born Chinese writer of Shanghai Neo-Sensationism and dandy par excellence, published a series of essays on cinema in two prominent contemporary film journals, Film Weekly (Dianying zhoubao 電影周報) and Contemporary Cinema (Xiandai dianying 現代電影). Liu not only was conversant with Chinese film, but drew his examples from Russian, French, German, and American film, as well as theoretical writings. In essays such as “On the Art of Film” (“Yingpian yishu lun” 影片藝術論), “Ecranesque,” or “A Simple Discussion of Filmic Rhythm” (“Dianying jiezou jianlun” 電影節奏簡論), Liu unceasingly advocates for cinema to use its own artistic media and emancipate itself from other arts, such as literature, theater, and visual art. He draws on the example of filmmakers such as Vsevolod Pudovkin and F.  W. Murnau, as well as the proponents of film pur and cinéma absolu, and for him, the foremost characteristic of film is movement. Hence, filmic images without attention to montage remain stagnant, “nothing but a ‘dead’ still image without any life.”27 Without montage, film is a lifeless corpse. For Liu, as he elucidates in “A Simple Discussion of Filmic Rhythm,” unlike the European terms “movie,” “motion-picture,” “kinematograph,” and “cinema,” which underline movement, Chinese terms, such as IconographIes

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電影 (dianying, “electric shadows”) and 影戲 (yingxi, “shadow play”), are misnomers.28 In this vein, he fustigates much of cinema, especially, but not only, Chinese film, for its reliance on long intertitles, as well as its lack of attention to montage. The insistence on movement and the importance of montage bring Liu’s perspectives on film close to some of the views that Fenollosa and Eisenstein express in their respective essays—probably unknown to Liu—through the vehicle of Chinese writing.29 Liu’s critique of intertitles, as a failed emancipation from the medium of text, seems to echo much of early (and not-soearly) film criticism in its call for (silent) cinema to be a purely visual, not literary, medium that can then be coded—via hieroglyphs or sinographs—as another kind of language.30 And yet, not surprisingly, the analogy of film and writing is largely absent from Liu’s reflections on cinema, let alone an equation of film and Chinese writing. The succession of filmic images assumes the role words and letters play in language, without being analogous to them: “Using letters to express meaning is the method of literature, but, from the perspective of the independence of filmic art, it should not be used. In film, it is the reflection of a succession of movements that performs the role of letters (yanzhe wenzi de juese 演著文字的角色). All effort can only be invested here.”31 Liu mentions the special powers of the sinograph in his essay “On the Art of Film,” but only with a view to integrating intertitles into filmic montage: “For instance, one can use trembling letters to express a state of terror, use revolving, crisscrossing letters to represent confused thoughts, or use letters that gradually grow larger to illustrate the distance or closeness of a calling voice, etc. All are very good examples. In this respect, Chinese characters are especially apt, because originally, China’s characters are already pictographic signs (xiangxing de jihao 象形的記號).”32 Only in the context of inevitable on-screen text does Liu advocate for a reimaging of letters. It is not that the sequence of cinematic images is like a language; but the vestiges of written language in film have to be brought closer to the realm of visuality. Only here, aided by visual art (imagined as a kind of moving typography), the sinograph has a slight advantage over other, especially phonetic, scripts. In any case, film remains a nontextual medium for Liu, one in which the sometimes necessary appearance of written language has to be integrated as much as possible in the filmic succession of images: by infusing the letters of intertitles with iconic energy, by adapting the rhythm of intertitles to that of the filmic montage, by using inserts, that is, intradiegetic text, instead of intertitles. 70

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In spite of his insistence on montage, Liu is far from essentializing the visual as the core of film. (In the early 1930s, when he wrote his essays, sound film had already claimed its place on the filmic stage.) Rather, Liu describes film art in synaesthetic terms, underlining rhythm—both in what is captured by the camera on-scene and in montage—as its most important structural principle. Although much of Liu’s discussion of filmic rhythm is dedicated to montage, sound forms part of the cinematic “beat,” even as musical language can be used to describe a film’s visuals, where fades become musical pauses.33 If film can be too textual on the visual side through a surplus of intertitles, this is equally possible on the side of sound: not without a touch of irony, Liu likens the American “all talkie” to a typewriter.34 For Liu, film ideally partakes of different media in that it harmonizes the aural and the visual, temporality and spatiality, but reduces, as far as possible, the realm of linguistic signification, especially writing. All three early film critics discussed here, Lindsay, Eisenstein, and Liu Na’ou, coincide in the use of metaphors that cross media to describe the new art of cinema. However, differences in cultural contexts account for their choice of medium. Lindsay privileges writing, in the form of (his own idiosyncratic view of) hieroglyphs, Eisenstein draws on collage, embodied in Chinese ideographs, but also in Japanese visual arts, for his account of montage, Liu Na’ou finds his analogy in a synaesthetic vision of rhythm. Of the three, only Liu’s metaphor lacks cultural specificity.35 Lindsay and Eisenstein, on the other hand, reference specific cultural traditions—such as Chinese writing and Egyptian hieroglyphs—in order to erase them subsequently; after all, the language of cinema is international. These examples of what Christopher Bush aptly calls ideographic modernism are not only important as illustrations of Western sinographic strategies at a given moment in history, namely, during the first decades of the twentieth century.36 They also form a crucial moment in a genealogy that allows us to understand the media politics of much of contemporary Western theory. The Western “importation” of the sinograph, as well as of the hieroglyph, into the field of visual media lets us appreciate the oft-invoked linguistic turn in theory and what W. J. T. Mitchell famously terms the pictorial turn of the twentieth century not as opposites, but as equal partners in a symbiotic relationship.37 The theoretical turn to the image in the wake of the invention of moving pictures does not reiconize the world, but enables a clearer, as well as more flexible, definition of writing. The use of the other script, one that, directly or by implication, bridges the gap between image and writing IconographIes

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(uneasily, but conveniently so), often becomes less visible in later theoretical texts, since it has turned into conventionalized knowledge, taken for granted rather than in need of further explanation. We can roughly distinguish two traditions, both in film theory and in theoretical texts.38 One is a tendency of generalized textuality, indebted above all to Jacques Derrida’s formulation of a generalized category of writing as écriture; the other, influenced by and present in much of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, introduces a division of text and image. Both tendencies embody opposite yet ultimately complementary movements with, through, and against the image. The Derridean definition of écriture in its broad sense as encompassing all types of mediated expression recodes images, as well as moving pictures, as just another type of text; as Mitchell quips: “Derrida’s answer to the question, ‘What is an image?’ would undoubtedly be: ‘Nothing but another kind of writing.’ ”39 In this context, texts on film theory, such as David Wills and Peter Brunette’s Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory or Marie-Claire RoparsWuilleumier’s The Divided Text: Essay on Filmic Writing (Le texte divisé: Essai sur l’écriture filmique), can treat the moving picture as a particular case of textuality, and thus decodable as writing. Here, writing is elevated to the rank of a master medium. But even as all articulations are included within, or rather subsumed under this category, the overriding metaphor is still that of written signifiers. If Western thought had seen the necessity of inventing the image and the text as separate categories at one point, under the logic of generalized textuality, one of the categories, namely, writing, is elevated to a higher level that subsumes and defines both. At the same time, however, writing, as writing proper, also remains embodied as one of the subcategories, and thus stands in contrast to other media, such as the image. The media specificity of writing proper remains operative, at least as a metaphor, even on the generalized level of écriture. In other words, writing both exceeds and retains its specificity. This allows for a complex management of mediality: writing can be (like any) other media, or function as its opposite.40 The second tradition sports another management of writing and image. Both categories not only inhabit different media realms; they also carry radically different values. Be it in the context of Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry, or in that of Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament, much of critical theory tints the realm of the image in dark colors, as obeying a disavowed logic in which image and text are linked. In her essay “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing,” Miriam Hansen elucidates the complexity of the shifts between image and writing in Adorno’s work.41 Mass media, designated 72

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as a hieroglyphics in the essay “Prologue on Television” (“Prolog zum Fernsehen”), published in 1953, and the addendum to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung), “The Schema of Mass Culture” (“Das Schema der Massenkultur”), keep the masses captives in the splendor of surfaces, due to their iconic nature, the pretense of representing things as they are. Behind the surfaces, however, images, as hieroglyphic writing, actually act as scripts of an ideological apparatus that enjoins the viewers to read, think, and perform (themselves) accordingly. Paradoxically, Adorno thus faults iconic mediality, likened to the other script of the hieroglyph, both for its superficial image and for its hidden script character. In analogy to the Marxist logic of unveiling in which the intellectual’s gaze pierces the surface to gain insight into the deep structure of capitalist ideology, only the practitioner of critical theory can escape the lure of the visual in order to read and decipher its true, hidden meaning. Likewise, the good hieroglyphs of true (read: elite) artistic expression invite a critical mode of reading as an activity of decoding and deciphering. In complex ways, then, the image also shows facets of textuality. Beyond its allure as opium for the masses, it is also food for thought and reading. As the other of elite culture that is equated with text, mass culture, as image, is also a type of writing, but only for the critic’s scrutinizing gaze.42 The equation of image and other script (the hieroglyph) allows for the paradoxical doubling of writing: “There are actually, at least, two kinds of writing, and two kinds of reading involved in Adorno’s notion of mass-cultural hieroglyphics. Indeed, his argument hinges upon the distinction between a literal and a figurative, between a complicit and a critical form of reading.”43 Ultimately, this doubling voids— logically but not operatively—the distinction between different media and the adjudication of political potential related to it. A critical awareness of ideological cooptation no longer attaches to any particular medium or expression, but acquires a quasi a priori status: a critical perspective produces a critical reading; an uncritical stance will remain mired in the opiatic power of mass media. Critical theory shares the selective conflation of image and writing with Derridean deconstruction, with a different logic: the distinction between writing and image is introduced into the category of the image, where some images, or ways of viewing the image, are more (or less) image than others.44 Both strategies, however, put the management of the boundaries between media to good use, by drawing distinctions, redoubling categories, and reintroducing differences within one side. This enables theoretical reflections to IconographIes

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negotiate between representation and signification, as image and text, but also to invest different expressions with aesthetic as well as political value while dismissing others. As a set of discursive strategies that emerges with the challenge of new media, this is merely a chapter in the history of media politics, one battle in the script wars, intercultural frictions, and crosspollinations traced by mediality. The sinograph (and its hieroglyphic alter ego), with its long (Western) history of iconic readings, serves extremely well as a metaphor that negotiates between image and text. Western iconographies in the realm of (media) theory are less interested in fixing the sinograph as an iconic essence than in the possibility of keeping it suspended between the iconic and the textual. The sinograph, in its gliding across media, thus becomes an instrument for renegotiating the boundaries of text and image, for bridging, as well as conserving, the difference between both.

on (not) Writing chinese Mediated through Ezra Pound’s critical and poetic practice, Ernest Fenollosa’s short text “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry” left its stamp on much of Western poetry. But what does it imply to hail the Chinese written character as the perfect medium for poetry for someone who, like Ernest Fenollosa and many other European, American, and Latin American poets inspired by his essay, comes from another linguistic tradition? Is a nonChinese poet’s claim to harness the graphic and expressive power of the sinograph always only a metaphor? For all the praise of Chinese writing, already disconnected, for the most part, from an age-old tradition of Chinese poetry, Western writers, while reclaiming the ideographic method for their own creative process, hardly ever set out to craft poetry with sinographic material. Modernism’s fixation on the ideograph rarely found sinographic expressions—with few exceptions, such as Ezra Pound’s inclusions of isolated sinographs in the Chinainspired parts of his Cantos (LII–LXI), usually carefully translated (and not, as we might expect from some of his reflections on Chinese writing, graphically self-explanatory), domesticated ruptures in his alphabetic text;45 Victor Segalen’s collection Stèles (1914) in which poems in French emerge from the inspiration of Chinese stele inscriptions in content and form;46 and one of the calligrams of Li-Po and Other Poems (Li-Po y otros poemas), published in 1920, by the Mexican poet José Juan Tablada, which uses a variant of the 74

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character “壽” for longevity as the frame for a poetic text in Spanish.47 The poetry resulting from the appeal of Chinese writing by poets creating in European languages and their (mostly) alphabetic scripts might well be ideographic—depending on what the term was intended to express at any given moment—but they are rarely written in Chinese. Indeed, “Chinese writing” viewed through the lens of a phonetic script tradition often signifies merely as a figurative specter. In the early 1950s, Pound’s ideographic method was taken up by the Brazilian Noigandres group, formed originally by the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari, which was to become one of the seeds of the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s and 1960s.48 For the members of Noigandres, as for other poets with similar agendas, such as Eugen Gomringer in Germany or Pierre Garnier in France, concrete poetry meant not only a formal response to the crisis of verse, but also the answer to new media constellations and changing modes of communication. As Augusto de Campos defined it in 1956, concrete poetry meant media synergy, “an organoform—in which traditional notions such as beginning-middleend, syllogism, and verse tend to disappear and to be overcome by a poeticgestaltic, poetic-musical, poetic-ideographic organization of structure.”49 Most practitioners of concrete poetry as it emerged independently in different parts of the globe concurred in emphasizing the graphic and sonic power of language, and thus its materiality, over and above signification, bringing poetry into close contact with design, architecture, and music. Most concrete poets equally espoused a creative genealogy that comprised Pound, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Cummings, and Joyce.50 And, for many concretists, Chinese characters became, once again, a cipher of poetic and medial newness. In his treatise-cum-anthology of concrete poetry, Once Again, published in 1968, the French poet Jean-François Bory hails the sinograph, in the form of the zen-inspired calligraphy of the Japanese philosopher Hakuin (1685– 1768), as the graphic antidote to a Judeo-Christian tradition fixated on meaning, not materiality. In contrast, concrete poetry is “real writing, only writing, writing itself,” in syntony with the pictorial force of Chinese writing:51 “In a form of writing that comes out of and is based on pictograms, whence → picture, visuality, and which takes its visual meaning in the concept of our time, it seems most natural that the great tradition of a mind formed by centuries of pictogram writing can transform itself more readily than another into what is called ‘visual poetry,’ having the picture as its very structure.”52 While this passage, with its pictographic myth and its link between Chinese IconographIes

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writing and contemporary visual media, seems no more than a weak echo of what Fenollosa had theorized several decades earlier in more complex terms, Bory also sought to give concrete poetic and visual form to his ideographic convictions, for instance, in the poem “Woman” (“Femme”) of 1970. The French title not only constitutes the only alphabetic text, but also translates the Chinese character “女” (nü), whose shape both frames and constitutes Bory’s poem. Instead of being rendered in black strokes, the space of and between the sinograph “女” pretends to become a window onto reality, as the abstract shape of the written sign is filled with the photo of a woman’s breasts. Through a tension between two “visual” technologies, the Chinese pictograph and the medium of photography, the poem both toys with and complicates a mimetic imaginary. “Woman” pretends to place the “real” object there where the written sign has reduced all concreteness to a few abstract lines. However, the object in question is not a woman; it is yet another representation, not of a woman, but of female breasts as a kind of metonymic cut-out picture. At first sight, the poem might seem to invite us to equate the two iconic representations of the referent “woman.” Yet, the sinograph is not like a photograph of reality; rather, the poem needs the picture of female breasts, as well as the French title, for its visual and signifying force. “Woman” accrues concreteness only because it thrives on different media: the cultural alterity of Chinese writing, the technology of photography, and the alphabetic script of its title. Bory, like other proponents of concrete poetry, found a contemporary model of visual poetry with sinographic material in the work of the Japanese concretist Seiichi Niikuni. His poetry is typically wrought with a small number of sinographs, or rather, Kanji, the sinitic signs within the hybrid Japanese script, for instance, in his poem “River or Sandbank” (kawa/sasu 川／州) of 1966, which forms a square with repetitions of these two characters, distributed on both sides of a diagonal divide. “River or Sandbank,” however, does not function only thanks to the pictorial power of Chinese characters. It uses characters as building blocks of a picture and reflects almost analytically on the minute difference between the two characters used: the addition or absence of three tiny drop-shaped strokes. In contrast to alphabetic scripts, sinographic material, in the form of Kanji, is part and parcel of the Japanese writing system. They only have to be separated from the syllabo-phonetic signs that usually tail them and rearranged graphically to downplay the linear flow of textual discourse and underline the characters’ formal beauty. And yet, as in Bory’s “Woman,” the use of a sinograph on its own does not 76

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a concrete poem make. Instead, only the intervention of other strategies or media, such as typography, repetition, spatial arrangement, or, in Bory’s case, photography, forces a “reader” to also see a poem as a concrete material force, not only as a carrier of meaning. The role of Chinese characters in non-Chinese concrete poetry does not confirm but rather questions the validity of ideographic fixations. The Brazilian Noigandres group, which was most vocal in advocating an ideographic strategy for their poetic creation, also reflected most deeply on the concomitant contradictory logic of translating between two scripts and poetic traditions. The terms “ideogram” or “ideographic” recur obsessively throughout Noigandres’s manifestos, such as Augusto de Campos’s “Poem, Ideogram” (“Poema, ideograma”) of 1955, Haroldo de Campos’s “Aspects of Concrete Poetry” (“Aspectos da poesia concreta”) of 1957, or his introductory article “Ideogram, Anagram, Diagram: Reading Fenollosa” (“Ideograma, anagrama, diagrama: Una leitura de Fenollosa”), which spearheaded the edited volume on ideographic writing Ideogram: Logic, Poetry, Language (Ideograma: Lógica, poesia, linguagem) of 1977, including translations of Fenollosa’s and Eisenstein’s famous essays on the sinograph. Viewing space as a force, one that both gives form and is to be shaped, and reading the sign as a node of relations between different expressions, between meaning and material, the Noigandres poets attempted to push the metaphoric ideography of Pound’s imagism into concrete graphic shape by envisioning the poem as a visible (not merely mental) ideogram. If, as Gonzalo Aguilar underlines, “the ideogram is the way toward the materiality of the sign and of the space in which these signs relate to each other,” the sinograph is both the perfect model of and an impossible presence for concrete ideography.53 If, for the Brazilian concretists, the poem as such should take the form of an ideogram, a nonlinear graphic constellation that orients writing toward visuality, the term itself and its ubiquitous illustration by means of the Chinese script cause the “ideogram” to be translated from concrete practice back into metaphor. For Noigandres, the term “ideogram” equally designated Chinese poetry, Pound’s or Mallarmé’s poetics, Noigandres’s own concrete poetry, and visual culture and graphic spacing in general, and, more specifically, it referred to the continuity of a visual or phonetic motif throughout a poem. Even though the sinograph holds out the possibility of a concrete graphic practice, in the guise of the ideograph, it converts Chinese writing into a specter, a specter of concreteness. For Noigandres’s Brazilian Portuguese to appropriate the graphic IconographIes

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and material power ascribed to the sinograph, it has to write its alphabetic script as if it were ideographic, without ever really writing Chinese, of course. If the concrete poem itself functions as an ideogram, the presence of sinographic material, where it enters the poetic stage, had to remain subdued. It is almost in hiding, and only the initiate detect it, for instance, in the poem “Zen” (1966) by the Brazilian concretist Pedro Xisto, in which the elimination of space between the letters “Z,” “E,” and “N,” placed in a rectangular frame, could be read as the sinograph “日” (ri, “sun” or “day”), flanked by two diagonal lines.54 In “Zen,” the sinograph “日” is an uncanny presence, one that gives graphic shape to and disavows the ideographic fixation of concrete poetry. Everything hinges upon writing “Chinese” without writing in Chinese. Even there, where Chinese characters are present, rather than merely constituting the abstracted shorthand for a process mostly pertaining to the alphabetic script, they are merely shapes into which the letters of the alphabet can conveniently morph, taking their place, as they take their shapes. Or, more radically put, “E” and “N” had the potential to form “日” all along. Because of the impossible bifurcation of the ideographic method into graphic reality on the one hand and programmatic metaphor on the other, the sinograph reemerges as necessary yet impossible presence. Instead of merely succumbing to a metaphorical use of the ideograph, in “Ideogram, Anagram, Diagram,” Haroldo de Campos reflects on the translation of the ideogram from a culturally and linguistically specific writing system, such as the sinograph, into a generally valid poetic practice. His extended reflection on Fenollosa’s famous essay marks the tacit acknowledgment of the precariousness of the ideographic fantasy by dubbing it the “Chinesification of poetry” (“ ‘chinesização’ da poesia”).55 In spite of the importance of the sinograph for a modern poetic aesthetic, this cannot simply be the desire to substitute one linguistic order with another. By drawing on Fenollosa’s ideographic method and Ferdinand de Saussure’s reflections on phonetic anagrams in the tradition of Indo-European poetry, de Campos places both creative practices of selecting recurring elements, either graphic or phonetic, under the sign of the poetic function of language formulated by Roman Jakobson in his essay “Poetics and Linguistics.”56 He follows up on this theory by juxtaposing classical Chinese poems with Brazilian ones, suggesting the possibility of a phonetic “translation” of the ideographic recurrence, a replacement of recurring (sino)graphic elements with repetitions of sound in their Brazilian (and alphabetic) translation.

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This leads de Campos to formulate the pressure of concrete creation as a process of mutual change rather than the (pragmatically impossible) replacement of the alphabet by a logographic script, such as the sinograph. According to de Campos, in order to become concrete, the alphabetic script had to strive for iconicity, whereas the pictorially empowered sinograph needed to tend toward digitality and modularity: Whereas “the alphabetic digit was systematically ‘iconized’ (treated as if it was an icon), individually or as a block, through the exploration of gestaltic factors of visual proximity or resemblance that reconverted it thus into an ad hoc pictogram,” nonalphabetic concrete poetry, for instance, that of Japanese poet Seiichi Niikuni, reverses the process by “treating the typographed ideograms as ‘digits’ to be re-iconized.”57 Haroldo de Campos’s insistence on different concrete trajectories for alphabetic and sinographic scripts does not simply reintroduce an unbridgeable gap of alterity between two sign systems, but rather points to an interesting dilemma of the ideographic metaphor. In order to be concrete, in order to communicate its own structure and exhibit its materiality, a poem has to be “an intersemiotic and intermedia text, i.e., a text that draws on two or more sign systems and/or media in such a way that the visual and/or musical, verbal, kinetic, or performance aspects of its signs are inseparable.”58 In other words, verbal material becomes concrete only in translation, only once it has been isolated from its normal texts or contexts, once its signifying function has been subordinated to its graphic, typographic, distributional, phonetic, or rhythmic expressivity. The sinographic material, as well as the ideographic metaphor of concrete poetry, lends intermediality to a text, imbues it with a welcome otherness. However, the very spectral presence of the sinograph also points to the impossibility of an alphabetic poetic practice in “Chinese”: the Chinese character becomes a geometrical form, disconnected from its linguistic context, as well as, potentially, unreadable. The problem here is not the unwillingness or inability of Western writers to learn to write in Chinese per se. On the contrary, though essentialized as the avatar of concretion, Chinese characters only really become concrete through the lens and in the texts of Western poets, that is, taken out of their cultural, textual conventions. In other words, poetic writing in Chinese is hardly ever ideographic or concrete. The problem lies in attributing concreteness to one specific sign system rather than to the multiple medial possibilities inherent in any script.

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The examples of concrete poetic practice and theory with sinographic material, though by poets who do not write Chinese, foreground the fact that the problem with Western ideographies is not merely, not even primarily, that the Chinese script is used as a cipher, and not in its own right. The sinograph was an important tenet of international concrete poetry, not so much because of its mantra-like invocation of a graphic concreteness, of which, in the end, little more remained than the name “ideogram.” Instead, both the manifestos and the poems already operate with a paradox born from the play with scriptural alterity. Fenollosa’s hailing of the Chinese script—but not of the Chinese language—as the perfect medium for poetry involved a deepseated contradiction that would dominate Western poetry’s celebration of the ideograph. The expressive force of the sinograph interested poets and critics only insofar as it could be harnessed to poetic practices in Western languages and scripts. On the one hand, the absolute alterity of the Chinese script was necessary to revitalize Occidental poetry and dare it to espouse a different signifying logic. On the other, this very otherness had to penetrate the alphabetic script, or had to be discovered as one of its suppressed powers. In order to function as a cipher for graphic and medial difference, the sinograph—both as material presence and as ideographic metaphor—has to be eternally suspended in translation: between image and text, a reference to a specific cultural tradition and a symbol of a generally, transculturally intelligible graphic expressivity. The preoccupation with sinographic writing hit a nerve not only for a poetic practice inspired by and across different media, but also for the transcultural, international ideal of the concrete poetry movement. On the one hand, the proponents of concrete poetry prided themselves on transgressing the limits drawn for poetic expression in the West. This meant, above all, activating the graphic, material expressivity of language beyond linguistic signification. The inspiration for different practices of concrete poetry, especially those that question the boundaries between text and image or pattern, between language and sound, came from the realm of cultural difference. However, the ultimate aim of the transculturality dreamed of by poets and critics such as Pierre Garnier and Seiichi Niikuni was one that transcended linguistic specificity. Paradoxically, even though the difference in scripts and linguistic traditions affirms the multimedial potential of writing for concrete poets, in the end, mediality trumps and erases linguistic specificity: the ultimate ideal, if not the reality of most concrete poems, is to use language so that it becomes expressive outside of and beyond language. 80

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In Garnier and Niikuni’s “Third Spatialist Manifesto: For a Supranational Poetry” (“3ème manifeste du spatialisme: pour une poésie supranationale”) of 1966, included at the end of Franco-Japanese Poems (Poèmes Franco-Japonais), concrete poetry is imagined as translingual: “Spatialism aims for the passage from national languages to one supranational language and for works that are no longer translatable, but transmissible in an ever wider linguistic field.” This implies the pursuit of “a linguistic aesthetics and a language that all humanity has in common.”59 The role of the poet, then, is to “deprive these languages of a sentimental or historical, expressionist or psychic content.”60 Here, the sinograph—taken out of its Chinese- or Japanese-language context—is no longer itself the supplemental embodiment of another medium, more visual, more graphic, more iconic than “normal” (read: alphabetic) writing. Instead, any kind of script ceases to exist in its original cultural contexts and is elevated not only to a supranational level, but also to a supralinguistic and supracultural plane. Even though such a view eschews exoticism or essentialism, it propagates a strangely empty role for writing and language in general. Poetry is maybe freed from what the spatialists see as the trammels of specific cultures and languages; but isn’t this very supranational dream and the desire of superseding linguistic boundaries and the age-old invocation of the obstacle of translation also a very culturally specific, namely, Western, dream? Indeed, the poetic practice illustrative of Garnier and Niikuni’s spatialist ideals, their collaboration FrancoJapanese Poems, hardly deserves the reference to two linguistic and cultural traditions in its title. In spite of the vocabulary table of Japanese words added at the beginning of the work, the specific meaning of French and Japanese, or the graphic potentials of an alphabetic and the mixed script of Japanese, has been dispensed with. Of course, in one poem, the meaning of the Japanese Kanji used side by side with small alphabetic letters echoes the shape of the whole poem, the cherry blossom (sakura 桜). And yet, only the graphic density and number of strokes distinguishes “桜” from “c” and “o,” since their function is exactly the same, that of graphic “fillers,” dots of ink. Concrete poetry was not only acutely aware of the importance of new medialities in order to shape a transcultural medium for poetry. It was also a practice that emerged simultaneously in different cultural contexts and converged in collaborations, exhibitions, congresses, and anthologies, showcasing an unprecedented intercultural breadth. Strangely enough, though, neither Bory nor the Noigandres poets ever referred much to Chinese writing or Chinese poetry, except for some examples drawn from classical IconographIes

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Chinese poetry. All other references remain indirect, via Pound and Fenollosa, or are to the sinograph within a Japanese-language context. While Japanese poets such as Seiichi Niikuni and Kitasono Katue played an important role in the intercultural thrust of concrete poetry, none of the major anthologies included even a single Chinese author or poem. Of course, in the 1960s and 1970s, when concrete poetry was at its apogee, the Cultural Revolution on the Chinese mainland created an atmosphere hostile to experimental language use, making language into an instrument, rather than drawing attention to its own materiality and expressivity. In this context, Eugene Eoyang sees the exclusion of Chinese poets from the movement of concrete poetry as both ironic and unavoidable, leading finally to a logic in which Western poets are envisioned as saving traditional Chinese poetry: Yet the unavoidable exclusion of Chinese poets for the inevitable political reasons strikes me as peculiarly ironic, since Chinese is, of all modern languages, the most “concrete.” What the contemporary “Concrete” poet strives to accomplish is precisely what many traditional poets have accomplished naturally for centuries. . . . At a time when the Chinese language is being groomed by the Communists to serve functional ends in either science (technical jargon) or politics (propaganda), it may be Western Concrete poets who will try to preserve traditional Chinese, for the sake of a universal “concrete poetry.”61

However, the “natural” exclusion of Chinese poetry and the turn of poets and critics such as Eugene Eoyang toward classical Chinese literature testifies to yet another exclusion, that of another modern Chinese culture: what was anathema in the People’s Republic of China was a thriving poetic practice in Taiwan. The flowering of so-called Taiwan Modernism in poetry from the 1950s onward, followed slightly later by similar experiments in narrative, triggered a strong interest in experimental and visual poetry, crystallizing in poetry journals such as Modernist Poetry (Xiandai shi 現代詩), Straw Hat (Li 笠), and The Epoch Poetry Quarterly (Chuang shiji shi she 創世紀詩社). Concrete poems constituted only a fraction of the poetic practice and, for the most part, failed to accrue the full cultural capital of modernist poetry, although many famous Taiwanese poets from the 1950s to today experimented at one point or another with components that can be described as concrete.62 Additionally, while strongly worded manifestos à la Haroldo de 82

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Campos or Eugen Gomringer were not in vogue, many poets such as Zhan Bing 詹冰, Lin Hengtai 林亨泰, Bai Qiu 白萩, and Do She-sun 杜十三 wrote programmatic essays on the practice of visual poetry, often using disparate terms, the most common term being tuxiang shi 圖像詩, roughly translatable as “image poem” or “pattern poem.”63 In other words, while poets were laboring to produce concrete poetry internationally, in many cases claiming inspiration from Chinese writing, at least indirectly, through the ideographic method of Fenollosa and Pound, Taiwanese poets were actually writing concrete poetry in Chinese without acknowledgment from the so-called international concrete poetry movement. With slight variations, and in tune with the emulative thrust of Taiwan modernism, Taiwanese “concretists” list the same sources invoked time and again by the international concrete poetry movement: Apollinaire and Mallarmé, Cummings and Pound. Some Chinese critics also cite older strains of visual poetry in the West, such as the poetry of George Herbert or the pattern poems of Greek and Roman antiquity, but references to an extant, if marginal, Chinese tradition, such as a Chinese type of pattern poetry, the huiwen 回文 (or 迴紋), are the exception rather than the rule, and are often dismissed as mere word play rather than literature.64 Does this emphasis on Western models in spite of the existence of a long (if marginal) Chinese tradition of “concrete” poetry mean that poetry in Chinese can only realize its (concrete) potential by indirection—through the fantasmatic sinographies of the Western other? If this is the case, Taiwanese poets and critics seemed unaware of this ironic twist to intercultural literary influence. Instead, Taiwanese artists and intellectuals were quick in claiming for their own medium of creation—the sinograph—graphic and expressive powers akin to those that Ernest Fenollosa had fantasized about. Zhan Bing, credited with producing the first Taiwanese concrete poem in 1943, self-confidently declares the superiority of the sinograph for this kind of poetic production in his essay “The Image Poem and I” (“Tuxiang shi yu wo” 圖像詩與我), published in 1978: “The script of my country is a kind of pictograph (xiangxing wenzi 象形文字). It is the most adequate material for image poetry (tuxiang shi 圖像詩). This is the reason why the poets of my country, in comparison to those from other countries, are so fortunate and have an advantage when it comes to writing image poetry. I think that the future of Chinese image poetry is boundless.”65 In even less uncertain terms, the Taiwanese poetry scholar Ding Xuhui 丁旭輝 expends several pages on an encomium for the advantages of the IconographIes

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Chinese script for concrete poetry, employing organic metaphors of kinship, blood, and genes. In spite of changes in the form of the Chinese script, Ding Xuhui claims, the sinograph has retained its pictorial power (tuxiangxing 圖像性) all along. . . . The early sinographs that mimicked reality became the foundation of the Chinese script, constituting the basic “scriptural elements” (zi su 字素) from which other sinographs were built afterward. Therefore, even though new sinographs were created incessantly and those were unlike earlier sinographs in that they no longer directly mimicked the shape of real objects, pictorial power flowed all along in the blood of each sinograph, since they used the “scriptural elements” as basic building blocks. One could say that the Chinese script is a kind of writing deeply imbued with a “pictorial gene” (tuxiang jiyin 圖像基因).66

For Ding, apart from its “mimetic gene,” Chinese writing is also endowed with a special relation between space and letters, a feature Ding designates as architectural characteristics (jianzhu texing 建築特性), imagining the sinographs in their imaginary square space as so many bricks for a poetic edifice.67 Ding professes pity for the desperate efforts of Western poets to craft concrete poems from the less suitable material of alphabetic letters. Little wonder, then, that the likes of Pound and Fenollosa had to have recourse to sinographic misreadings in order to bolster Western poetic practice. In this context, Ding acknowledges the decisive influence of Western models for concrete Taiwanese poetry—though the international concrete poetry movement is not explicitly mentioned, in spite of Ding’s use of the translated term “concrete poetry” (juxiang shi 具象詩). However, equipped with a superior medium such as the sinograph, Taiwanese poets quickly left their Western inspirations behind and established—according to Ding’s emancipation narrative—an autochthonous tradition. Does this mean that the graphic ideals pursued by international concrete poetry were actually being achieved in Taiwanese modernist poetry at the same time? Is this sinographic poetry the true crown of concrete poetry— unbeknown to all of its self-stylized international practitioners? The claim of a “concrete” advantage for poems written in Chinese—one paradoxically suggested by the ideographic fascination of Western modernists and concretists, though probably not to the extent they claimed—led to an emphasis of sinographic purity at the hands of critics. Some of them even shunned 84

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the introduction of graphic elements extraneous to the Chinese script. From such a perspective, a poem such as Lin Hengtai’s “Car Accident” (“Che huo” 車禍) with its mixture of sinographs, alphabetic letters, and typographical symbols will always compare unfavorably with the allegedly pristine sinography of Wang Runhua’s 王潤華 poems-cum-commentary on individual Chinese characters in their seal-script form in “Resemblance/Dissemblance” (“Xiang wai xiang” 象外象), even though these are mainly poetic descriptions of, rather than graphic experiments with, sinographic material.68 This purism, however, is contradictory on multiple counts. The claim of a “Chinese” concrete purity owes its existence to Western dreams of poetic concretion embodied in the sinograph, not to any Chinese tradition. The very lens through which the sinograph becomes ideal concrete material is that of another cultural tradition. On more conceptual grounds, such a perspective tries to exclude the heterogeneity of different sets of symbols or script elements while at the same time overemphasizing the permeability between the symbolic and the iconic with regard to the Chinese script. Indeed, it is the creative “impurity” at the heart of the sinograph itself, both in terms of form and with regard to semiotic difference (since the link between referent, signified, and signifier can be motivated pictographically, ideographically as a composite, symbolically, or through sound), that might make of Chinese writing a suggestive medium for concrete experiments. After all, in spite of all the proclaimed pictorial powers of the sinograph, Chinese poetry is rarely concrete. Or, even though Chinese characters might lend themselves well to concrete experiments, their graphic force has to be activated, traduced away from the role of signifiers of meaning. Indeed, the very recognition of the graphic, semiotic, and medial wealth of the sinograph—what enables it to become “concrete” material for poetry— hinges at least partly on intercultural pressures. One of the earliest “Chinese” experiments with typographical concreteness is the poem “The Second Obituary for the World” (“Di er hui shijie fuwen” 第二回世界訃聞), written in 1937 by the Cantonese poet Ou Wai’ou 鷗外鷗 who grew up in Hong Kong. Not yet a fully fledged concrete poem, the text, in reaction to news heralding the threat of a new world war, figures the approaching danger of war through the typographical manipulation of the English word “WAR,” reminiscent of newspaper headlines, within its Chinese text.69 In subsequent poems, Ou Wai’ou similarly manipulates the size of Chinese characters. And yet, his first typographic experiment thrived on the juxtaposition of different scripts as a reaction to an impending intercultural conflict in the concrete medium of the newspaper. IconographIes

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Similarly, one of the earliest modern concrete poems “in Chinese,” Zhan Bing’s “Affair” of 1943, illustrates the heterogeneous impulse for the creation of concrete poetry, even though it is variously praised for its sinographic simplicity. The poem consists entirely of differently spaced pairings of characters, man (nan 男) and woman (nü 女), preceded by Arabic numerals, as a series of constellations that can be read in sexually explicit terms or in a more toned-down variant as a metaphorical way of expressing the enchantments and disenchantments between the two sexes.70 Whereas the use of Arabic numerals in order to distinguish between the different constellations has elicited little comment—after all, this other script tradition is already an integral part of the Chinese script, side by side with Chinese numerals—some critics have commented negatively on Zhan Bing’s use of the English word “Affair” as his title. Zhan Bing’s own answer to this critique in his essay “The Image Poem and I,” published in 1978, reveals much of the intercultural and multimedial logic of concrete poetry: One day in Tokyo, Japan, I was chatting with some painters and musicians I knew. I voiced my envy thus: “Your works can be understood everywhere. But this is not the case with poems and novels since they are written with letters.” At that time I associated this idea with thinking about the means by which somebody who did not understand Chinese could write modern Chinese poetry. With these expectations in mind, I wrote two poems, “Affair” and “Self Portrait” (zi hua xiang 自畫像). I could not use verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and so on, so I only used nouns. With respect to the title of “Affair” I have the following to say: At that time I simply did not know how to write in Chinese, so how would I have been able to choose an adequate Chinese title? I really was unable to write [it in Chinese], for that reason I chose to use a foreign language.71

Here, the desire to write poetry that transcends any one linguistic tradition—as music and painting do—comes out of a concrete situation of linguistic colonialism, the propagation of Japanese during Taiwan’s colonial period. It is not the use of the sinographs for man and woman that marks “Affair” as Chinese—since they coincide with the Japanese Kanji derived from the Chinese script. Paradoxically, the use of an English title, and the eschewal of a Japanese one, marks the poem as Chinese, not Japanese, since at that moment Zhan Bing was not capable of choosing a

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Chinese title. Paradoxically, Zhan Bing, who had written Japanese poetry before, thus created his first work of Chinese concretism by not writing (only) Chinese. Even there where concrete poems are entirely wrought with sinographic material, however, “concretion” comes from the activation of divergent semiotic and medial facets, such as in the widely anthologized “Water Buffalo Image” (“Shui niu tu” 水牛圖) of 1986 by Zhan Bing. In contradistinction to many modernist and contemporary Taiwanese poems that creatively use spacing only in parts of a poem, “Water Buffalo Image” flaunts its concreteness at first glance. The lines of the poetic text are arranged so as to shape the slightly abstracted but quite recognizable shape of its object, the water buffalo.72 Not unlike Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, in which letters are the building blocks of graphic shapes (though they also deliver a coherently readable poetic text), “Water Buffalo Image” reinforces its content through iconic mimesis.

等 待 等 待 再 等 待 ！

只永時水傾以眼水一角不水夏等同擺 角 角 遠間牛聽複球牛直質懂牛天波心動 不與忘歌胃看以吹的阿浸的長圓黑 黑 來自卻聲反上沈過小基在太的的字 的已炎蟬芻天在思括米水陽橫波型 東而熱聲寂空淚想號得中樹波紋的 西默與以寞白中的之原但葉上就臉 然 及 雲的風間理 在 繼 等 無 跳 續 待 聲 扭 地 也 之 扭 擴 許 聲 舞 開

[Horn Black Horn Its face the swaying shape of the sinograph “black” Concentric ripples continue to expand On the horizontal waves of the same length Under the summer sun tree leaves are dancing The water buffalo is submerged in water but

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Does not understand Archimedes’s principle Between the brackets of his horns All along the wind of thought was blowing The water buffalo submerged in tears His eyeballs look at the white clouds in the sky above Chewing the cud of loneliness Listening to singing the crickets’ chirping or even to soundless sound The water buffalo forgets the sweltering heat and Time and himself and silently waits maybe For something that will never come Only Waiting waiting and waiting!]

The overall procedure of the poem is one for which any kind of script could have been used, with a slightly different visual effect due to the graphic and distributional difference between Chinese characters and words formed from alphabetic or phonetic letters. However, as several Taiwanese critics highlight, Zhan Bing also has recourse to graphic sleights of hand that depend entirely on the use of the sinograph. The beginning of the poem, that is, the water buffalo’s head, relies for its mimetic effect on the shape of the two sinographs used. The appropriately doubled character “角” (jiao) for “horn,” a sinograph of pictographic origin, underlines the poem’s play with iconicity. However, rather than indulging in the pictographic myth, Zhan Bing’s poem reverses the reading logic of graphic mimesis: It is not the use of “角” per se that allows for an immediate visual recognition of the referent “horn”—it is much too stylized for that; instead, it is the placement of the character there where the poem’s gestalt suggests that we imagine the buffalo’s horn which actually induces the Chinese reader to rediscover “角” as pictographic. The third bold-faced character, “黑” (hei, “black”), is used to even stronger iconic purpose, since it suggests the face of the water buffalo with its most salient features: two eye-slits in a square-shaped face and beard-like dots on its chin. The first line of the poetic text after its “head” draws attention to the mimetic character play: “his face the swaying shape of the sinograph ‘black.’ ” However, Zhan Bing does not (re)activate the pictographic remainder of a sinograph; he instead uses the graphics of the character “black” to suggest the buffalo’s face. The connection is not a directly pictographic one, but one mediated by a chance resemblance highlighted through the poetic text and

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reinforced through the shared color black. The concrete charm of “Water Buffalo Image” does not lie in the essentialist celebration of the pictographic force of Chinese writing. Rather, it derives from multiple uses of the Chinese script: as reactivated pictographs, as building blocks of a graphic shape, and as unlikely resemblances of signs with objects. The final typographic punch of the poem, the water buffalo’s tail, as the semiheterogeneous element of the exclamation mark in a text that does not use any other punctuation, humorously signs off on such a reading. Zhan Bing’s poem demonstrates that concreteness is not the monopoly of any single script; it thrives, ideally, on the heterogeneity of scriptural effects. Concrete poetic practice in Chinese—unlike the claim of some critics who zealously emphasize the pictographic advantage of the sinograph— finds its inspiration in semiotic difference: a difference of media at the heart of the sinograph, or, indeed, any single script. If Western sinographic concrete poetry wrote Chinese without writing in Chinese, Chinese concrete poetry writes Chinese without only writing in Chinese. In other words, for the full concrete potential of Chinese to emerge, it needs to recognize its hybrid facets instead of merely relying on the visual advantage of the pictograph. Another highly praised Taiwanese concrete poem further illustrates the prevalence of a multimedial concrete practice with the Chinese language: Chen Li’s 陳黎 “War Symphony” (“Zhanzheng jiaoxiangqu” 戰爭交響曲) of 1995. Chen’s work, from the 1970s up to today, comprises a wide range of subjects and styles. Even though only a fraction of his poetry shows “concrete” elements, this constitutes a recurring interest throughout his oeuvre. In “War Symphony,” the poet plays with very different visual and aural characteristics of the sinograph. Not unlike those in Seiichi Niikuni’s “River or Sandbank,” the most salient effects of “War Symphony” rely on the principle of difference in repetition. The poem consists entirely of differently distributed repetitions of four Chinese characters: the rows of “soldiers” (bing 兵) of the first stanza, the “mounds” of graves (qiu 丘) of the third and final stanza, and the parts of the onomatopoetic character compound “ping pang” (乒乓) in between. Its concrete ingenuity derives not only from the graphic distribution that suggests a direct correlation between the lines of soldiers and the neatly arranged rows of graves, mediated through the representation of death in combat, doubly embodied by the increasing sparseness of “soldiers” and the “ping pang” soundtrack of artillery:

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戰爭交響曲 兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵 兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵  . . . 兵兵兵兵兵兵兵乒兵兵兵兵兵兵兵兵乓兵兵兵兵兵兵乒 兵兵兵乓兵兵乒兵兵兵乒乒兵兵乒乓兵兵乒乓兵兵乓乓 乒乒兵兵兵兵乓乓乓乓兵兵乒乒乓乓乒乓兵乓兵兵乓乓 兵乒兵乒乒乒乓乓兵兵乒乒乓乓乓乓乒乒乓乓乒兵乓乓 乒兵乓乓乒兵乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓 乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓 乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓乒乒乓乓 乒乓乒乓乒乓乒乓乒乓乒乓乒乓乒乓乒乓乒乓乒乓乒乓 乒乓乒乓乒乒乓乓乒乓乒乓乒乒乓乓乒乓乒乓乒乒乓乓 乒乒乒乒乒乒乒乒乓乓乓乓乓乓乓乓乒乒 乒乒乒 乓 乓乓 乒乓乒乒 乒 乓 乒乒 乒乒 乓乓 乒乒 乓乒 乒 乓 乒 乓 乒乒乒 乓 乒 乒乒 乓 乓乓 乒 乒 乓 乒 乓 乒 乒 乓乓 乓 乒 乓 乒 乓 乒 乓 乓 乒 乓 丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘 丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘丘  . . . 73 This is further underlined by the ingenious choice of characters, which— though not all of the order of the pictograph, for instance, “乒乓” is derived from “兵” by sound—suggest a false yet poetically attractive connection between the able-bodied soldier (兵) and the wounded or mangled bodies: from “乒” or “乓” to “丘.” While Chen’s poem is entirely sinographic, it defies a purely ideographic reading. In order to savor its full creative energy, a reader cannot only understand the poem’s visual side, but has to activate the characters’ sounds—indeed, the title “War Symphony” directly points to a concrete aurality so frequently erased in Western discussions of the ideographic principle, as well as in the Taiwanese tradition of poetry and poetry criticism that often equates concretion and visuality. 90

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My purpose here is not to deny the link between writing and other visualities at play in Chinese traditions—without fetishizing the pictographic element that is only a small part of a much more complex writing system. And yet, the impact of other media and other languages is precisely the atmosphere in which the sinograph can develop some of its most creative potential. In other words, Chinese writing might come into its own—multimedially and intersemiotically speaking—there where not only Chinese is written. This does not mean an erasure of scriptural and linguistic specificity either; rather, it advocates for the recognition of heterogeneity within a particular linguistic and script tradition. Concrete poetry in Chinese at its best cannot simply rehearse the ideographic myth of Western poetry, staking its glory on its scriptural tradition largely inaccessible to nonsinophone (or, rather, sinographic) poets. In the era of concrete poetry, the sinograph became a creative force for poets who could not write Chinese because its scriptural and medial difference— however misread or exaggerated—made it possible for alphabetic scripts to become graphic, rather than merely signify, and thus detautologize the Western tradition of poetry. In spite of the examples of sinographic poems by writers who did not speak or write Chinese, the effect of the ideographic method did not lie in the discovery of total difference elsewhere (Chinese writing and poetry), but in the possibility of returning to Western culture from a different perspective and of discovering the “ideographic” in everyday culture, making the graphic and the medial an integral part of poetic practice. For concrete poetry written in Chinese, similar impulses came out of situations of linguistic strife—often, as in the case of Zhan Bing or Ou Wai’ou, in (semi)colonial contexts—and out of influences from other poetic practices. Concrete poetry in Chinese is not simply a copy of similar Western endeavors, nor is Chinese poetry per se “naturally” concrete. Western concretism did not invent the idea of graphic force in poetry, nor does it constitute merely a weak echo of concrete practices with supposedly more adequate (that is, sinographic) material. Rather, both traditions of concrete poetry emerge from real and imagined situations of transculturality, from scriptural and linguistic heterogeneity that led to the (re)discovery of the multimedial and intersemiotic powers inherent in their own script traditions, and in writing in general.

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Figure 3.1 Poster campaign for Tsingtao Beer, San Francisco (2007). Photograph by

the author.

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Muteness envy In October of 2007, billboards all over San Francisco featured an advertisement for China’s most famous beer brand, Tsingtao Beer. (See figure 3.1.) The fact that the advertisement’s display was not limited to the city’s Chinatown district suggests that it targeted the American consumer in general, in other words, an audience not familiar with the Chinese language. In the ad, four English words frame the four Chinese characters in the poster, which are already encased by quotation marks. The strangeness of another language is further tamed through parenthetical translation: next to the text, the poster shows a bottle of Tsingtao Beer, its name displayed on the label both in Chinese and in alphabetic transcription. Consequently, the Chinese phrase on the poster might appear mysterious to an American public at first sight, but becomes easily decipherable: while the label of the bottle repeats and translates it, the English text identifies the four foreign characters as the beer’s name. This advertisement might just be a flimsy example of how marketing capitalizes upon the exotic aura of a product. With the fad for Chinese characters in the West—as ornaments for all kinds of objects from tattooed flesh to meditation candles—the insertion of a Chinese text into an advertisement hardly runs the risk of estranging its American audience. Does the presence of the Chinese characters in the poster accomplish anything beyond highlighting the oriental appeal of a beer “made in China”? After all, the audience of the advertisement never really feels the shock of the unknown; a confrontation with that which they cannot fully understand fails to happen. And yet, the very taming of the foreign script involves another, surprising movement.

Even as it provides its audience with a translation, the poster, with its injunction to voice, also bars its reader from consuming the Chinese text, at least in the ways he or she is used to, namely, as pure ornament or cipher of cultural difference. To many a non-Chinese audience, the Chinese script has signified—and continues to signify—as an image, either as a pictograph that can be easily deciphered because of its supposed resemblance to a referent or, for most lay readers, as nothing more than exotic decoration. The foreign script enthralls its beholders above all for aesthetic reasons, meaning almost nothing beyond its aura of inscrutable alterity. The cover of an issue of the scholarly journal of the prestigious German Max Planck Foundation dedicated to China in the year of the Beijing Olympic Games amused blog-users all over the world with a recent example of an “appreciation” of the sinograph that eschewed reading. The third Max Planck Forschung of 2008 sported a red cover with a text written in Chinese characters. The text, which a consultant had declared to be of neutral content, and thus suited for communicating the message of Chineseness, turned out to be a brothel announcement, probably from Macao. Of course, the Max Planck Foundation immediately changed the cover and issued a note of apology.1 And yet, what should incite us to critical scrutiny is not the fact that this institution relied on the wrong specialist, but rather the general logic that remains in place even with its new cover: it still presupposes the easy conflation of a writing system and a cultural essence, a shorthand for a reader not too conversant with the Chinese culture or language. Would a special issue on Germany in the United States simply feature a couple of German sentences on its cover? Seemingly—at least if we were to believe the increasing Internet and press interest in the phenomenon of erroneous tattoos in Chinese or Japanese Kanji—the sinograph has its ways of striking back. Its revenge is written large (or small) on the bodies of those eager to participate in the mystique of the other writing system and who discover only after the fact that their tattoos are poorly executed or reversed characters, result in gibberish, or have meanings that the host could not have intended. At times, these tattoo designs use Chinese characters in a merely phonetic way, either by conserving a standard Chinese pronunciation associated with the characters—this works much like the products of calligraphers who offer to transcribe non-Chinese names as a souvenir, but also allows for foreign names to be included in standard Chinese texts—or, worse, by way of randomly assigning each letter of the alphabet a Chinese sign. One example featured on the website “Hanzi Smatter,” 94

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dedicated to unveiling such “Chinese” errors, which uses the customary practice of transcribing, seems particularly revealing, if absurd: A “Chinese” tattoo made in Turkey, supposed to reproduce the Chinese characters for “faith—hope—love,” becomes only readable in a Turkish translation, via a phonetic transliteration of Chinese characters.2 While this phonetic or pseudophonetic use downplays the complexity of the Chinese writing system, the opposite tendency, namely, to downplay or suppress the voicing of sinographs, has been much more prevalent. Upon scrutiny of much of Western philosophy and theory, it is not an exaggeration to speak of a muting of the sinograph, of an erasure of its connection to speech. Both for detractors and for supporters of the sinograph, Chinese frequently signifies as the prime example of pure writing, whereas its pronunciation does not interest, or is framed as an inferior, mutable add-on. On the one hand, philosophers such as Hegel denigrated Chinese writing as lacking the nimbleness of speech. On the other, theorists such as Derrida, in their attempt to counter just such criticism of the sinograph, constructed the Chinese script as the supreme avatar of writing as such. In Derrida’s famous argument in Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie), Chinese becomes writing writ large, its phonetic facets pushed to the margins of attention.3 The cultural other, most poignantly expressed in as well as reduced to its writing system, lends itself to different theoretical inscriptions, ranging from Hegel’s alphabetic chauvinism to Derrida’s antiphonocentric celebration. Even though these approaches differ in their fascination with or contempt for the Chinese language, they are all equally guilty of an erasure: framing the “other” language of Chinese as predominantly defined by what is only one part of language in general, writing, and by what is only one part of writing, its graphics. One of the texts that lie at the basis of much of modern linguistics and theory, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), given as a lecture from 1906 to 1911 and published posthumously in 1916, provides a powerful example of a disconnection between speech and writing over the sinograph’s body. De Saussure begins his Course with the exclusion of writing from the realm of linguistics through a reflection on the difference between phonetic and largely nonphonetic writing systems. Whereas the alphabetic script consists of letters that represent sound, in nonphonetic systems, such as Chinese writing, the graphs instead correspond to a unit of meaning. (This description of Chinese as a nonphonetic language largely neglects that the sinograph has phonetic features.) SonographieS

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Paradoxically, for a thinker with a strong emphasis on speech as the proper object of the discipline of linguistics, de Saussure in his bias against writing is split. Phonetic scripts are under suspicion precisely because of their closeness to speech. They are supposed to merely transcribe speech, but the danger of imprecise transcription that they harbor makes them an accomplice in the “cases of abnormal development” in which writing influences, even adulterates, speech.4 In contrast, nonphonetic scripts cannot effect similar changes, since they are disconnected from speech to begin with. As a separate system, the Chinese written sign cannot compromise and alter the signifier (as a sound image), as de Saussure constantly fears in the case of phonetic writing: For a Chinese, the ideogram and the spoken word are of equal validity as signs for an idea. He treats writing as a second language, and when in conversation two words are identically pronounced, he sometimes refers to the written form in order to explain which he means. But this substitution, because it is a total substitution, does not give rise to the same objectionable consequences as in our Western systems of writing. Chinese words from different dialects which correspond to the same idea are represented by the same written sign.5

Writing works its sinister power vis-à-vis the spoken signifier only because of a lack of difference, whereas the relation between the spoken and the written sign in Chinese becomes recoded into one of safe difference. Here, speech and writing are like two different languages; the transition from one to another consists in an act of translation. In contrast, phonetic writing is so contiguous to speech, since it expresses sounds, not ideas, that its potentially imperfect transcription can change speech itself. The very difference of the Chinese language renders it safe: writing is writing and speech is speech and never the twain shall meet. In spite of this “advantage” of the Chinese language, its seemingly beneficial difference excludes it from the realm of language proper—as the other language, and, with its emphasis on writing, as the other of language itself, whenever the definition of what constitutes a language is centered on spoken language. Apart from the fact that this is a biased view both of phonetic and of logographic writing systems and their languages, this reveals a paradoxical logic of difference at the heart of de Saussure’s theory of language. In the case of the sinograph, the (absolute) difference between writing and speech precludes difference within speech. For phonetic writing, the resemblance of 96

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the two forms of signifiers potentially sparks difference. The very lack of difference between writing and speech in alphabetic (or phonetic) languages opens the door to “pollution,” as the very nonmatch between the supposedly purely phonetic script and its voiced original, speech, induces the possibility for changes in pronunciation on the basis of the script. Phonetic scripts are assumed to transcribe the sounds of spoken language directly and as unequivocally as possible, at least ideally speaking. This very assumption, however, is problematic, since no phonetic script of a natural language ever transcribes speech perfectly. Rather, speech and writing constantly influence each other. The framing of speech over and above writing operates with a deft manipulation and bifurcation of difference via the example of the Chinese script. What is desirable is either absolute coincidence and equality or absolute difference. This hybridity between the two sides of language that de Saussure wills as two separate realms is unsettling. In order to uphold the primacy of spoken language, the relation between speech and writing can only be of two types: either writing, as the handmaiden (or maybe secretary) of speech, as faithful copyist that transforms sounds into letters (for phonetic scripts); or writing and speech as two languages, one that translates ideas into sound, and one that translates ideas into graphic shapes, yet without admitting any link between the two. However, neither the sinograph nor the alphabet is actually a pure case of identity with or difference from its respective systems of spoken language; both are hybrid cases that include logographic and phonetic principles, though in different proportions. Indifferent to a difference beyond the absolute, this logic immobilizes both speech and writing through the ideal of an absolutely accurate transcription. It is true that, for the Chinese language, speech and writing are not linked in “conventional” ways. Their connection is not taken for granted, much as it is too facilely assumed for phonetic writing systems. And yet, the Chinese script, as a complex system based on different signifying principles, consists also of phonetic principles. What matters, however, is not merely that the nature of the Chinese language is misinterpreted, but also that assumptions about language in general obey a flawed logic of exclusion, difference, and identity. In contrast to the silencing of Chinese logographs in Western thought, the four Chinese characters of the Tsingtao Beer ad are not merely an image— pleasing to the eye, but ultimately insignificant apart from their function as markers of an unspecified exoticism. The poster contains an injunction, one SonographieS

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that urges its audience to turn from passive gaze to active voice, namely, to “ask for ‘青島啤酒’ by name.” While this emphasizes the aim of every advertisement, the desire that exposure to the advertisement lead directly to the purchase of the product advertised, it also accomplishes something else. It jolts the reader out of her familiar horizon of signification, at least for a moment, since she is unable to obey the advertisement’s suggestion or command. On the basis of the four Chinese characters, the poster’s audience, supposedly unfamiliar with the Chinese language, cannot pronounce the name of the product; she cannot ask for the beverage by its name. As much as the advertisement is about translation, it is itself untranslatable. In what sense? Meaning, in the sense of signification, is not at issue here. Indeed, it would be preposterous to claim that one cannot accurately render the meaning of “青島啤酒” in English. The untranslatability of the slogan lies in its deployment of the Chinese script. Only the presence of a writing system alien to its American reader achieves the advertisement’s aim, namely, to underline the fact that the reader is asked to do the impossible: to voice a phrase in a nonphonetic script. The advertisement is about translation, because, by highlighting the reader’s failure to perform a simple act of communication, it makes her experience a state in translation. The advertisement works its magic—for its own purpose as well as for my purpose here—because it insists on linguistic difference. This difference consists not merely in that between two languages, English and Chinese, but also in that between two different writing systems, one alphabetic, the other logographic. Chinese characters, unlike alphabetic ones or, more generally, phonetic writing systems, which themselves never quite match graphic sign and sound perfectly and univocally, are not meant to be transcriptions of sounds. Whereas monolingual speakers of German can be expected to produce a more or less recognizable pronunciation of a Spanish word, no idea of a sound image would accompany their look at a Chinese word. This does not mean that phonetic principles do not factor into Chinese writing at all, only that they are more complex. Most Chinese characters, such as “啤” (pi), the first part of the two-character compound for “beer,” combine a component that indicates pronunciation and one that represents sound. In our case, the left part, “口,” also called the mouth-radical, marks the character as a buccal activity, related to either speech or ingestion. The right part, however, carries no indication of signification. Even though “卑” is a character in its own right, it functions here only as a phonetic shorthand for the pronunciation “pi.” In our case, the Chinese word for beer, “啤酒,” is an approximate 98

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phonetic transcription of a foreign word plus a hint at its field of signification, appended with the character for alcohol, “酒” (jiu). Especially since the diachronic evolution of the language has rendered these phonetic components approximations rather than reliable indicators of sound, these are rarely sounded out consciously in the act of reading, unless in the attempt to tentatively pronounce a rare character for which a speaker of Chinese might not have a related sound image immediately at hand. In any case, since the phonetic principle of the Chinese written character requires familiarity with the sound of the rather large number of logographs used phonetically, not only with a limited set of letters, this is of no use to the average American in San Francisco, whom the advertisement targets. And yet, the four Chinese characters whose intricate lines stand out amid the stark, simple forms of the English letters are not muted. The poster’s injunction, “to call ‘青島啤酒’ by its name,” underlines that the Chinese characters are not merely inscrutable, if elegant, graphs, designs rather than signs, but that they are supposed to be pronounced. The advertisement’s slogan exposes the reader’s ignorance of the sound that belongs to the graphs. But it is precisely the emphasis on the absent sound image that makes it impossible to ignore pronunciation—present here in its very absence. The advertisement is quite spectacular, with its play on the complexity of difference—between what is spoken and what is written, between what is heard and what is read. It carries out a “reading” of Chinese writing across different media, thus exploiting and making visible that a given group of words stimulates a variety of sense perceptions in its readers. Through its Chinese example, it seems to argue that “reading” consists in a multifaceted performance rather than in passively receiving the mental imprint of either sound or sight. Rather than delinking writing and spoken language, it makes them play together, enrich and destabilize each other. The film City of Sadness (Beijing chengshi 悲情城市) by the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien 候孝賢, released in 1989, plays on precisely such a double muting of the Chinese language. It grants the sinograph a structural position in the cinematic narrative as a whole, with an emphasis on the conjunction of visuality and aurality, of writing and voicing. As one of the undisputed masterpieces of Taiwan New Cinema, City of Sadness has been discussed by various critics for its oblique yet forceful representation of Taiwanese history, especially the traumatic 2-28 Incident of 1947, a violent riot of Taiwanese against the new “colonizers” from the mainland that was brutally crushed by the Nationalist (Guomindang KMT) government, which was SonographieS

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followed by a prolonged epoch of so-called White Terror and the imposition of martial law, which was not lifted until 1987. In an attempt to construe the film as a national allegory, or at least as a reflection on the possibility of such an allegory, the language politics of City of Sadness have attracted special attention.6 After decades in which the production of Mandarin films predominated in the context of the Guomindang’s nationalist language politics, the new linguistic liberty of Taiwan New Cinema in the 1980s, with its turn to Taiwanese subjects, finds one of its most complex examples in Hou’s film. Since it renders Taiwan’s history and culture audible in a multiplicity of voices, we can call City of Sadness a Sinophone film par excellence. In contrast to the example with which Shih Shu-mei begins her book Visuality and Identity, namely, Ang Lee’s 李安 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long 臥虎藏龍), with its different pronunciations and thus destabilization of standard Mandarin, Hou’s film flaunts a multiplicity of different Sinophone languages as well as Japanese.7 The linguistic polyphony in Hou’s movie is not restricted to the Taiwanese Lim 林 family whose fate the movie traces, but encompasses all registers of enunciation, including the voices of authority, such as that of Chen Yi 陳儀, the governor-general after the return of Taiwan to China, which becomes audible in radio broadcasts included in the film: Chen Yi’s supposedly standard Mandarin is shot through with a heavy regional accent. Even though Sinophone multiplicity in the movie thus contests any notion of a standard Sinophone such as Mandarin, it also questions another linguistic binary bind in which Taiwanese (also known as Minnan or Fokkienese) would be the “authentic” language of Taiwan, wresting power from Mandarin, as the language of the colonizer. The criminal milieu that the second and third sons of the Lim family frequent, for instance, consists of a kind of Sinophone United Nations in terms of language politics. In one scene that features a negotiation between competing gangs, the conversation has to be multiply translated, since, between Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Shanghainese, the participants do not have a language in common, even though most are conversant in two Sinophones. While Mandarin, which is equally featured as a locally flavored Sinophone, is clearly not presented as a desirable lingua franca, the coexistence of Sinophones in the film does not result in a harmonious multivocal chorus as much as in a cacophony potentially fraught with violence. In the film, the 2-28 Incident is at least partly staged as a linguistic conflict in which the problem of establishing any stable criterion for linguistic, cultural, and national identity arises forcefully. A scene that is particularly 100

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emblematic of the fact that the multilinguistic situation escalates into a language war that impedes translation comes when the film’s protagonist, the deaf-mute Wenqing 文青 (played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai 梁朝偉), is confronted on a train by Taiwanese Nativists during the 2-28 Incident. In order to establish the identity of the train passengers, to distinguish between Taiwanese and “Mainlanders,” they ask each of them where they come from. The question as such is, of course, a rhetorical one, or, to be more exact, a kind of shibboleth. As in the Bible story in which ethnic identity—the distinction between friend and foe—hinges upon the pronunciation of an “s” versus a “sh,” the answer to the question “where are you from?” does not involve content so much as linguistic performance. The violent Nativists voice their question first in Taiwanese and expect an answer in the same language from their fellow Taiwanese and a nonunderstanding of the question or the use of the nonappropriate Sinophone from Mainlanders. When they interrogate Wenqing without obtaining an answer—he is, after all, a deaf-mute who cannot hear their question—the Nativist identity marker falters. Faced with Wenqing’s silence, they have to resort to another language, acknowledging that, even though the majority of Taiwanese speak Minnan, other Taiwanese (as genuine Taiwanese?), like the aborigines or the Hakka minority, might speak other languages instead. When they reformulate the question, it is phrased in Japanese—the language of the colonial force during the fifty-year occupation and thus also the language of general education. Paradoxically, Taiwanese is not a sufficient indicator of Taiwanese identity—after all, Minnan is the main local Sinophone, but by no means the only one. Japanese becomes the language that confirms Taiwaneseness without a doubt. On the one hand, Mainlanders, unlike local Taiwanese, are unlikely to understand either Japanese or Taiwanese; on the other, the language and pronunciation of their answer gives them away. In the change from Taiwanese to Japanese lies a deep irony: how do you recognize a true Taiwanese against the Guomindang Mainlanders who wear the faces of the new colonial force? By resorting to the language of the old oppressor. Hence, cultural identity remains ultimately disconnected from any linguistic essence. This is one of the few scenes in which Wenqing, being thus interpellated and grasping the urgency of the situation, utters more than guttural sounds: a barely intelligible “I am Taiwanese” that cannot be understood as voiced in any particular Sinophone language. City of Sadness reflects here on the linguistic politics of cultural and ethnic identity. Language, which is after all not an essence but an articulation or instrument of performance, cannot be SonographieS

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unequivocally tied to any specific cultural identity, unless it is imposed by a regime of power. Paradoxically, it is a deaf-mute protagonist, one who cannot speak his own identity, who becomes the main means of articulating the film’s critique of language politics. As has been variously underlined in readings of City of Sadness, a constraint of Sinophone internationalism, namely, the injunction that the movie include the then-rising star Tony Leung among its cast, becomes a structural asset.8 Leung, a speaker of Cantonese, cannot speak Taiwanese. Rather than resorting to dubbing in Mandarin or to the implausible inclusion of a Hong Konger in the story, the film casts Leung as a deaf-mute. Tony Leung, it seems, can transcend his own linguistic community only by being silenced. With the increasing importance of cultural studies, film has gradually become one of the most important objects of analysis in the field of Chinese studies. The emerging discourse of Sinophone studies, spearheaded by Shumei Shih’s Visuality and Identity, with its focus on speech instead of writing, on “alternative” media instead of literature, has further underlined this tendency. No doubt, film, with its multimedial appeal, its combination of sound and image, lends itself particularly well to an illustration of the Sinophone. On the one hand, it can activate the sonic multiplicity of Chinese by rendering audible different Sinophone languages (as in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness) or variant pronunciations that decenter so-called standard Mandarin (as in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). On the other hand, film offers a realm of visuality apart from writing, supposedly resistant to the canonicity of literature and the essentialism attributed to its material basis, the sinograph. And yet, in City of Sadness, the Chinese writing system accrues as much importance as the audibility of different Sinophones. Actually, it is only when writing enters the scene that the film fully develops its medial complexity. The muteness of the main protagonist, who is invested with agency over a medium that is close to film itself through his profession as a photographer, has been multiply cathected to the silencing of the 2-28 Incident by the government or as an allegory of Taiwanese disempowerment. This negative connection between muteness and power, however, follows a logic of repression that links speech or visibility too straightforwardly with agency or freedom. It is precisely this facile notion of agency that Michel Foucault addresses in the first volume of his History of Sexuality in the context of sexuality under the aegis of the “repressive hypothesis”: namely, the assumption that, since the powers that control sex are supposed to be of the order of repression, 102

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sexual liberation would have already been brought about by an act of speaking up.9 According to Foucault, this conception of liberation is inbuilt in the structure of the power that regulates sex, part and parcel of another, discursive regime of control.10 We can conceptualize language politics in similar terms, only now the language used, rather than the content of the speech act, becomes invested with agency and liberation. Of course, in times in which a specific language is banned, continuing to use it not only keeps such a language alive, but also defies linguistic oppression. But does the audibility of any one language really always empower those who speak it? Could the logic of audibility as resistance, in essentialist worst-case scenarios, not also spawn another type of control, the imposition of another oppressive system in which language and identity are linked on different but maybe not less unjust terms? The figure of Wenqing illustrates the complexity of muteness, tied to the particular economy of the Chinese languages or Sinophones, and enables a reflection on the gap or relation between spoken and written Chinese(s). We can understand the complex power constellation of the figure of muteness in a Western context through the lens of Barbara Johnson’s essay “Muteness Envy.”11 In the text, a discussion of Jane Campion’s film The Piano, with its mute female protagonist, becomes the pretext for probing the function of muteness as a figure that stands in for a complex strategy of (dis)empowerment. Johnson’s formulation of “muteness envy” consciously echoes Freud’s expression “penis envy.” Likewise, “muteness envy” becomes a marker of sexual difference in a constellation in which a male author-subject produces the female as a muted voice or blank page. Idealized as an aesthetic tenet, but really designed to silence women’s expression of pleasure and to erase the violence inflicted on them, silence becomes rescripted into a sign of power whenever a male subject assumes it—very audibly and articulately— as a mask. What does this mean for my analysis of City of Sadness? I do not want to suggest that silence empowers rather than oppresses the mute protagonist, nor that it plays a major role in an economy of gender difference in the film. And yet, muteness assumes a particularly complex form here, since it is tied to another form of expression: writing. Since speech is barred to them, Wenqing and Hiromi, the female protagonist of the film and Wenqing’s love interest, converse through writing. To some extent, the film thus turns its attention from silence and repression to media politics. In other words, muteness allows multiple translations between different signifying systems SonographieS

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and media. It reserves an important place for the medium of writing, visible yet unvoiced, or voiced indirectly, in order to reconfigure linguistic and filmic conventions. What is to be envied in the constellation that I term sinographic “muteness envy”? The written “conversations” appear frequently in scenes in which spoken languages enter into conflict, for instance, in the “shibboleth” scene discussed above. If the painstaking scenes in which Hiromi and Wenqing “speak” through writing make for a slow viewing that taxes the audience’s patience, then their written conversation, rendered as printed intertitles on the screen, also seems to turn scenes of language war into a kind of escape space shaped in and by writing. If the sleight of hand of creating Wenqing as a mute character allows the performance of a Cantonese-speaking actor, it also allows another voice to enter the film: that of the scriptwriter and novelist Chu T’ien-wen 朱天文, who, not a speaker of Taiwanese herself (her cowriter Wu Nien-jen 吳念真 signs as being responsible for the dialogues), wrote the beautifully phrased written conversations in a classically flavored literary style, both elegant and concise.12 But if I seem to suggest that the sinograph is a panacea against the frictions of cultural multiplicity, expressed most forcefully in linguistic terms, this does not do justice to the film’s complexity either. The cinematic framing and use of the writing scenes preclude such a facile binary between conflictive speech and harmonious text. When Wenqing describes his trip with Hiromi’s brother Hiroe to the capital, the written medium is highlighted through an intertitle that gives a condensed account of the atmosphere during the 2-28 Incident: “Hiroe is safe. He told me to return first. Teacher Lin has been going to public meetings every day. Many people have died in Taipei. Everyone is anxious and fearful.”13 The interplay between written text and cinematic representation through a flashback allows for the reflection on the media politics so central to Hou’s subject. Paradoxically, the scene that the film provides for the spectators’ eyes puts Wenqing’s narration into pictures, thereby rendering the crucial conflict between different languages and voices through cinematic images and diegetic sound. These linguistic politics, illustrated precisely by Wenqing’s inability to speak, cannot find their full expression in writing either. In my opinion, Johnson’s “muteness envy” parallels a paradoxical case of “castration envy” rather than Freud’s “penis envy.” Not having (a penis, a voice) but lack (of a penis, a voice) becomes invested with power—yet only in a structure of displacement, where having masquerades as lack. The equally 104

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complex sinographic “muteness envy” in City of Sadness also displaces and disavows an underlying fetish: in the absence of speech, writing becomes a medium that allows for a displacement of the conflictive multiplicity of voices onto a seemingly harmonious, aesthetically balanced written text. And yet, this text is always forced to take stock of that which it potentially flees from or for which it substitutes: problematic language politics. In writing’s impossible task to both account and substitute for linguistic conflict, empowerment and disempowerment are linked in complex ways. On the one hand, the film transmutes muteness, as the inability to speak, into the power to write. On the other, the filmic text translates writing inevitably back into speech. The connection between speech and writing, however, is nonconventional: the “normal” link between speech and writing is broken—usually the film never voices a written conversation for us, nor rewrites what we hear as speech. Writing and speaking are incessantly connected even as they are disconnected. The film translates back and forth between different media, framing a scene for the spectator as of a specific medium, but really showing it to us in another. For instance, Hiromi’s activity of diary writing, which carries much of the narration of the movie, as such is rendered as a voice-over, not in written form.14 Sinographic “muteness envy” in the film, which turns speech into writing, also transmutes writing back into image or sound. This is less a flight from speech to writing, as a generalized reflection on mediality that hinges upon the figure of muteness, hence upon writing, and hence upon the sinograph as a specific medium of writing. Writing itself becomes multimedial not merely for its connection with and mutation into other media, but already through its multiple integration and disintegration in the cinematic text as such. In general, the texts that we see displayed as intertitles are diegetically motivated. We actually see Wenqing and Hiromi engage in acts of writing on-screen. And yet, the writing shown to us subverts film’s mimetic illusion, since it is not handwritten, but printed. In this sense, City of Sadness plays with cinematic conventions even as it breaks them. Traditionally, intertitles in silent cinema serve two different objectives: firstly, they render visible what is not immediately visible (a transition in time or space or a turn in the narrative) or audible (the characters’ dialogues); secondly, they can allow for the intrusion of another narrative voice, for instance, as a commentary, which interrupts the filmic diegesis, with its illusion of unmediated representation. Hou Hsiao-hsien, however, splices the “intertitles” into a position both inside and outside of SonographieS

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the filmic frame. As printed text, the intertitles transcend the level of diegetic narrative, becoming paratextual to the film as such. Diegetically motivated, however, they are visual representations of real objects in the frame. And yet, the script used—not handwriting, but print—precludes a seamless mimesis, unlike in most films, which give the spectator a close-up of a written document. Only in a few cases does the film “naturalize” its intertitles, by showing them in the materiality—script, writing material—they supposedly possess in the diegesis. When Wenqing visits a woman with the sad news of her husband’s execution during the 2-28 Incident, he gives her the husband’s farewell note, seemingly written in blood on a white rag, which reads, “You must live with honor and dignity / Father is innocent.” Consequently, the film’s “muteness envy” also implies a disconnection and reconnection of writing and cinematic image, barring the spectator from “naturally” linking categories such as speech and writing, writing and image. In this sense, the presence of writing in its different facets in City of Sadness actually can be described as an interruption of the cinematic text and its purchase on the mimetic powers of the moving image and diegetic sound. Tom Conley discusses the inclusion of writing in film in general in Film Hieroglyphs as follows: Because writing is not the matter of film, its form intervenes and brings forward things that cannot be assimilated or entirely controlled by the film or its editing. Writing . . . can thus acquire unforeseen critical force and even suggest, especially in the area between the images in which it is found and even in its own characters, the presence of other dimensions of the film that often need to remain unnamed or even, on occasion, are unnamable. The gap between what a film would wish to say or mean and the impact of writing in the field of the image was discerned as an effect of rupture: wherever graphic traits interceded in the film, . . . it was sustained that the illusion of reality seen within the frame became subject to graphic treatment that might forcibly call cinematic illusion into question. Whatever was visible became equally legible.15

Hou’s film negotiates not only between writing and image, but also between the visible and the audible. City of Sadness resuscitates one of the mainstays of the bygone days of silent film, the intertitle, and reinvents it as a powerful tool for highlighting the multifaceted potential of the art of the moving picture. 106

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Years after the release of City of Sadness, in his film Three Times (Zui hao de shiguang 最好的時光), released in 2005, Hou plays again with and against the conventions of silent film. The three love stories featured in the movie reflect on the means of communication that mediate relationships. Depending on each historical moment portrayed, the 1960s, 1911, and 2005, the film focuses on letters, music, and text messaging. The second part, the recreation of a silent film, presents all dialogue in the form of intertitles. This is a strange kind of anachronistic mimesis, since the segment is filmed in color, thus complicating the illusion of an “old” movie. The intertitles are elegant vignettes finely crafted in written Chinese. Speech is muted here, underlining the fact that the only way in which the female protagonist, a courtesan, can “voice” her grief is her singing to the pipa, which is diegetically motivated but also, at times, in lieu of the customary sound accompaniment of silent film. The context of the silent movie, with its disconnection of image and sound through its extradiegetic soundtrack, converts the protagonist’s song into a kind of ventriloquism, where the lip movements are silent gestures of grief, lip-synched to the musical pieces. Intertitles—often seen as a necessary evil by film critics, as taking away from the visuality of film itself—are transmuted in both films into reflections on the interaction of writing and image. This is especially important as a reflection in and on a linguistic medium in which writing both borders on the image and translates speech. This use of intertitles, in which a cinematic convention of the past is reactivated for other purposes, obliquely hints at another important written part of film’s language politics: subtitles. The linguistic heteroglossia of the new Sinophone cinematic trends that culminated in the Fifth Generation on the Chinese mainland and the New Wave Cinema in Taiwan and Hong Kong relied heavily on the paratext of subtitles. Paradoxically, one and the same medium allowed for Mandarin-centered and Sinophone turns in Chinese film history. Because of the linguistic diversity of Chinese cultural spaces, Mandarin-language films were (and still are) widely released in subtitled versions, so that speakers of other Sinophones besides the so-called standard can read along. In order to ensure a wider distribution of Sinophone films, subtitles became indispensable. Where movies experiment with different Sinophones at once, such as in City of Sadness, the multiplicity of voices would not be pragmatically viable without the presence of subtitles. Only very few speakers of “Chinese” indeed would be able to understand Taiwanese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Japanese. Without the possibility of sinographic subtitles, the various “nativist” tendencies in sound film SonographieS

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would not have been possible, in the same way in which this same strategy can make “standard” Mandarin films accessible to speakers of another Sinophone, which thus potentially renders films in a particular Sinophone an unnecessary investment. This ambivalence raises urgent questions about mediality. Do we want to see this situation as a kind of diglossia between different Sinophone languages, where writing always returns to a monoscriptural (and thus monological) standard Chinese? Or does this rather spell out a polyphonic possibility in the sinograph itself? Even if the sinograph can be read as an instrument of a Mandarin-centric perspective, it can also, maybe, at the same time, function very differently and allow for heterogeneous voices. In a global context, the problem of subtitles is equally crucial, highlighting, once more, the paradoxical medialities of translation across cultures. The filmic characteristics that go beyond or are independent from language—visuality as well as nonlinguistic audio—make for the easy “translatability” of film for global circulation: hence the repeated cliché of the international language of film. Only for dialogue is translation indispensable. Subtitles rather than synchronization, which would erase the cultural and regional specificity of speech once and for all, assures the audibility of different languages. At the same time, the translation of dialogue in subtitles introduces the medium of writing into the filmic text.16 It is in an episode in which the different Sinophones are confronted with another sinographic but not Sinophone language, namely, Japanese, that the media politics of City of Sadness emerge as a product of multiple translations. The sequence in question, consisting of different signifying acts and articulations around a Japanese poem, is framed as one of gift giving, in which the exchange of objects and the translation of text go hand in hand. After the Japanese capitulation, before the repatriation of the Japanese who reside in Taiwan, Shisuko, Hiromi’s Japanese friend who is probably emotionally attached to Hiromi’s brother Hiroe, conveys her farewell with the gift of a kimono, a katana, and a scroll of poetry calligraphed by her older brother. When Hiromi shows her brother Hiroe and his friend Wenqing Shisuko’s gifts, the film engages in a complex cinematic prevarication as one and the same content—the nostalgia of parting and the fondness of memory—finds expression in various forms. It congeals around a process of textual translation, what we might call, with Dina Al-kassim, a “transgraphing,” a motion across different scripts and media.17 The sequence, beginning with two flashbacks, one of Shisuko singing a Japanese song, another of her brother 108

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practicing calligraphy, prepares us for a movement between media. The second flashback transports the protagonists as well as us spectators back to the situation in which Shisuko’s brother wrote the scroll, which is at the center of filmic attention. While Hiroe comments upon the calligraphic text, a poem in which a young woman evokes the fading Sakura blossoms as a metaphor for her decision to die at the height of beauty, Wenqing looks at the scroll. The screen image of the Japanese calligraphy appears as a photographic negative of sorts: as with the other intertitles in white upon black rather than in black ink upon white paper, like the “real” medium of the calligraphed scroll that we see in the scene without being able to read it. The text in Japanese is complemented with subtitles in Chinese. Subsequently, Hiromi explains the poem’s meaning to Wenqing in writing (that we see on-screen), but which is rendered as a voice-over. The sequence ends with an intertitle that shows the Japanese poem in a Chinese translation—possibly still motivated in the context of Hiromi’s “conversation” with Wenqing. Interestingly, the Japanese poem and the Chinese version—which reads, “Fellow cherry blossoms, fly as you will and go, I will follow, so it is with all of us”—differ in their first line. The translation throws doubt on the original: Does the Japanese intertitle give us the entire text of the calligraphic scroll? What is the original to Hiromi’s Chinese translation? In spite of the excess of translation, the doubling of the subtitled Japanese “original” and the second intertitle (the Chinese translation), the transfer from one language to another, from one script to another, from one medium to another, is never complete. The scene conjugates hybridity as already a linguistic phenomenon, both on the level of speech, in Hiroe’s spoken Taiwanese with its use of Japanese vocabulary, and on that of writing—after all, Japanese as a hybrid medium mixes the sinograph (as Kanji) with the phonetic kana scripts. In terms of cinematic technique, the hybridity is further highlighted as one of media: of speech, writing, and image as well as of the cinematic text and its paratext, as the boundaries between these categories are constantly challenged and distributed anew. That the sinograph is a polyphonic rather than a monologic medium in Hou’s film derives from the film’s multiple reactivation of boundaries between media. Hinging upon the structural core that I am calling its sinographic “muteness envy,” the cinematic text enters a logic of translation, one in which the constant transition between different languages as well as media puts traditional signifying economies under erasure. This process destabilizes the diegetic illusion of the filmic text by allowing writing to become SonographieS

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visible as a cinematic paratext. It subverts the logic of writing and voicing: the hidden assumption according to which writing and voicing are different, so that one can be valued above and beyond the other—the Sinophone versus the sinograph—even though their direct relationality is always taken for granted. City of Sadness engages in a double economy that subverts existing conventions by highlighting and reactivating them. The Chinese written character forms the axis around which mediality revolves in the film, since it becomes the focal point for a strategic mismatch between phonetic and graphic principles. City of Sadness is a Sinophone film par excellence, precisely because of its strong focus on the sinograph. Instead of attributing cultural identity to a specific language or medium, it adumbrates a complex scenario in which identity does not make itself heard (or seen) as an essence, but rather emerges in processes of translation.

sinographic glossolalia When Cang Jie 倉頡, the scribe of the Yellow Emperor, invented writing— so the myth tells us—the ghosts wailed at night.18 In the Chinese tradition, the act of creation—not of the world, but of a new medium—is, unlike the Biblical creation myth, not accompanied by a voice that commands, names, and thus creates. The graphic shapes of the Chinese writing system are birthed to the soundtrack of spectral howling. The explanations of the cries that usher in the era of writing are multiple: from the ghosts’ desperation because humans, endowed with a new tool for reasoning, were now immune to the harm wrought by specters, to the grief in the face of the fallenness of the world through writing, the beginning of the end of innocence.19 Irrespective of graphophiliac or graphophobic interpretations, the image is compelling: the soundtrack to writing at its primal scene is not speech but inarticulate screams. This scene splices together two types of expressions that are usually located at opposite ends of the media spectrum: writing and the cry. At the same time, it fails to connect two types of expressions that are usually read together, even if in opposition or tension: speech and writing. In the West, philosophical debates seem to have polarized speech and writing to a large extent. The primacy of orality and its erasure through writing, especially after the advent of printing, which established writing as an automated process of production and reproduction, constitutes a wellknown genealogy of media studies.20 According to the nostalgically tinted 110

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narratives of some Western media theorists, the invention of printing turned the living voices of orality, often connected to a mythical notion of “the people,” into mere ghostly sounds, reduced to an existence within its other: writing.21 From the perspective of phonocentrism that Jacques Derrida attributed to Western metaphysics, the supremacy of speech over writing spells the nightmare scenario in which the copy, the dangerous supplement of writing, displaces the guarantor of presence as the “living” breath of speech. The story of a transition from orality to scripturality simplifies, often for nostalgic emphasis, the much more complex history of the interaction of script and speech. According to Michel de Certeau, the difference between speech and writing is not an absolute given, but a process in flux, depending on the media constellations of a specific moment in time. According to de Certeau, Western modernity in a broad sense is under the spell of the “scriptural economy” (l’économie scriptuaire): this economy replaced the performative presence of the voice that still pervaded the scriptural tradition of Christianity by framing writing in terms of work, discipline, and reproduction. However, scripturality and orality do not form separate spheres. They always coexist and interact in complex ways. The birth of the “scriptural economy” does not usher in the replacement of orality by scripturality, but rather constitutes a shift in their mode of relation. Instead of a binary opposition, de Certeau postulates an originary plurality: “I want to make clear at the outset that in referring to writing and orality I am not postulating two opposed terms whose contradiction could be transcended by a third, or whose hierarchization could be inverted. . . . On the contrary . . . I shall assume that plurality is originary; that difference is constitutive of its terms; that language must continually conceal the structuring work of division beneath a symbolic order.”22 In other words, we can describe Western history through the shifting relations between speech and writing. But the idea of an originary medium, such as speech, merely covers up a medial multiplicity that is operative at all times. Even though de Certeau insists on the interwoven fabric of speech and writing, he singles out the cry as a token of resistance whose inarticulate burst of sound momentarily ruptures the fabric of signification and socialization. For de Certeau, since speech and writing are instrumental to the subjection of bodies to social law, the scream signifies the return to corporeality— precisely because it does not signify or express anything beyond itself. The scream is expression at its most raw, breaking through the societal shackles imposed not only by writing but also by speech, since language, in both its SonographieS

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voiced and its written form, forces human beings into the (necessary) straitjacket of socialization. Of course, the cry, even though it breaks loose from the foundation of signification, aligns itself medially with orality rather than writing. As such, it resonates with the renewed interest in theorizing sound in recent years. What some dub an “anti-ocular turn” in theory actually replicates, rather than undoing, Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism, since the prevalent metaphors of sound reach beyond and outside of speech.23 For instance, Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening (A l’écoute), published in 2002, explores sound as the master medium that subsumes all other media, since the principle of listening— as opposed to understanding—rules all the senses. Nancy posits the aural as superior to vision precisely because of its proneness to dissolution and impermanence. The visual cannot be thought without recurrence to form, and thus finds itself in too close a vicinity to the concept; “the sonorous, on the other hand, outweighs form. It does not dissolve it, but rather it enlarges it; it gives it an amplitude, a density, and a vibration or an undulation whose outline never does anything but approach. The visual persists until its disappearance; the sonorous appears and fades away into its permanence.”24 According to Nancy, listening in the strong sense pays attention to the medium rather than the message. It bypasses meaning and is alert to a body’s resonance with rhythm or a harmony’s affective impact instead. As a methexic medium, the aural depends on contact, contagion, and participation—terms of particular importance to Nancy’s theoretical system as a whole. It is unlike visuality and its penchant for mimesis. Sound becomes the prime metaphor of consciousness and self-knowledge—though no longer as an intellectual or conceptual grasp. The self resonates—neither absent nor fully present, no longer the living breath of the voice as the presence of spirit, but rather the echo that fills the void, establishing the self as insistent yet always deferred resounding. In spite of surface appearances, Nancy’s interest in sound is not at odds with the poststructuralist emphasis on writing, which is indicated by key references to Derrida’s work in Listening.25 On the contrary, it extends the principles of écriture in its broad definition into the realm of sound, where music, rhythm, sighs, and screams are to speech as furrows, incisions, and marks are to writing. Sound functions theoretically like écriture for Nancy and replaces it as metaphor, but the interaction of both “media” remains largely eclipsed. The isolation of sound from visuality, especially writing (precisely in its equation with écriture writ large), diverts attention from the realm in which the 112

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graphic and the sonic meet: that of language. For sonic theories, as for those invested in poststructuralist notions of writing, the link between speech and writing is of scarce interest. Apparently, it offers insufficient potential for rupture, difference, and complexity, on whose invocation such theories thrive. Of course, this might be the case whenever we reduce the interaction of speech and writing in advance to a mere transcription of sound or voicing of script, instead of looking for more complex interactive scenarios. Instead, theoretical attention shifts insistently to the margins of articulation, to music, rhythm, sighs, and screams. One of the borderlands privileged thus is glossolalia. Glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues,” emerged in a Christian tradition as a voicing that is not the articulation of any known language or signifying system. It either transcends it or fails to reach the threshold of linguistic communication. Glossolalia is nonsense, or, at the other end of the spectrum, it is absolute communication of that which cannot be normally expressed by way of spiritual inspiration. Not part of any real language, glossolalia invokes linguistic difference, the Babelic specter of linguistic miscommunication as well as the possibility of the inspired transcendence of linguistic difference. Glossolalia, a speaking in tongues, in different religious, pathological, and literary uses, so de Certeau clarifies in an essay on the subject, “is a trompel’oreille, just like a trompe-l’oeil, a semblance of language, a fiction of discourse [that] orchestrates the act of saying [l’acte de dire] but expresses nothing.”26 Throughout the essay, by way of critical readings of theorists of glossolalia, such as Oskar Pfister and Roman Jakobson, who sought to ascribe meaning to the glossolalic phenomena studied, de Certeau emphasizes time and again that glossolalia has no interpretable meaning, even that its importance lies in not having to transport any meaning. Thus freed from the trammels of signification, glossolalia can become a laboratory of sound that opens up speech to its uncanny other: noise. This paradoxically produces language at its purest—no longer message, but medium, congealed around the act of speaking and listening, rather than the production of meaning and understanding. Glossolalia has always been close to questions of linguistic difference— from the split of the speaking subject in Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, to the xenoglossia of Jesus’ disciples during the Pentecost, to the pseudo-Sanskrit of the famous glossolalic medium Hélène Smith (Catherine-Élise Müller) studied by de Saussure.27 But I want to take the question of cultural difference a step further: Why are metaphors of marginal orality such as glossolalia or nonlinguistic sound so compelling for particular theoretical reflections? SonographieS

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Why is it necessary to invest the sonic—the scream, glossolalias—with so much meaning, a meaning that consists in its noninvestment with meaning, in its resistance to meaning? Can such a return of the oral also harbor the disavowed return of speech? And how does this really relate to other languages and cultures? The strange connection between the scream and writing in a Chinese tradition will be my pretext for a slightly different look at the media politics of voice and graphy, one in which the paradoxical loop of sameness and difference is not already taken for granted, and therefore hidden from sight, a perspective from which it becomes possible to scrutinize the media politics of theory. By pointing to a fantasmatic connection between Chinese writing and inarticulate sound, I do not mean to reiterate the prejudice of the mute sinograph yet again, if from a slightly different angle, by pairing it with a kind of sound outside of linguistic communication. Unless cultural bias deludes us, Chinese is, of course, a spoken and voiced language like any other, though with a slightly different link between script and voice, since the script, not primarily a transcription of sound, does not necessarily impose a specific pronunciation—leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that phonetic scripts are not completely faithful reproductions (or impositions) of sound either, to the grief of linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure. The fear of the disconnection of the phonetic and the graphic in language is largely a Western phobia and fascination, projected upon the Chinese script, since nobody will seriously doubt the enduring—if changing and flexible—bond between speech and writing in any fully functional linguistic system that has developed writing. What is to be feared—not for reasons of linguistic integrity, but for the possibility of inducing cultural blindness—is not the difference between script and voice, but the illusion of the coincidence of both, so that one can be erased in favor of the other. Or, alternately, the illusion of their total difference, where one can be completely disconnected from the other. From this vantage point, the problem of Western metaphysics does not lie in a prejudice in favor of speech (or writing). Rather, linguistic systems that rely on alphabetic scripts (or phonetic scripts more generally) seem obsessed with sameness and difference. As discussed above, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics had a problem not so much with total difference, but with insufficient resemblance: the monstrosity of alphabetic writing lies in its impurity, the danger that changes in writing contaminate “living” speech. Chinese writing on the other hand—falsely perceived as not bound by phonetic principles at all—seemed exempt from the problem. 114

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Even after the deconstruction of phonocentrism, similar economies continue to drive theoretical thought. To take difference as the basis of signifying economies does not prevent the erasure of the difference between speech and writing on a symbolic and theoretical level. In the context of phonetic— especially alphabetic—writing, the false promise of the coincidence of speech and writing underlies Western metaphysics. This produced thoughts fustigated by Derrida as phonocentric, namely, the fear of noncoincidence of speech and script, but also Derrida’s own graphocentrism, where speech is completely subsumed under the metaphor of writing. Either writing should only be a transcription of speech or writing, as écriture writ large, can symbolically encompass all other sign systems. Between absolute difference and absolute coincidence, the complex connections between speech and writing remain a theoretical wasteland, accentuated by theories that overinvest the margins of each system but elide their points of contact. Therefore, much of Western theoretical thought can treat speech and writing as implicitly interchangeable, without paying attention to the specificities of each. For instance, Western translation theory constantly equates writing and speech. Its whole tradition writes about the rendering of a written text in another language, from the Bible translations to Walter Benjamin’s reflections on translation and textual survival in “The Task of the Translator” (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”), but its metaphors are overwhelmingly phonetic.28 In After Babel, George Steiner briefly characterizes his approach to translation with a language replete with oral metaphors: This book has applied poetics, literary criticism, and the history of cultural forms to aspects of natural language. Its focus throughout has been on the act of translation. Translation is fully implicit in the most rudimentary communication. It is explicit in the coexistence and mutual contact of the thousands of languages spoken on the earth. Between the utterance and interpretation of meaning through verbal sign systems on the one hand, and the extreme multiplicity and variety of human tongues on the other, lies the domain of language as a whole. I have argued that these two ends of the spectrum—elementary acts of speech and the paradox of Babel—are closely related, and that any coherent linguistics must take both into account.29

Conceptually speaking, communication and translation are of course connected, and translation enables communication. But Steiner’s vocabulary— he writes of “languages spoken,” “utterance,” “human tongues,” and “acts of SonographieS

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speech”—highlights translation squarely as a phenomenon of speech. And yet, his text relies mainly on examples of the translation or interpretation of literary texts. Steiner posits translation as a universal phenomenon, which is not merely found in intralingual situations, but plays a part in communication and understanding in general. And yet, influenced by a Western or Judeo-Christian tradition, Steiner fails to distinguish between speech and writing. With deconstruction and poststructuralism, Western theory turned its attention from speech to writing. Nevertheless, the blurring of both categories, as well as a generalizing thrust that downplays or ignores cultural difference, is still at play in Jacques Derrida’s “Des Tours de Babel,” a reflection on translation through a rereading of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzters”), written in 1923. Translation happens—this almost goes without saying—on the basis of a written text. For most Western translation theorists from Martin Luther onward, one text forms the center and basis of all translation: the Bible. This text also contains the primal scene that founds translation as a catastrophe and forms the basis not only of Derrida’s essay but also of many other texts on translations: God’s destruction of the tower of Babel through a multiplication of languages and the ensuing problem of communication. While translation as a practice in the West almost automatically means the transference of a written text into another (written) language—unlike Lin Shu’s 林紓 eminent example in China of a translation that negotiates between orality and scripturality as well as between cultures, texts, linguistic registers, and languages—its emblematic scene (as part of the Bible in the form of a written text) underscores speech:30 Babel is not a confusion of texts, but one of tongues. Nevertheless, it incessantly returns as the primal scene of translation and translation theory mainly concerned with the transposition of written texts from one language into another. But can we really conceive of the translation of speech in the same way as that of written texts? Does it matter that we use oral metaphors for a mainly textual phenomenon? Does this make our notion of translation any less universally applicable? Are cultures with phonetic writing systems particularly prone to the theoretical slippage between speech and writing? This conflation, though apparently innocuous, is culturally specific, based on a script system, such as the alphabet, that equates speech and writing, making writing merely the transcription of spoken language. Of course, transcription is not the same as translation, and, maybe, the translation of content matters 116

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more than a shift in form, say, from sinographs to letters. And yet, the materiality and mediality of a text carries weight, or so media studies, poststructuralism at large, and cultural studies has led us to believe. Consequently, medial metaphors are not just random figures, but deeply invested in media politics and cultural ideologies. A different type of conflation of speech and writing in favor of orality lies at the basis of another discourse on alterity: when we deploy the terms “Anglophone” or “Francophone,” we rarely talk about spoken expressions, but apply these mostly to literary texts. Of course, speaking (and writing) of “Anglographic” or “Francographic” novels or poems would make even less sense, not least because of their shared alphabetic script. But because texts in these languages, that is, French or English, are supposed to be notations of speech, the substitution of phone and graphe is often not noted, even in the context of theories that proclaim particular attention to medium specificity. And so, in some cases, the generic x-phone term actually furthers rather than contests a strategic erasure or oblivion of medial particularity and cultural difference. A case in point is the facile cooptation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature (littérature mineure) in Kafka: For a Minor Literature (Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure), a term that translates Kafka’s “small literature” (kleine Literatur). When Deleuze and Guattari wrote their compelling analysis of Kafka’s work, they probably never expected the term “minor literature” to have the kind of afterlife it experienced in the context of postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Minor literature, as in the example of Kafka’s writing, meant the possibility to phrase literary resistance in the face of linguistic hegemony. Even though Kafka, as a Jew living in Prague, wrote in German, his style contested and altered this linguistic and cultural tradition. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature thus always constitutes a political agenda, a gesture of resistance, a contestation of the dominant system of inscription that occurs inevitably in and with that which it contests. In their book, Deleuze and Guattari offer two examples of strategies for crafting a minor literature that deterritorializes the dominant language: the Baroque excess of writers such as Max Brod and James Joyce, and the linguistic scarcity practiced by Kafka. Excess and lack, however, are not the only attributes that distinguish the strategies. They are also separated by another, less noticeable symbolic divide, that between graphism and orality. Even though these reflections bear on written texts, Baroque excess—dismissed as SonographieS

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ultimately reifying the dominant linguistic tradition—stands in for writing, whereas Kafka’s positive example, coded as oral, challenges German as the major language through a politics of linguistic scarcity. Deleuze and Guattari metaphorically privilege orality by way of buccal metaphors.31 Linguistic penury signifies through figures of eating and hunger, implicitly staking a desirable minority of literature on the example of speech: Kafka’s “pure sonic matter” depends on a “deterritorialization of the mouth, the tongue, and the teeth.”32 Through the contiguity between eating and speech, the ideal of minor resistance hinges on orality and speech. Subsequent uses of the term “minor literature” often disregard the oral bias of the concept. Drawing on the terminology Deleuze and Guattari developed, some critics describe Sinophone authors as practitioners of a minor literature: one that is a challenge to but still scripted in the major language of Chinese. Some of these Sinophone writers, such as Zhang Guixing 張貴興, who will be discussed in the next chapter, indeed deploy a style of Baroque exuberance, though, irrespective of Deleuze and Guattari’s devaluation of graphic excess, their works are still celebrated as minor literature, often without critical regard for the cultural and medial problems inherent in the term.33 In the case of Sinophone writers, however, speech and literature are not as easily equated as in Kafka’s case. We have to bear in mind that the mother tongue of most of these authors is not standard Mandarin, but more likely another Sinophone language like Hakka, Taiwanese, or Cantonese. As Jing Tsu points out, “the Chinese language is what keeps Sinophone writers together as a global community, it is also the medium they learn to manipulate in order to hold themselves apart.”34 However, the differences these writers straddle lie not only between a “minor” versus a “major” literature, but also between spoken and written expressions—a difference that Deleuze and Guattari elide, while making it the unacknowledged basis of their whole argument. In this context, the use of written Chinese becomes a space in which more complex tensions are at play: the Chinese script normalizes and territorializes divergent oral expressions that strive for deterritorializaton. On the other hand, in diasporic contexts such as Malaysia or other parts of the world dominated by the alphabet or other phonetic scripts, the sinograph can also become a contested writing system in need of salvaging. The aporia of literature in Chinese thus really hinges as much on the sinograph, the Chinese writing system, as on the oral, Sinophone expressions. The problem here is not the free application of the term “minor literature” to texts and cultures that escaped Deleuze and Guattari’s purview. Rather, 118

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I take issue with the blindness at the center of minor literature as a concept, as a symptom of the skewed media politics of theory—especially whenever it invokes resistance or marginality. In the flow of theories, too frequently from the centers to the margins, theories are eager to invest in the idea of the marginal as resistant, even if, for the most part, theorists at the center define what counts as “marginal” or “resistant.” Instead, we might want to read examples from other cultures back at theories from the center, in order to differentiate and enrich them. Otherwise, as with such potentially empowering theoretical moves that harbor problematic dichotomies as the concept of minor literature, we will take cultural bias as general theoretical coinage. This is not to say that we should not investigate or invest the margins of mediality: the sonic versus speech, the graphic versus writing. The very term of the “Sinophone,” as defined by Shih Shu-mei, relegates Chinese writing, the visual level of linguistic signification, to a marginal position. According to Shih, the cultural articulations that most usefully contest a China-centric hegemony are of the order of sound—hence her emphasis on the Sinophone—and of nonlinguistic visualities. The fact that Shih dwells on visual articulations, even though her theoretical metaphors are highly sound-oriented, emphasizes her strategic exclusion of the visuality of writing.35 Even though the politically necessary impact behind these maneuvers is clear, such a thought needs a consideration of Chinese writing as the realm where the visual and the oral meet. Sinophone and sinographic artists and writers create in the twilight zone of writing and speech, of archive and repertoire. Their operative terrain consists of a complex field of competing cultural discourses. Thus, the central issue is not the alignment with writing versus orality or performance, but rather a critical rethinking of these binaries and the operational processes of media politics as such. From this vantage point, can we conceive of other examples? Of glossolalias that do not exclude the graphic, of instances of speaking in tongues with and through graphic phantasmagorias? Can we pit other types of glossolalias against the Western tradition that invests the phonic with special power, even as, or especially whenever, the oral, as spoken language, seems to be deterritorialized via music, sound, voicing, the cry, eating, or hunger? As discussed above, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film City of Sadness forces its viewer to rethink the link between speech and writing through the introduction of a mute character whose presence leads to a multiplicity of disconnections and reconnections of writing and speech. Another way of rethinking the difference between both spectra of verbal communication lies not with SonographieS

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muteness, but with an overinvestment of sound; not silence, but Babel; not shibboleth, but stutter. Because sinographs are voiced as syllables with a relatively small number of possible combinations of consonants and vowels, homophony occurs frequently. The tonal structure of Chinese—the four intonations that exist in standard Mandarin—somewhat palliate homophony though, since it helps differentiate between syllables of the same phonetic building blocks. And yet, unlike most other languages, Chinese lends itself particularly well to linguistic experiments with syllabic repetitions and variations in verbal meaning. One experiment by the linguist Y. R. Chao, for example, consists entirely of repetitions of the syllable “shi” in different tones. Only the Chinese characters make the difference between nonsense and (a certain kind of) sense, between “shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi” and “Stone house poet Mr. Shih was fond of lions and resolved to eat ten lions.”36 As Lydia Liu underscores in her discussion of the experiment, Chao’s text illustrates the noncoincidence of writing and speech. Reading the text out loud results in a stutter, albeit with different tones. Only a reading of the characters allows for the nonsense text to make sense, as graphic difference comes to the aid of phonetic indifference. Here, glossolalic stutter does not void writing, nor does writing annihilate sonic excess. Rather, writing and sound work together. Pushed one step further, such experiments can result in both sonic and graphic stutter, for example, in the poem “Ventriloquy Lesson” (“Fuyu ke” 腹語課) by the Taiwanese poet Chen Li 陳黎, which capitalizes upon the wealth of homophones in Chinese.37 The poem confronts readers with columns of Chinese characters that do not form any readable text. Instead, they appear as a concatenation of sinographs without meaning beyond the single unit—apart from three sentence fragments in a different font, placed in brackets: “I am affectionate . . . / as well as good . . . ” The characters in each of the two blocks separated by these sentence fragments share a formal similarity: all the characters in the first block are voiced “wu,” those in the second block “e.” Except for minor differences, each series of “wu” and “e” is written in a sequence of different characters, then repeated in reverse order. Phonic similarity contrasts with and yet is expressed by means of graphic variation. Both groups of characters are bridged, however, by the repetition of the first character in each series: “惡” that can be voiced both “e” and “wu,” depending on context and meaning. In the transition between character groups, the homography of “惡,” with its two possible pronunciations, counterbalances homophony. The logic of the two series, as a stutter of graphically different 120

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homophones, is thus supplemented with its opposite. More than half of the characters in both series are extremely rare, so rare, indeed, that a native speaker of Chinese might be forced to guess at their pronunciation by way of their phonetic components, rather than having their phonetic activation readily memorized. Consequently, though the characters at the beginning of the series transliterate sounds, the characters become more arcane and only the law of the series helps a reader voice them. In other words, Chen Li’s glossolalic ventriloquy activates the link between the sonic and the graphic facets of Chinese characters in multiple ways, relying on homophonies and homographies, on the seriality of the similar and the rupture of the dissimilar. Both blocks of homophonic characters can be seen as preparations for the intelligible text that they precede. They assume the form of a rehearsal in which the repetitions of “wu” end in the articulation of “我” (wo, “I”) of the phrase “I am affectionate . . . ” The second series likewise seems to practice the sound “e” in preparation for pronouncing “而” (er) the first syllable of “as well as” in “as well as good . . . ” As unformed sound in search of meaning, the syllables “wu” and “e” contrast with the text that becomes audible in the interstices of the ventriloquy lesson. And yet, the intelligible, meaningful fragments are placed in brackets, while the series of unintelligible sounds makes up almost all of the “text” of Chen Li’s poem. Where is ventriloquy located in this text? Indeed, how can the corporeal and oral phenomenon of ventriloquy emerge in a written text? Is it the series of guttural sounds that are in need of vocal disciplining in order to be transmuted into correctly voiced and meaningful Chinese? Or does the act of ventriloquy actually consist in voicing these meaningful fragments that seem to anchor the poem in meaning, fake in opposition to the real materiality of sound and graphy in the homophonic series? Of course, Chen Li’s “Ventriloquy” might seem like a gratuitous poetic experiment, mindful of the possibilities of spoken and written Chinese, though removed from the pragmatic realities of linguistic communication. And yet, similar phenomena that bear on the flexible link between pronunciation and graphic representation are always at play in the linguistic reality of Chinese, especially in the force field between standard Chinese and different regional Chineses or other Sinophone languages besides Mandarin. Precisely because the sinograph is not a purely phonetic writing system, it allows for different articulations according to linguistic context. Of course, this does not mean that so-called standard Chinese does not impose a fixed link between the graphic shape of a character and its pronunciation. And SonographieS

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yet, this is not anchored in the Chinese characters themselves, but always needs a supplemental script, such as the alphabetic transcription system Pinyin in the PRC or the Zhuyin system of Taiwan, as exclusive definitions of a standard. In the interest of arresting the flexible link between the sinograph and its possible voicings, and in the context of the debates on Chinese language reforms in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, as well as on Chineselanguage pedagogy, the replacement—or at least the unequivocal pairing—of the sinograph with a phonetic script occurs frequently. A similar undertone emerges in an essay by Victor H. Mair in which he advocates the use of phonetic transcription as the organizing system for a Chinese dictionary: Existing dictionaries of Mandarin are unwieldy because their primary focus is on the single graph (zi) rather than whole words (ci). The most revolutionary feature of the dictionary proposed herein is that it will be arranged by the sounds of all entries in one alphabetical listing. Such an arrangement would save typical users untold thousands of hours of fruitless searching through obscure and arcane finding systems. . . . The chief consideration throughout is the time-saving convenience of potential users, rather than adherence to some preconceived notion of the nature of Sinitic languages and the traditional orthography. There are numerous means of looking up words in Sinitic dictionaries and all except one are either slow, cumbersome, hard to learn, plagued with exceptions, or share a combination of these defects. No matter how ingeniously conceived, any primary arrangement of Chinese tetragraphs (kuangkuaizi) is bound to be difficult to use simply because there is such an inordinately large number of them (roughly 5,000 in small lexicons, 10,000 in medium ones, and 50,000 in large ones).38

Most bilingual dictionaries of Chinese have indeed espoused an alphabetical ordering, for which I, for one, am grateful. What Mair does not touch upon in his celebration of phonetic practicality, however, are the various problems—not in ordering Chinese characters or words per se—but rather with regard to the transliteration of sinographs into letters. For an alphabetic sequence to successfully order Chinese characters, the “translation” into letters has to be unequivocal—and yet there exist different systems of transcription, depending on historical, cultural, and regional contexts. Furthermore, this would suppose a clear correlation between sign and sound in a linguistic 122

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universe in which standard Mandarin, different dialects, and other Sinophone languages coexist and mix. If these difficulties do not irk the native speaker of another language who learns Chinese, probably the “typical user” that Mair has in mind, this is also, typically, the one who cannot readily match a sinograph with its pronunciation. In order to locate the meaning of a Chinese character without knowledge of its (standard) voicing, another ordering system is still needed: a system that isolates recurring elements in a character (the radicals) that are put into a fixed sequence, and then arranges characters with the same radicals according to stroke number. No dictionary of Chinese can do without this supplemental order of organization: one in which a conventionalized system of radicals and stroke order allows a user to look up a character by graphic characteristics. The alphabetical order can never reign supreme, but needs its other, one of the “numerous means of looking up words” that are “either slow, cumbersome, hard to learn, [or] plagued with exceptions.” In fact, any systematics of Chinese has to take into consideration both phonetic and graphic elements, without ever being able to lay claim to a pure system, one that would be exhaustively described through the application of only one factor, either phonetic or graphic. And indeed, the complex link between speech and writing in Chinese led to the emergence of differently organized dictionaries. The first Chinese dictionary, the Erya 爾雅, roughly translatable as Correct Diction, dating from around the third century bce, functions according to semantic categories; it arranges characters thematically. Closer to an encyclopedia, the Erya often draws on homophonies for its word definitions, rather than on content alone. In this reasoning, the link between the phonetic characteristics of two words forges a connection between word and meaning, word and world. One of its most famous examples, “Gui zhi wei (yan) gui ye” (“That which returns is called a ghost”), comes close to a cratylistic notion: what enables “歸” (gui, “to return”) to define “鬼” (gui, “ghost”) is the fact that both characters are near homophones.39 Here sound functions as a bridge between object and signification, since one character can describe and define another because of phonetic equivalence, not because of any graphic similarity. In contrast, the first full-fledged Chinese dictionary, Explanations of Simple and Compound Characters (Shuowen jiezi 說文解字), compiled during the Han dynasty (around 100 ce) by Xu Shen 許慎, includes more than nine thousand characters arranged according to graphic principles, the radicals. The graphic similarity of words that share one component also translates SonographieS

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(in most cases) into a semantic closeness, since the radical often indicates a category of meaning to which characters belong. Pronunciation, though notated, does not become a structural principle. That Xu Shen organized his dictionary according to the recurrence of the same graphic components, and not according to phonetic principles, is a matter of choice. It does not mean that he disregards phonetics, nor that this categorization suits the sinograph best. By quoting the Confucian classic Rites of Zhou (Zhouli 周禮), Xu Shen himself refers explicitly to the liu shu 六書, the six rules of character construction, categories that include both graphic and phonetic elements.40 A more recent example, the novel Dictionary of Maqiao (Maqiao cidian 馬橋詞典), published in 1995, by the PRC author Han Shaogong 韓少功, takes stock of the phonic and graphic complexities of Chinese in novelistic form.41 The novel, set in the Chinese countryside during the Cultural Revolution, represents a regionally specific, as well as nationally valid, construction of another Chinese diction. Written in standard Mandarin, the text maps a culture at the margins of Chinese tradition, but one that could or should be at its heart. In the essay “The Roots of Literature” (“Wenxue de ‘gen’ ” 文學 的 ‘根’), Han had advocated for a (re)turn to different versions of “Chineseness” after the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, for seeking alternative cultural and literary roots in the hybridity of “Chinese” expressions in order to revitalize a tradition at the verge of exhaustion and death.42 Prominently among these alternative “Chinas”—which are, nevertheless, part of the “real” China—figures the realm of the South, the location of Maqiao. Southern China, framed traditionally as a place of barbarism and exile, removed from the center of the Chinese Great Plains’ culture, becomes another possible site for the origins of Chinese culture. In Han’s novel Maqiao becomes the locale for the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, but also, ultimately, the construct of a possible future that hearkens back to another past. The novelistic form of the dictionary weds the mapping of a space to an analysis of its language. Or rather, the definitions of terms and expressions— some only to be found in Maqiao, some of a more general regional usage— and the anecdotes and local histories that surround or motivate them create a space by linguistic means. The novel’s Maqiao, however, is a textual space in which not merely the categories or concepts expressed in language but language itself (or languages in the plural) fails to add up to a coherent enterprise of world-shaping. Even as the first-person narrator (the author’s persona), an urbanite intellectual youth sent to the countryside for reeducation, tries to use language to understand the alien environment into which he 124

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finds himself thrown, reality and language never coincide. Han’s “dictionary” constantly oscillates between contradictory and yet necessarily complementary relations between world and word: on the one hand, the world in its specific locatedness shapes language; on the other, language shapes reality. In the novel, language is constantly threatened by losing its tie with the world, since language and the world might not correlate, since phenomena and words might not match, since one and the same word can express contradictory ideas. This mismatch between signified and signifier is both deeply troubling and profoundly liberating. While the noncoincidence of world and word threatens a person’s being in the world, it also protects against ideological totalization. Even in the nightmare of the political (ab)use of language, a simple change in rhythm can yield a totally different message, changing a revolutionary slogan into its opposite: a different scansion transforms the slogan “Striking at poor peasants means striking at the revolution!” into: “(1) Strike at poor peasants! (2) Oh yes! (3) Strike at the revolution!”43 The danger of language is twofold: too close a correlation between language and the world, and thus the potential vulnerability of reality to linguistic control on the one hand, and a loss of correlation between language and the world on the other. Han’s novel creatively activates linguistic differences: those between standard Chinese and the regional idiom of Maqiao, as well as those between different scripts. When the first-person narrator talks to one of the village’s marginal figures, Ma Ming 馬鳴, an incarnation of the wise madman, Ma Ming directly links the trauma of the present, the Cultural Revolution, to a rupture in the structure of meaning, through the following enigmatic declaration: “When time is confused, it must be a time of confusion.”44 What he means has to do with the Chinese script reform of the 1950s that replaced the system of Chinese characters with simplified versions by reducing stroke numbers or by replacing characters with homophones. Ma Ming invokes the order of the liu shu, the six ways of the formation of Chinese characters, to fustigate the simplification of “時” to “时” (shi, “time”) as a breach in the traditional system of knowledge: He gave another slight smile and said that these simplified characters had no logic at all. Full-form Chinese characters fall into six categories, the picto-phonetic type (in which one element represents meaning and the other sound) being easiest for communication. Take the full form character for time “時”: its meaning derives from the left-hand element, the character

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for “day,” “日”; its sound shi derives from the right-hand element, the character “寺,” which is pronounced si. If it means “日” and sounds like “寺,” why change something that works perfectly well? In simplified form “时,” its side component became “寸,” pronounced cun. The reader now had nothing to orient himself by and the character didn’t lend itself to quick memorization. What was introduced as a measure to reduce confusion in fact completely confused the texture of Chinese characters. Time being thus confused, confused times could not be far off.45

In the simplified form “时,” “時” no longer cements the link between meaning, pronunciation, and the written sign, which thus signifies the chaos of the present times in the severing of the link between world and word. Of course, Ma Ming’s and Han Shaogong’s quips on script changes are ironic. Older forms of “時” are ideographic rather than phonetic, and the novel, published in the PRC in 1995, itself uses simplified characters.46 When the novel was published in Chinese where traditional characters are still in use, in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the text was changed even before any translation into another language: from one set of characters to another. However, such a transcription from simplified to traditional characters does not change the sequence of the novel, but merely that of its table of contents, since Han chose to arrange his dictionary entries in an order of narrative sequence, rather than according to the order the section headings would espouse in a real dictionary. Only the table of contents arranges the section headings in a list, according to the stroke number of the first character of the entry heading. If Han eschewed the recommendations of Victor H. Mair and others and failed to organize his novel—either the text or at least its table of contents—according to phonetic criteria, this does not render pronunciation inconsequential. On the contrary, Han’s fascination with the local language and its semantic and phonetic specificities makes an alphabetic ordering impossible. It even throws the problematic ordering system of the alphabet into high relief. Many of the dictionary entries in Dictionary of Maqiao concern local and dialectal terms that differ from the Mandarin pronunciation set up as standard. For instance, “江,” with its standard pronunciation “jiang,” becomes “gang” in the Maqiao idiom. Only the character “江,” and not its phonetic transliteration, allows Han’s reader to translate “gang” into “jiang.” Consequently, the character is the hinge, the common ground that allows Han to set up his novel as a kind of Maqiao language primer for outsiders. In a phonetic order, one character has to appear in two places at once. 126

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But if one Chinese character allows for very different Sinophone actualizations depending on linguistic and regional context, then the transliterationdependent phonetic ordering (the alphabetic arrangement according to the standard Pinyin transcription) falls short of grasping the multiple reality of the Chinese language. However, this by no means implies the replacement of a phonetic script with the Chinese character writ large. On the contrary, the very need to distinguish between the standard and Maqiao idiom makes phonetic transliteration necessary: “江” must be supplemented by “jiang” and “gang.” Han needs the alphabetic script as an instrument of differentiation as well as mediation between different Sinophones and dialects, besides as a way of supplying examples from other languages—mainly English, sometimes French—in order to clarify differences in usage that also elucidate the cultural specificity and relativity of languages and signifying systems. The differences between standard Mandarin and the local language of Maqiao highlight the relativity of linguistic expression and harbor nostalgia for a language closer to reality. These differences are mediated by yet another difference, that of the alphabet, used mainly to transcribe sound and the sinograph. It is only in the interstices between the Chinese character and an alphabetic transliteration that the Maqiao idiom can be made visible and audible. In the text of Dictionary of Maqiao, speech is always already represented and replaced by writing. The character “江,” which heads the discussion of “gang,” is already a transliteration of a spoken practice through analogy with standard Chinese. In other words, Han Shaogong’s dictionary novel is always already in transl(iter)ation. These examples of slips of the tongue that do not disavow graphe but rather depend on it for their functioning harbor a different vision for the connection of speech and writing, of the sonic and the graphic. The sinograph, because of its potentially flexible voicing, lends itself particularly well to experiments in the connection of speech and writing. These are reflections beyond the prevalent Western media politics that tend to either equate speech and writing or invest the one over and at the expense of its really complementary other. Instead, both levels can play together to creatively enrich and destabilize each other. The issue with sinographic work is not to establish another binary and to reify the side of writing, but rather to use it as a focal point for an analysis of the medial scene as a whole.

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4 AllogrAphies

Crypto-Chinese One page in the short story collection From Island to Island: Carved Spines (You dao zhi dao: Dari Pulau Ke Pulau: Ke bei 由島至島：刻背) by the Malaysian-Chinese writer Kim-chew Ng 黃錦樹 is completely unreadable, except for the two Chinese characters that seem to form a title for the jumble of symbols they thus code as “text”: “Entreaty” (“Suqiu” 訴求).1 Made up of an array of alphabetic letters, many with accents, mathematical symbols, and punctuation marks, the six lines of text, subdivided into sentences by periods, run from left to right without spacing between groups of letters, counter to the orientation of the rest of the collection’s text from right to left, top to bottom, and back to front. And yet, “Entreaty” is written in Chinese. Its cryptic text is the outcome of an incompatibility of the encoding systems required when using Chinese on the computer. In a collection of texts that thematically links spatial displacement, the diasporic movement between different islands, and processes of inscription—the subtitle “Carved Spines,” placed on the book spine, suggests the interplay of text and corporeality—the appearance of encrypted Chinese characters in “Entreaty” engages in a reflection on mediality. The unreadability of “Entreaty” is timely. While Ng has recourse to archaic forms of Chinese writing elsewhere—the ancient seal script and the practice of oracle bone inscription—this text toys with incomprehension by way of medial interference.2 Digital encoding, not differences in script form, and modern technology, not diachronic divergence, produce strangeness. Likewise, the story, whose title seems to interpellate the reader so that it can be decrypted, shifts the emphasis from a question of translation proper to one that I have called

transgraphing:3 not a translation of content, but a change of code; a change in graphic form, not linguistic system. The cryptic character of “Entreaty” does not result from the reader’s unfamiliarity with its language, but from the encrypting of its written signifiers into a script that only the computer can read, not its human interface. As an outcome of digital noise, incomprehensibility transcends the limits of cultural and linguistic difference to become a potential problem for any language. At first sight, the enigmatic symbols of “Entreaty” reflect a problem of encoding specific to Chinese, namely, the need for additional sets of symbols—for codes such as Big-5 or Unicode— between what a user inputs and the characters displayed on the screen. However, this specific trait also reminds us that text in any language “suffers” the same transcription into digital code in order to be processed by a computer. It is not only the strange symbols of scrambled Chinese that resemble alphabetic letters and diacritical marks. On the level of digital code, all languages and scripts look alike. In “Entreaty,” the sinograph becomes cryptic. However, this does not simply repeat the tendency of Western writers and thinkers to harp on the mystic strangeness of another script. Rather, the alterity invoked here resonates in every script insofar as it needs media for its embodiment. In this sense, “Entreaty” practices allography: a different type of writing, a scripting of alterity.4 Yet, its writing does not set out to prove, once again, that the cultural other is different, but rather uses Chinese writing in mediated form to show the differences internal to the sinographic script system. Through digital scramble, Chinese becomes other to itself, no longer the object of Western script fantasies and phobias. At the same time, the strong emphasis on mediality extends allography, an underscoring of multiplicity and thus strangeness within one script tradition, potentially to all graphies. As such, it marks a strong contrast to allographies that use metaphors of specific other script traditions for a generalized theory of the cryptic or hidden, for instance, psychoanalysis. For Sigmund Freud, scripts such as hieroglyphs and sinographs became privileged figures for the hidden messages of the unconscious, especially those of dreams. Since Freud imagined the work of the psyche as an instance of censorship, the task of the analyst is one of translation. The work of dreams (Traumarbeit) avails itself of a set of advanced “cryptographic” principles: condensation (Verdichtung), displacement (Verschiebung), consideration for figurability (Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit), and secondary elaboration (Sekundäre Bearbeitung). The dream thought (Traumgedanke) does not merely encode the dream content 130

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(Trauminhalt) by switching its signs for different ones. Rather, condensation clusters and superimposes the signs of the dream onto one another, while displacement rearranges them. The third and fourth principles of the dream work make sure that the ensuing code actually makes a certain sense. Unlike the scrambled letters of “Entreaty,” the dream thus also hides the fact that it is a cryptic message, rather than simply a sequence of strange images. Since the real libidinal dream content becomes radically transformed by these cryptographic principles, and thus unreadable, psychoanalysis has to step in to decrypt it. For Freud, the psychoanalytical interpretation of dreams consists indeed in the deciphering of a secret script (Geheimschrift) that psychic censorship has rendered in cipher.5 He imagines the relation between dream content and dream thought in analogy to linguistic difference as one between original and translation into another language. Yet, psychoanalysis’s job is even more difficult than that of a translator, since the dream content uses not only a different language, but a different script, one of images (Bilderschrift).6 The dream, reduced by Freud to a mainly visual experience, projects images that are really part of a language, much like hieroglyphs or rebuses (Bilderrätsel).7 The process of transposition from one sign system into another mediates between image and word, as well as between two different scripts:8 one supposedly phonetic, one pictorial in nature. The problem, one common to an iconographic treatment of non-Western scripts, lies in the ambivalent desires projected onto the other script: like phonetic scripts, it has to function like a writing system, but unlike Western scripts, it must consist not of letters, but of pictures. Likewise, Freud underscores both that the “representations (Darstellungsbilder) of the dream are mainly visual images, not words (visuelle Bilder, nicht Worte),” and that we have to read them as signs, not purely for their pictorial value.9 Like many other iconographic fantasies, Freudian psychoanalysis finds its examples in Egyptian hieroglyphs as well as the sinograph. Consequently, psychoanalysis becomes script archeology, since “the interpretation of a dream is quite analogous to the deciphering of an old pictorial script, such as the Egyptian hieroglyphs.”10 Yet, the massive encoding that Freud attributes to the dream work requires more of its illustrative example than just pictorial qualities. According to Freud, the dream manipulates words by treating them not merely as pictures, but as things within its dream logic. And Chinese characters apparently came closest to the idea of material language, not only because they could be treated like images, but, more importantly, because they appeared to be especially malleable chunks of linguistic matter: AllogrAphies

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For our comparison the fact that there is almost no grammar in this language [Chinese] is even more interesting. One cannot say of any of the monosyllabic words whether they are substantives, verbs, or adjectives, and all changes of the words through which one could know gender, number, ending, tense, or modus are lacking. Actually, the language consists only of raw material (Rohmaterial), similar to the way in which our thought language is dissolved into raw material by the dream work by suppressing all expressions of relations. In Chinese, all cases of undecidability are left to the understanding of the listener, who is guided by context.11

Chinese, then, is more cryptic than other likely candidates, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, at least according to Freud’s catalogue of age-old biases about the Chinese language and script: since Chinese lacks grammar—or what Indo-European grammatology defined as such, namely, conjugation and declension and fixed word type—its understanding depends strongly on context.12 Freud’s descriptor of “raw material” not only places Chinese into the category of archaic, since it is an “unsophisticated” language, framing characters as isolated monoliths rather than cogs in a linguistic machine, but also enhances its figurative tie to the unconscious. Imagined by Freud and Freudians, the unconscious exists as unwieldy, unprocessed material, forced into the catacombs of the psyche so as not to threaten and interrupt psychic stability. Chinese, the most cryptic of languages, becomes the perfect cipher for the code of the unconscious. Of course, the dream work does not write Chinese. And psychoanalytical acumen, rather than Chinese-language skills, might show us the way to the secret meaning of the unconscious, if we were to believe Freud. In other words, Chinese works as a metaphor. Fine. Nevertheless, in order to understand allography, we have to understand the logic of such metaphors. For Freud, as well as for a tradition of psychoanalytically inspired theorists, the strangeness of the psyche, a universal trait common to all human beings irrespective of culture, warranted an illustrative use by way of a culturally specific script or language. This is problematic, even though (or really because) it constitutes a typical example of the way theory uses examples, by expressing the supposedly universal difference between the unconscious and the conscious parts of the psyche through the culturally specific difference between hieroglyphs or sinographs and Western scripts. Apart from the need to couch one language, namely, Chinese, as particularly different and cryptic, such an approach also unconsciously validates theory’s erasure of cultural 132

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specificity. Since the culturally other has already appeared on the level of example, singled out as metaphorical proof of a generalized condition, the applicability of the concept thus underpinned for the cultural tradition from which an illustrative example has been culled can be taken for granted without further analysis. The cryptology of psychoanalysis and its theoretical heirs avails itself of the metaphors of translation and transcription, while at the same time disavowing the implications of such an analogical link between the process of linguistic and graphic transposition and the interpretation of the unconscious. The translation between different languages and the transcription between different graphic regimes and signifying logics—from the visual materiality of the rebus to words—are mere catachreses for the similar yet different procedure of probing the depths of the psyche. But what happens when the dream work or the unconscious actually thinks in different languages, for example in the case of the so-called Wolfman, the object of a study on psychic encrypting by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, aptly entitled Cryptonymy (Cryptonymie)?13 The Wolfman’s unconscious, so Abraham and Torok insist, works with a multilingual code, indicative of the subject’s familiarity with different languages and the different affective links represented by each linguistic substratum. But even there where the unconscious already works in translation, the metaphorical use of cultural and linguistic difference remains untouched. The crypt of the psyche, invoked in Jacques Derrida’s preface to Cryptonomy, both tomb and cipher, continues to work as a generalized metaphor, without second thoughts about linguistic specificity.14 If all psychic work is translation, if all psychoanalytical work is decoding, what does this mean for translation proper, or for processes of transgraphing? Nothing, since the figurative and the literal levels of theoretical metaphoricity are disconnected from the outset. Psychoanalysis itself depends on a process of en-crypting: the entombing of concrete linguistic and cultural specificity. In such cases, allography, as the scripting of difference by way of the metaphor of another script, becomes a dangerous production of otherness. But if Chinese is the most alien of languages to some, would not a Chinese allography run the risk of reinforcing the cryptic mystique of alterity? Not if it emphasizes hybridity and difference at the heart of the sinograph, rather than treating the Chinese script tradition as an absolutely different essence. Not if it espouses another allography, one in which difference is not posited as absolute, but rather as a heterogeneity that fights against the dictates of the one. AllogrAphies

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Such allographic interventions, attuned to particular, though wary of, essentialized differences, often happen at the margins of Chinese culture, at diasporic sites such as Taiwanese or Malaysian-Chinese literature. The background of diasporic Chinese authors places them in a precarious position: they are insiders and outsiders with respect to different cultures. Even as they are called upon to be Chinese elsewhere the suspicion of having left the “core” of Chinese culture already places them at the outside.15 From a position in which one’s own claim to belong to a cultural system and its mode of inscription has become brittle, the discursive self-affirmation of cultural sameness and the exploitation of the cultural “other” are less likely. Once one’s own position within a culture has been questioned by its more authoritative representatives, once the label of the “same” becomes contested grounds, the self finds herself in close vicinity to the “other.” This other, however, can also never become a supplemental, secondary “same,” even as it remains elusive to becoming totally “othered.” Frequently, for diasporic Chinese writers, the Chinese writing system is both the inevitable basis for signification and something they cannot lay a total claim to. The resulting in-between position fuels texts that recuperate a hybrid and changing sinograph against both Sinocentric discourses and Western theories of signification. One strategy of rendering the sinograph other to itself consists in renegotiating the boundaries between writing and nonwriting, between culture and savagery, especially through the figure of tattooing. The savage does not write, at least not quite. Whenever the savage writes, as in the famous “Writing Lesson” from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques, she does not really master the art of writing, though she does succumb to its aura of power.16 There, the ethnographer, traversing the Brazilian rainforest in search of a primitive purity before and beyond the horrors of civilization, witnesses how a Nambikwara chief imitates writing by tracing wavy lines onto a piece of paper and “reading” from it. Having learned his lesson on writing from one of the objects of his ethnographic gaze and pen, Lévi-Strauss begins a reflection on culture and (Western) civilization and a critique of writing. Writing—so the ethnographer muses, singling out China, at the end of a timeline that begins with Egypt, as one of his prime example—is foremost an instrument of power, accompanied by and subservient to empire building and the formation of a class or caste system. In his flight from writing’s and civilization’s violent sway, when LéviStrauss censures writing as an instrument of state power, he nevertheless carries it with him wherever he goes, spreading its germs even to the remotest corner, to the most primitive tribe in the Brazilian jungle. The savage cannot 134

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write, or, at least, she should not write, lest she undermine the ethnographer’s fantasy, the construction of civilization’s other. The ethnographer’s pen can only create the “primitive,” as the unwritten and nonwriting other, whenever his own writing act retains its exclusivity. And yet, what the savage does is uncannily close to writing. The savage can trace decorative lines on clay vessels, weave patterned cloth, or paint and mark his own body: “Of all that is savage about savages, the most savage is what they do to themselves. They paint, puncture, tattoo, scarify, cicatrize, circumcise, subincise themselves.”17 For most of European anthropology, tattooing serves as a marker of cultural difference, or rather of a lack of culture. And yet, especially in primitivist discourses that attempt to trace the prehistory of modern civilization from supposedly less developed cultures, tattooing is also often framed as a precursor to writing. Tattooing, then, is almost writing, but it is also the other of writing. The Taiwanese poet Chen Li 陳黎 exploits the uncanny relation between writing and tattoo in a series of poems, “Five Savages” (“Wu hu” 五胡), from the collection Light/Slow (Qing/man 輕／慢), published in 2009, in order to critique primitivist discourses. Chen Li had repeatedly thematized the indigenous cultures of Taiwan in various earlier poems, such as “Formosa 1661” (“Fuermosha: yiliuliuyi” 福爾摩沙．一六六一) from the collection The Edge of the Island (Daoyu bianyuan 島嶼邊緣).18 Unlike his indigenousthemed poems that focus on Taiwan, “Five Savages” has the “primitive” talk back to a cultural tradition (largely associated with mainland Chinese Sinocentrism) that produced him as savage by highlighting the biased structure of naming in particular, and of the ethnocentrism of the Chinese language and script in general. Yet, the antiprimitivist content of the poems comes in a poetic form based on a sophisticated play with and comprehension of the Chinese written character: the hidden character poem (yinzi shi 隱字詩), a poetic riddle that requires the reader to guess a specific character through the poem’s content, as well as by way of homophony and the repetition of character components. The last poem of the series “Five Savages,” “Clan” (shi 氏), for instance, hides the character “氐” (di), the name of the Di ethnicity: 氏 你們自居世界的中心 你們高 我是邊緣 我低

Clan You live at the center of the world You are elevated I am the margin I am lowly

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我沒有名字， 沒有文字 我的臉就是我的姓氏 我在我的下顎刺青 自我命名，看清楚—— 氐 非你族類 非人的 低 斷手缺筆 依然抵抗 抵中心 抵高尚 抵神祇

I have no name, I have no writing My face is my name and clan From the tattoo on my lower jaw I derive my name, see clearly— Di I am not of your ethnicity I am not human Lowly Broken hands without a brush still resist resist the center resist nobility resist your gods19

Like all the poems in the “Five Savages” series, the poetic voice adopts the position of the marginal, subaltern subject. As such, the text gives not only voice but also, in a supplemental turn, writing to the minority thematized in the poem. Chen Li’s poetic craft carries the Di from “lowly” (di亻+ 氐) to “resist” (di扌+ 氐). Even though they are without writing, the Di ethnicity are given a name (shi 氏) through the graphic materialization of the imaginary of tattooing: a spot or line added onto the lower jaw that finds graphic expression in the poem as a dot added to the character “clan” to produce the character “氐” for Di. The five poems, written from the perspective of the “savage” produced through the culturally biased lens of Sinocentrism, debunk the concept of the “savage” as a discursive production. However, Chen Li’s critique of Chinese ethnocentrism also relies on the symbol par excellence of Chinese civilization: its script. In the postface to Light/Slow, the poet even underlines the untranslatability of his poetic experiment, because of the “Chineseness” of some of his poems, their dependence on sinographic materiality.20 However, the use of the Chinese language in “Five Savages” marks its cultural context not as one of Chinese purity or Sinocentrism, but as permeated with other traditions, and open to other meanings with and against its scriptural genealogy. Chen Li produces a critique of ethnocentrism, ventriloquizing nonChinese voices that quote and contest this very ethnocentric discourse. The genre of the poems, with its focus on the specificity of the Chinese script, however, also reinscribes the critique in a reaffirmation of Chinese culture. Chen Li rewrites Chineseness (differently) through the specter of one of 136

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its marginalized others. And yet, the figure of the “primitive” other obeys a supplemental logic: the sinographic script gives voice, face, and name to the ethnographic other, both in the ethnocentric discourse of indigenous peoples as “savages” and in Chen Li’s own poems. In their defiance of Chinacentrism, the five “savages” of Chen Li’s series also stand in for a Taiwanese identity that is also situated at the margins of Chinese culture. Consequently, the very instrumentalization of the “primitive” and the destabilization and critique of the Chinese tradition allow for the representation of a symbolic Taiwanese identity that is at once Chinese and (its) other. In other words, the savage other is inscribed in order to craft another Chinese identity that can be ideologically detached from Sinocentrism. And yet, while the sinograph precariously supplements an absence of writing, the Chinese script itself is symbolically punctured by the savage inscription of tattooing. By equating the “dot” in the Chinese character Di with a tattooed clan sign, Chen Li wreaks a subtle link between writing and tattooing. He poetically restages the possible savage origin of Chinese culture, since the character wen 文, which embodies all that is literate, civilized, and culturally sophisticated, has originated, according to some theories, as a tattooed sign, and thus as the sign for a tattooed body.21 James J. Y. Liu’s etymological reconstruction of the term refutes such a link between wen and tattooing by pointing to the scarcity of evidence for newer theories that have wen originate as a sign for a tattooed human figure in ritual contexts.22 In a footnote, he further argues against such a connection by pointing out that tattooing was considered a barbarian practice, not part of Chinese culture: “It is hard to believe that the Northern Chinese, after having practiced tattooing for an unknown period of time, stopped doing so and began to consider the custom barbarian when they found other people practicing it.”23 However, as Liu shows, wen did not only refer to writing, but actually to different marks present in decorative or natural patterns: The traditional interpretation, as given in the first Chinese etymological dictionary, Hsü Shen’s Explanations of Simple and Compound Characters (Shuo-wen chieh-tsu, ca. A.D. 100), seems more plausible: “Wen [consists of] intersecting strokes, representing a criss-cross pattern.” This interpretation is corroborated by various ancient texts. For example, in a section of the Book of Documents (Shu-ching, the earliest historical work in Chinese) generally accepted as authentic and probably belonging to the eleventh century B.C., there is mention of wen-pei or “striped cowrie,” and a poem

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which has been dated 778 B.C. in the Book of Poetry (Shih-ching, the first anthology of Chinese poetry) contains the phrase wen-yin or “patterned mat,” explained by commentators as a mat made of tiger skin. In some texts ranging in date from the fifth century to the first century B.C., wen is used to refer to various kinds of physical markings or patterns, such as birth marks on the palm of the hand, patterns on colored woven silk, and painted designs on carriages.24

Wen, not unlike some European etymologies of terms of writing, such as the Greek graphein, shows the vicinity of writing and other means of producing marks on a surface. The homophones wen 文 and wen 紋, or “pattern,” still faintly echo the fact that the character that represents the idea of writing today, 文, had a much broader spectrum of meaning, much of which is now expressed by 紋. If wen could have designated birthmarks and shell markings, as well as man-made patterns, at some point in its long etymological history, why expend so much effort on excluding tattooing from the list? Liu’s argument seems to replicate the cultural bias that he locates in the culture of Northern China: that between civilization and savagery, between one’s own culture and its others. But did early “China”—or what we reconstruct from the vantage point of the present as such—necessarily constitute a unified culture rather than a conglomerate of divergent traditions? Just maybe, “Chinese” culture or wen also had room for the “savage” practice of tattooing at some point. At least, such is the hypothesis that the Malaysian-Chinese author Zhang Guixing 張貴興 develops in his novel Monkey Cup (Hou bei 猴杯), published in 2000. Zhang’s novel traces the journey of its Malaysian-Chinese protagonist Zhi 雉 into Borneo’s rainforest in a process of renouncing his Chinese heritage and becoming part of the native Dayak, though, instead of pitting Dayak culture against Chineseness, the text suggests deep cultural connections between ancient China and the indigenous South Seas culture. Tattooing as a shared cultural practice forges this link. The novel pays close attention to patterned objects and the intricately tattooed bodies of the Dayak. Badou 巴都, the native guide who accompanies the novel’s protagonist into the rainforest, and who is the son of the tattoo artist Abanban, has such a densely decorated body that it has become impossible to distinguish between man-made tattoos and the natural patterns of birthmarks: [Badou] decorated his body so densely with patterns (wen 紋), because he wanted to cover the birthmarks all over his body. However, in the end, even

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he himself was unable to distinguish which ones were tattoos (wenban 紋 斑), which ones were birthmarks (taiji 胎記). Finally, nobody remembered that his body had originally been covered with birthmarks.  .  .  . Even his face and his neck were full of tattoos . . . or birth marks, although they were so beautifully arranged that it was difficult to imagine that there could be birthmarks among them.25

The passage, with its conflation of the marks of culture (tattooing) and those of nature (birthmarks), as well as the insistent use of 紋, serves as a reminder of the closeness between such patterns and the traces of writing, or wen 文. This sets the stage for a more explicit equation of tattooing and Chinese writing. In the text, the protagonist’s former teacher Luo 羅 attempts to prove the connection between prehistoric China and the South Seas: It is said that the people of Yin steamed and ate the brains of their prisoners of war. Once steamed, the brain would congeal, and one could discern beautiful brain patterns (nao wen 腦紋). If one used a very fine blade and cut them into slices, the brain patterns were even more gorgeous and varied. The people of Yin carved the brain patterns onto bone, stone, and bronze objects. According to legend, this was a kind of worship of intelligence. There are some who think that these were the beginnings of the taotie design (taotie wen 饕餮紋). . . . When King Wu of the Zhou attacked the east, the people of Yin in the Shandong Province fled the country. Some of them fled to the South Seas. Is it not true that Yin bronze objects have been found here? I suspect that the Yin somehow influenced Borneo’s indigenous decorative art.26

This interpretation markedly reverses notions of civilization and so-called savagery on two grounds. Firstly, it equates the emergence of writing with a cannibalistic ritual, thus mixing two prominent metaphors of culture and preculture—even though the raw has already given way to the cooked: in this primal scene, cannibalism is not an uncivilized state whose suppression marks the entry into a state of society and civilization, but a necessary step toward writing. This mythic configuration destabilizes the transition from preculture to culture, from the “primitive” to the “civilized.” Secondly, Luo’s theory also blurs the boundary between the “savage” Dayak and the “civilized” Chinese. With its primitivist thrust, Luo’s research project aims at confirming and reconstructing part of China’s mythic prehistory by studying AllogrAphies

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Dayak aesthetics. The South Seas space is nostalgically envisioned as preserving the source of Chineseness. However, the desire for a return to the origin leads to a confusing tautological circle. Even if the Dayak used the practice of copying brain patterns—actually, we readers later learn that this is indeed the case for the tattoo artist Abanban—what would this prove? That the Dayak received the influence of early Chinese migrants? That ancient Chinese culture survives in the South Seas? In any case, Luo’s whole reasoning is flawed by the typical primitivist aporia: the wish to locate the origin of one’s own culture, while, at the same time, wanting to maintain a scenario of cultural difference and hierarchy. Rather than reconstructing an alternative Chinese culture, Luo’s obsession with the cannibalistic scenario of Chinese prehistory links Borneo’s indigenous culture and ancient China, questioning any notion of essential Chineseness. Zhang’s reinvention of the prehistory of Chinese writing in the South Seas diaspora is especially apt, since, for diasporic Chinese writers, the Chinese writing system is both the inevitable basis for signification and something not totally theirs. The in-between position of writers like Zhang Guixing enables them to grasp their specific situation of desire and dispossession vis-à-vis the sinograph and use it as creative energy against Sinocentric discourses of Chinese essence and Western theories of signification. That this uncanny investment of the sinograph happens through a transposition onto cultural otherness is intriguing, but only since the otherness of that which is used as a cipher for the sinograph is staged in complex terms: Dayak tattooing is traced back to the (equally alien) rituals of Chinese prehistory; the Chinese archive is connected to the “exotic” reality of the South Seas. The crafting of a savage Chinese in Zhang Guixing’s novels does not consist in the regress to a notion of (pre)cultural purity or radical alterity. Rather, Chinese becomes savage precisely because it is traversed without being erased by other traditions, other sign systems, other significations, and other interpretive possibilities.27 Whereas Chen Li and Zhang Guixing blur the boundaries between the sinograph as symbol of Chinese civilization and the “savage” prescripts of tattooing and patterning, Kim-chew Ng, the author of “Entreaty,” frequently thematizes ancient Chinese script traditions and archives, such as oracle bone inscription and seal script, in order to destabilize their Chineseness.28 In the short story “Allah’s Command” (“Ala de zhiyi” 阿拉的旨意), from the same collection as his experiment in digital lettrism, “Entreaty,” for instance, Kim-chew Ng stages a desperate act of scriptural loyalism.29 As the title, with 140

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its evocation of a Muslim value system through Chinese characters, suggests, the text thematizes the friction between Chinese diasporic culture and the Islamic tradition of the Malaysian nation-state. At first sight, “Allah’s Command” takes the shape of a case study: can a Malaysian-Chinese individual bury all his cultural conditioning and become a “true” subject, not only of the nation-state of Malaysia, but also of its official religion, Islam? The object of the “experiment,” the text’s first-person narrator, a militant fighter for the Communist party, has been saved from execution by the narrator’s childhood friend, a politically influential Malay. The protagonist’s life, however, is only spared upon his signing a lifelong contract: he has to change his name to Musi Abdullah, adopt Islam, and live the rest of his life as a Malay, forbidden to use his native language of Chinese. Even the gesture of cultural abnegation is scripted in contradictory ways, though. The very act of resigning his Chinese identity happens in Chinese: this is true not only for the short story itself, but also for the protagonist’s signing of the “contract” in which he agrees to relinquish his cultural, religious, and ethnic identity: “Dazed, I signed it with trembling hand, and when I looked at it, once I was done signing, I saw a group of chaotic Chinese characters.”30 A similar structure of ambivalent signification also determines the protagonist’s attempt at a posthumous inscription, which is supposed to re-mark his Chinese identity on his gravestone, as he tries to undo his cultural betrayal toward the end of his life. He writes his epitaph in Chinese, a script system that he has been forced to abjure for the past thirty years of his life, as an expression of his cultural and ethnic origin: Lately, I had chosen several stones, and prepared them in order to inscribe some traces on them (mingke yixie henji 銘刻一些痕跡). It would be too evident to carve Chinese graphs, since this would be discovered immediately and entail big trouble. I remembered that the ancient graphs were all pictographs (xiangxing 象形), and yet, I did not know any seal script, and had to rely entirely on my imagination and on associative compounds (huiyi 會意) [that is, ideograms]. To carve some patterns or images (tu’an huo tuxiang 圖案或圖像) would not amount to an infraction of my contract. First, I incised a distorted pig—my birth sign. After the period, I added my name and surname .  .  . I drew several coins and seashells such as the island dwellers might sometimes find by the

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seaside. My last name is Liu (劉), a homophone of “niu” (“ox”). My name is Cai (財, “wealth”)—the same as those of many children whose parents eagerly wished for riches. . . . I formally asked [my wife Na] to erect the stone in front of my grave after my death. Also, I showed her the broken stele that had been dug up accidentally while clearing the land. Only two incomplete graphs were left: “ .” I was not able to ascertain if they really were the two graphs that I guessed. In any case, I instructed my wife to put it behind my carved symbols, facing the sky. I explained to her: “These are short trees and grass.”31

This passage effects for the reader what the short story’s protagonist aims at: the inscription of his Chinese name. While the reader knows from early on that he changed his name to Musi Abdullah, she learns only here what his Chinese name is: Liu Cai 劉財. Whereas Liu/Musi probably could have written his Chinese name in an alphabetic transcription without risking punishment, the marking of his Chinese identity calls for the use of the Chinese script. Even though the signified stays the same, even though the signifier (as the signified’s sound image) is identical, it would still not be the same to write “Liu Cai” instead of “劉財,” though. For the protagonist, the use of an alphabetic transcription would lessen, even adulterate, the inscription of his Chinese identity. Thus, while he is not allowed to write “劉財,” he cannot not write it. The solution? A different kind of transcription, one that uses both phonetic and pictographic principles. Cai renders his birth sign, the Pig, by carving a pig’s image into stone—an image, though, that is so distorted that his wife has difficulty guessing its meaning. The representation of his surname, Liu, however, exceeds the scope of a purely pictographic sign system. Here, he has to use not only imagination but also associative compounds, one of the liu shu 六書, the six categories for forming Chinese characters, by combining different signifying elements into one graph. The strange graph that emerges and that he claims represents his first and last name, however, remains undecipherable, except for Liu/Musi himself: not only does he represent the signified of “Cai” (wealth) in a pictographic manner by incising likenesses of shells used as currency—this is indeed really the graphic etymology of the left part of the sign “財”—but he also uses Chinese graphs for a phonetic transcription, replacing “劉” with “牛” because of their homophonic relation. This indicates that the protagonist does not use standard Chinese, but rather a dialect, or a Sinophone language whose pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar differ from 142

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so-called standard Chinese. In standard Mandarin, “牛” (ox) is pronounced “niu,” whereas the surname “劉” is pronounced “liu.” The outcome is a graph so cryptic that it can be neither read mimetically, as a pictographic image of something, nor deciphered by somebody familiar with the Chinese language and script. Even as Liu/Musi reinscribes his cultural identity in the face of oppression, it becomes unreadable. His use of the formative principles of the Chinese script backfires since, lacking knowledge of the history of this writing system and its earlier graphs, such as ancient seal script, his attempt at a graphic regression for the sake of encrypting can only lead to a precarious imitation, partly conditioned by a variation in phonetic actualization. In this context, the two strange characters Liu produces resemble the two fragmented, unreadable characters on an ancient stele: yet another symbol of an interrupted cultural tradition. What Liu/Musi does produce in this attempt at scriptural loyalism is in fact a hybridization of the Chinese script. His crypto-Chinese—both encrypted and unviable—reverses rather than endorses an identity politics connected to writing. Ng’s protagonist attempts to assume a pro-Chinese position in a situation of cultural strife between different writing systems in Malaysia. Nevertheless, the outcome of scriptural loyalism is problematic, to the point of perverting the connection between Chineseness and the Chinese script. Of course, a politics that cathects writing to identity is itself already perverse, since it creates an overdetermination of signification. It overburdens the Chinese script with meaning, forces it to express too much: meaning by way of signification, and Chineseness by way of the form of signification (the writing system). In the case of “Allah’s Command,” the protagonist’s crypto-Chinese accomplishes neither. It is literally unreadable. Even the secondary meaning it is intended to produce—Chinese identity cast in stone—is performative in a precarious way: the protagonist (re)produces his Chinese identity in the act of using the sinographic script, but a reader cannot recognize his text as Chinese. Consequently, the text’s protagonist betrays Chineseness doubly: once through the act of abjuring his cultural identity to begin with, and a second time precisely when he attempts to reverse his first betrayal. The recreation of sinographic writing supposedly professes enduring loyalism to his cultural origins beyond the grave (as an epitaph) but not up to death, since his use of a cryptosinographic script shows that he is not really willing to risk his life in an act of defying the scriptural prohibition imposed by the Malay authorities.32 AllogrAphies

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Should we read Ng’s short story “Allah’s Command,” then, as nothing more than a pessimistic prognosis of the loss of Chinese language, culture, and identity in the Chinese diaspora?33 Is even a resistance like Liu Cai’s, a desperate attempt at preserving the Chinese script in the face of alphabetic pressure, doomed to end in a mere caricature of the sinograph portending its inevitable final erasure? Apart from the fear of the loss of language, and especially of writing, another, equally dire specter of the sinograph emerges in a diasporic context: its timeless, splendid isolation, which turns the rich tradition of Chinese culture, with its creative potential and multiple local variants, into a strait-jacket, a venerated, though no less deadly, dungeon, the crypt of identity petrified. “Allah’s Command” explores the narrow ground between two negative extremes: a loss of (Chinese) identity due to an excess of change and a loss of (Malaysian-Chinese) identity through stagnation, through servile imitation of an idealized Chinese cultural tradition. The path that Ng’s story “Allah’s Command” suggests is not an easy one to tread. The inscriptive logos of the Chinese tradition represented as pure and eternally immutable must be contested, like the excavated stele whose fragmented graphs are being reread and reinterpreted. On the other hand, the pressure of another national cultural tradition, that of the Malay language and ethnicity coupled with the Islamic religion, renders an attempt at recuperating the Chinese tradition extremely urgent, even if this results in an individual’s sign system that is incomprehensible to the very cultural group whose identity is being salvaged thus. The protagonist’s cryptic excavation of the Chinese script seems to spring from a logic of cultural exclusionism: either Chinese or Malay. And yet, while he tries to craft an inscription that would only mark him as Chinese, as Liu Cai, in this very act, Musi also affirms his identity: the representation of shells used to express his last name are locally specific to his Malay island prison; the preparation of two tombstones echoes a Muslim burial tradition. In this sense, the story’s vision of cultural identity presents itself as far more complex than the protagonist’s own perspective. The very existence of the short story—an account of the protagonist’s experiences after several decades of life as a Malay—bears witness to the futility of the attempt at cultural reeducation, since it shows that the tradition of Chinese culture cannot remain hidden even after a lapse of decades. Ng’s short story deals with sinographic inscriptions not only on the level of plot but also on a metalevel. Due to the complex framing of the text, the cultural identity involved in the production of the text we are reading remains undecidable. The paratexts of “Allah’s Command”—its title, but also a citation from the Qu’ran that precedes it—seem to assign the short story to 144

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a Muslim author, while the text’s continuous use of Chinese contradicts this reading. The bracketed line after the title “Allah’s Command” sounds even more enigmatic: “The original is written in Malay.”34 It signals that the text we are reading is a translation, the Chinese copy of a Malay original, even though the beginning of the story proper has the first-person narrator and self-declared author of the account, Musi/Liu, insist on his use of Chinese: Whenever I take up the pen, I become infinitely confused. What is worse, I have not written Chinese characters for close to thirty years, and do not entirely remember the shape of many characters (they would be lacking one stroke or have several additional ones, or I would remember other shapes, or only have a vague idea, or only remember their pronunciation . . . ). And yet, even so, I definitely would not use Malay letters (Malai pinyin 馬來拼音) as a stand-in, but rather use Chinese homophones instead.35

Even faced with the danger of producing an incomprehensible text, the first-person narrator cannot desist from his politically inspired but pragmatically precarious use not only of the Chinese language, but, more importantly, of the Chinese writing system. We readers are thus reading a Chinese text that poses as a translation from the Malay of a text that its author (the text’s narrator) marks as written in precarious Chinese. Undecidability compromises total cultural and scriptural difference; Liu Cai’s scriptural loyalism forms the content of a text that suggests incommensurable versions of its written form: “Allah’s Command” poses either as Liu Cai’s first-person account, supposedly written in faulty, half-forgotten Chinese, or as the Chinese translation of a Malay original. This draws attention to the author’s own predicament of sinographic inscription. On a plot level, he can stage the sinograph’s decentering and script its reinvention, however precariously. Nevertheless, on a metalevel he can merely hint at the fact that this reinvention can only happen through the literary medium of a fairly standardized sinograph. Only the mysterious fragment of two Chinese graphs transcribed into the text and the reader’s imagination of the monstrous graph that transcribes Liu Cai’s name emerge as unruly, elusive remains within a body of salvaged sinographs. Only these two spectral graphs really graphically mark a difference that exceeds the inevitable logic of marking difference through sameness, of salvaging the specificity of a Malaysian-Chinese literary articulation in and with the dominant tradition of the sinograph. AllogrAphies

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Ng’s text stages this complex scriptural incommensurability, but is written in relatively standard Chinese. If we reformulate this in terms of its scriptural politics, a complex constellation of graphic difference and sameness emerges. “Allah’s Command” is less interested in pitting alphabetic Malay and logographic Chinese against each other. Rather, graphic difference is shown at work in the Chinese script itself: Chinese writing becomes other to itself, as the sinograph becomes its own allograph. On the level of Ng’s text, the betrayed ideal is precisely the notion of a scriptural identity politics. These examples activate Chinese writing as allography in different ways: digitalized Chinese is encrypted, the Chinese script is couched as the protoscript of tattooing, and Chinese writing is reinvented as crypto-Chinese, the production of a fake script that erases any possibility of a linguistic community, even as it desperately tries to inscribe “Chineseness.” These different allographies do not reinvest Chinese writing with an essentialist mystique, as a privileged script that magically anoints its inscriber with a Chinese identity. Instead, they put into motion processes of transcription that question the very boundaries of identity and alterity. Chinese—understood as an inscriptive tradition—is neither an unequivocal sign of identity for its wielder, nor the exotic other for those outside of its tradition. Instead, in its various contexts and material embodiments, the sinograph is constantly, though subtly, rendered other to itself—or, rather, other to a hallucination of its univocal essence. Allography as a theory of communication in transference, of encoding and decoding, is related to alterity only secondarily or perversely: it formulates a theory of signification in general while tarrying with the notion of the “other” writing. It exploits cultural and scriptural difference—between Dayak tattooing or Malay and the Chinese script—but only to reposit it as a difference within a seemingly unified tradition. Allography, in the shape of the literary strategies under analysis here, constantly denies the idea of a universal signification without specific materiality, a linguistic or script tradition, or a cultural context, even as it also disallows the framing of languages and script traditions as simply untranslatable, inscrutable, and alien.

grAphiC pArAsites When the protagonist in Kim-chew Ng’s story “Allah’s Command” tries to express his loyalty to his Chinese heritage in the rebellious gesture of inscribing his epitaph in Chinese, another sign system enters the equation: “First, I 146

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incised a distorted pig—my birth sign. After the period (juhao 句號), I added my name and surname.”36 On an already multilayered surface of inscriptive traditions, a smudge appears, a point, imperceptible almost, of contention: the punctuation mark intercalated between the two crypto-graphs crafted by the protagonist, a period that separates his birth sign from the strange compound character of his name. What is the status of this strange mark in the text, this seemingly gratuitous spot? How does it recode the text and its graphic politics? In the protagonist’s attempt at imitating seal script, the punctuation mark—irrespective of if we want to translate the term generically (juhao 句號 literally translates as “sentence mark”) or in its specific modern usage and form, a small circle with functions equivalent to the period—strikes us as odd. Even though Chinese writing has a long tradition of punctuation marks, from the dividing lines between textual units on oracle bones onward, punctuation remained nonsystematized and variable in form and function. Until the era of Chinese language reform under the aegis of modernization in the early twentieth century, punctuation marks were merely supplemental to Chinese.37 You could take them or leave them. This is, of course, true for punctuation in the history of writing in general and not specific to Chinese writing. Indeed, alphabetic writing systems show a similar history: the need for punctuation, even the necessity to mark the boundaries between words by spaces, evolved, in most cases, in a relatively late stage of writing. However, the inconsistent and fluctuating usage of punctuation marks in Chinese textual history, until the moment in which writing as a medium began to be evaluated according to Western standards, testifies to the fact that, for a long time, it was perceived neither as a necessity nor as an improvement upon the communicative powers of the script as such. Punctuation marks are other to the Chinese script in a strange way: the injunction to systematically use punctuation and some punctuation marks are grafts from Western writing systems, even though the process of importation transmuted some of the symbols according to the need and spacing of Chinese, sometimes in accordance with earlier Chinese punctuation marks. And yet, such marks are always allographic, other to the script they punctuate. Upon closer scrutiny, however, the smudge of the “句號” in the cryptosinographic text in “Allah’s Command” is not so much anachronistic as alien to the protagonist’s intention. The protagonist’s avowed ignorance of Chinese seal script might not necessarily indicate that he would be equally ignorant of premodern punctuation marks or, for that matter, of the fact that premodern AllogrAphies

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Chinese texts often dispensed with punctuation altogether. And yet, the appearance of “。” in between signs that pose as mere images seems strange. Why would a writer at once mask a text as nonwriting and mark it as text by signaling its, admittedly basic, syntax through the addition of a punctuation mark? Why would it matter to separate two enunciations—birth sign (pig) and name (Liu Cai)—when even the conventional spacing between different characters is abandoned, family name and first name blended into one? When “Liu Cai” is expressed not by two, as is conventional in Chinese, but by one sign? What could well be just the author’s slip (not of the tongue, but of the hand)—the minuscule mark that Ng’s text names rather than writes (we read “句號” but not “。”)—becomes the touchstone of another reflection on writing, one that goes beyond scriptural identity politics and challenges the facile adscription of difference to any and every kind of textuality, irrespective of its cultural context, subtext, or paratext. An allography does not have to alter a given script or infiltrate it with different signs, since such an infiltration has already happened in the form of punctuation marks, tiny parasites on the body of language. Traditionally, discussions of heterogeneity in writing have paid attention to the intrusion of elements from other scripts. For instance, Derrida’s discussion of the centrifugal power of writing in Dissemination (La dissemination) draws on examples in which elements of Chinese writing interrupt alphabetical text, though, according to Derrida, not all uses of isolated sinographs in European texts are the same. For instance, Derrida critiques Ezra Pound’s use of Chinese writing as exoticist because of its ornamental aim: Pound’s sinographs merely decorate the page in order to enhance the reader’s fascination.38 The critique of Pound serves as a negative foil for a more positive example: Philippe Sollers’s inclusion of Chinese characters in the French text of his novel Numbers (Nombres) of 1966: The phonetic writing in Numbers finds itself grafted to nonphonetic types of writing. Particularly to a tissue of Chinese ideograms, as they are called, from which it derives nourishment like a parasite. . . . Exoticism has nothing to do with it. The text is penetrated otherwise; it draws a different kind of strength from that graphy that invades it, framing it in a regular, obsessive manner, which becomes more and more massive and inescapable, coming from the other side of the mirror—from the est—, acting within the so-called phonetic sequence itself, working it through, translating itself into

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the latter even before appearing, before letting itself be recognized after the fact, at the point at which it is dropped like a textual tail, like a remainder, like a sentence upon the text. Its active translation has been clandestinely inseminated; it has for a long time been (under)mining the organism and the history of our domestic text, just as it now punctuates its end, like the registered trademark [marque] of a kind of labor that is finished, yet still in progress—39

Even though Sollers’s “sinographic” practice differs little from Pound’s, since both surround isolated and insular Chinese characters with non-Chinese text, the language of this passage suggests otherwise: rather than appropriating the other for one’s own exoticist uses, Sollers opens his own phonetic text to the other writing system. This reversal of actual scriptural power— after all, Sollers’s text is intelligible only to a reader of French, not to one of Chinese—results from framing Chinese rhetorically as the active force in a process of linguistic subversion. It is not that Chinese characters are cut out of context and transplanted into an alien textual environment. No, the sinograph itself has done the invading or undermining. The sinograph is active within the other text that it has inseminated, translates it, and signs the death sentence of the textual tradition thus attacked. In contrast, the linguistic material of French is penetrated by and grafted onto its other. French draws nourishment from Chinese “like a parasite.” In spite of the seemingly evenhanded distribution of activity between French and Chinese, ultimately, the beneficiary of linguistic intrusion is the European text that, enriched by Chinese and thus freed from its trammels of tradition and domesticity, has become a better embodiment of Derrida’s notion of writing or écriture. Since writing, so Derrida reminds us just before discussing Sollers’s use of the sinograph, is heterogeneous, “[it] is numerous from the first or it is not.”40 Sollers’s example allows Derrida to frame the contact of two different writing systems as just one more example of the difference inherent in writing, its innate possibility of dissemination, of becoming other. And yet, if we define writing as difference itself, what happens to cultural differences? Is difference in writing, or writing as difference, always the same for all scripts and traditions? Where exoticism claims to exhibit the other, Derrida’s manipulation of writing’s otherness shows the other to have been at the heart of sameness to begin with. Translation proper, which Derrida calls “active translation” in the passage above, has suffered insemination. The transference between different writing systems can be safely defined as apart AllogrAphies

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from, since it is more than translation proper, whereas Pound’s decorative use of the sinograph is criticized for its lack of translation, since, according to Derrida, he invokes the pure presence of the written Chinese signifier. The distinction Derrida draws between Sollers’s good and Pound’s bad use of Chinese characters—irrespective of its truth-value—performs an interesting elision. For Derrida, Pound inserts Chinese characters into his text without rendering their meaning. Consequently, Pound does not translate. Sollers, on the other hand, integrates as well as translates Chinese characters in his novel. But for Derrida, this is not a case of translation either. It merely visualizes the difference at work in a text in general. Seemingly, wherever another writing system appears, translation does not apply. Either nothing translates, or translation has always already happened. Derrida’s illustration of textual dissemination espouses an imagery of parasitism. In tune with the metaphors of grafting, virology, and sexual intercourse deployed throughout the different pieces of Dissemination, the figure of the parasite sets the stage for an interaction that blurs disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. Categories that Western thought has taught us to keep apart, entombed in binary oppositions (such as phonetic and logographic writing), are shown by Derrida as inextricably intertwined. The other in the same, the same in the other—cankers in the neatly organized garden of logocentrism. Derrida’s subversive imagery, however, is staked on violent interaction, not on harmonious mutuality. In order to express a process of mutual linguistic penetration, the other writing, in the form of Chinese logographs, has to be both nurturing matrix and alien intruder for Derrida’s text. A constellation in which Sollers’s alphabetic text frames a relatively scant number of Chinese characters—isolated from any Chinese (con) text, scattered throughout the French text as so many allegorical, nay allographic ruins—becomes transmuted into two contradictory images: much as the sinographic signs are reshaped as violent intruders, the alphabetic script turns it into a host from which it sucks sustenance. Where generalized difference reigns supreme, appropriation and intrusion become virtually interchangeable: the other at work in the same. In spite of the staging of allographic dissemination as a process from which both texts and scripts come away changed, traduced by the other, Derrida has to employ parasitism in a limited sense. Discursive favoritism mars the intended violent reciprocity— it masks appropriation as intrusion and attributes the subversive role par excellence, that of the parasite, to phonetic writing. Of course, this coincides with Derrida’s staged betrayal of Western thought. His theories nourish 150

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themselves parasitically on the fascination with the cultural other; a writing of the other becomes the catalyst for reenergizing Western theory. Although Western writing has always been other to itself, it needs the cultural other— and Derrida’s “translation”—to discover this. But punctuation intervenes, as a parasite on Derrida’s parasitic economy of writing itself. Just before turning to the comparison between Sollers’s and Pound’s uses of Chinese writing, Derrida’s text singles out punctuation marks as privileged examples of the heterogeneity of writing: “[The crossing of the subject] is possible only in the gap that separates the text from itself and thus allows for scission or for the disarticulation of silent spacings (bars, hyphens, dashes, numerals, periods, quotation marks, blanks, etc.). The heterogeneity of different writings is writing itself, the graft. It is numerous from the first, or it is not.”41 As Derrida theorizes in Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie), the production of meaning is not staked on the phonetically evoked copresence of sign and signification, but rather on absence and distance—the divorce of sign from referent, sign from sign, and enunciating subject from enunciation.42 The force of écriture crosses out being, a notion that phonocentrism perpetuated through the fraudulent link between presence and speech. The true denizens of writing are signs and signifying principles different from alphabetic letters, because phonocentrism cannot exploit them as easily as phonetic signs for its own purposes. Such other signs, muted signs that function purely graphically, the “silent spacings” Derrida invokes in the passage above, are nonphonetic signs from the outside (such as Chinese characters) and from the inside (punctuation marks, word spaces). It is not only the intrusion of another script that produces and activates the heterogeneity of writing. This, according to Derrida, is also true for punctuation marks, an order of signs that belongs most clearly to the realm of spacing, the fundamental principle of language that both underwrites signification—without distinction, how would anything signify?—and subverts a purely phonetic, meaning-based economy of language. According to Derrida’s graphocentric privileging of visual and spatial metaphors, as champions of spacing, punctuation marks make no sound. They silently undo the phonocentric premises of writing as such. Their cut of difference performs a disarticulation: it renders writing inarticulate, unarticulated. By extrapolation, Chinese characters are valuable insofar as they accomplish a similar task: the silent interpellation of another (graphic) space. This space of difference cuts through a text, as a graphic rem(a)inder of an unpronounceable other. But it is also cut through, crossed out itself. Chinese AllogrAphies

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writing comes from the “est”—the “East” as well as the realm of being. But the “est” in Derrida’s text cannot appear other than crossed out or put in inverted commas. According to Derrida’s Heideggerian logic, the relation of being with presence, with the sound of the “living voice” in Western metaphysics, has to be put under erasure, not so much by a line, but by a cross.43 On the one hand, Chinese writing has to accomplish the crossing-out (Durchkreuzung) of being, since its textual otherness interrupts the conversion of text into sound. The status of the sinograph as other, however, is equally elided or X-ed. The “X,” a graft from Heidegger, another of Derrida’s silent and silencing spacings, though one that functions at a theoretical metalevel, reaches beyond the two-dimensionality of the visible textual space, where punctuation marks and spaces operate to cut into the flow of words.44 Since all pretense at being has to be voided, since being exists only as a precarious place-holder for difference and absence, which is signaled as such by being put under erasure, difference itself cannot be. Consequently, Chinese writing both is a necessary figure of difference and cannot really be different—or at least not more different than other signs. But if the sinograph’s difference itself has to be crossed out, what of its equivalence with the silent spacing of punctuation marks? Is spacing itself in need of spacing? Difference itself in need of difference? Maybe Derrida’s alphabetic writing is parasitic upon the sinograph precisely because it reduces it to a graphic mark in the service of cutting through phonetic writing in order to mark it as difference, other to itself. And what about the “est,” the being or being different of the sinograph? What disturbs the essence of difference of the sinograph? What would serve as signs that cut across the domestic tradition of Chinese writing? Definitely not alphabetic letters, since they would just reassert a phonetic dominance (for Derrida); and, pragmatically speaking, because of the unequal distribution of linguistic capital and valence, they would be much less of an interruption in a Chinese text than sinographs (still) are in most other languages. Punctuation marks? But Derrida conceptually equates the function of sinographs and punctuation marks, so there is no potential for interruption there. Unless we rethink the status of punctuation marks. But did I not frame the appearance of the punctuation mark in the cryptic inscription of the protagonist of Kim-chew Ng’s “Allah’s Command” as a point of irritation? Is this not an example parallel to those Derrida provides in Dissemination, namely, an interruption of the text, the infiltration of an uncanny other? The mysterious dot, the “句號,” in “Allah’s Command” 152

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indeed undermines the text in which it appears, but not because of a difference specific to punctuation marks. Instead, the period becomes a force of difference precisely because it gives a touch of normalcy to a crazy, unreadable text. In other words, the text of the protagonist’s inscriptions has produced an example of how a graphic system can become other to itself, if under the threat of becoming not merely inarticulate but utterly unintelligible. This scriptural becoming-other happens in contact and contention with another script, the alphabetic script of Bahasa Malaysia. Unlike Derrida’s operation in Dissemination, however, it does not need the graphic other for its purpose. Strangeness comes from within a Chinese tradition, that of the six principles of character formation, or liu shu, that the protagonist applies in nonconventional ways, leading to an unintelligible text. In contrast, the punctuation mark does not exacerbate the otherness at work in the text, or does so only insofar as it signals a clinging to syntactic conventions visibly at odds with the cryptic intent of the text. Do punctuation marks function like Chinese characters, then—leaving aside the specific example of “Allah’s Command”? No. Support for this categorical answer will come from two sources: thoughts on the role of punctuation marks that contest Derrida’s graphocentrism, and examples of experiments with punctuation marks from within a Chinese literary tradition, the works of the Taiwanese writer Wuhe 舞鶴. Whereas Derrida places punctuation marks squarely within a graphic economy, one that is on the level of the visual, but defies the level of aurality with silence, Brian Rotman reminds us that we can read these marks completely differently, as notations of oral elements: Observe that, strictly speaking, the development of prose and poetic diction is not the fruit of the alphabet alone, in the sense of being constructed from letters. Both mimesis and transduction called for and in turn were forwarded by devices and techniques of punctuation that discharge a core set of functions handled orally by tone. These are extra-alphabetic having to do with handling text—blank spaces between words, commas, question marks, periods, quotation marks, paragraphs, hyphens, marks of ellipsis, capital letters, exclamation marks, parenthesis—rather than representing sound elements of speech.45

Rotman, like Derrida, marks a clear difference between phonetic signs, such as the letters of the alphabet, and punctuation marks. Unlike Derrida, however, Rotman’s punctuation marks are charged with sonic duties. They AllogrAphies

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return voice to the phonetic realm of language, or, to be more precise, of lettered text. This clarification springs from a break within orality: the letters of the alphabet stand in for sound, but they do not indicate tone, pitch, or rhythm. Phonetic writing thus reduces the expressive spectrum of aurality, rather than presencing voice. When meaning is communicated—as Rotman claims in an implicit critique of Derrida’s phonocentric premise—presence is already doubly deferred. The so-called living voice that phonetic writing invokes is already divorced from bodily expression, bound in the toneless signifying prison house of (alphabetic) language. On this basis, punctuation marks supplement alphabetic writing precisely on the level of aurality, since they supply rhythm, intonation, and stops—the closest written language comes to bodily and vocal expression. According to this logic, punctuation marks are actually more aural (if less significant and signifying) than alphabetic letters. At the same time, however, in order to be true to their role, they are also of the realm of the visual and spatial, not silent, but speaking in a different voice, scions of the rustle of language. It is this uncanny double character of punctuation marks that Theodor W. Adorno treats in his essay “Punctuation Marks” (“Satzzeichen”), published in 1956. For Adorno, punctuation marks partake of the realm of both the visible and the aural. Insofar as their “physiognomic” character exceeds their syntactic function, punctuation marks are ideographic.46 Comparing, for instance, the exclamation mark with a finger raised in warning, Adorno describes punctuation marks as traffic signs—not merely pictographic, but also performative, invested with the power to interpellate. At the same time, however, punctuation marks are the elements of language that Adorno sees as closest to music—they notate vocal movement and rhythm rather than meaning. What Adorno foregrounds in his reflection on punctuation marks is thus not their belonging to any one type of signification. Rather, as acoustic hieroglyphs, they at once mark the difference between and the nodal point of the different media that are involved in linguistic and paralinguistic communication. Not quite writing (either phonetic or logographic), they still partake of the realm of visuality as notation marks; not quite aural, they still express voice beyond phonetically meaningful units; not quite gestural, they still embody a supplement to embodied expression. This leads Adorno to conclude his short essay with a vertiginous paradox: “Every cautiously avoided mark (Zeichen) is a reverence offered up by writing (Schrift) to the sound (Laut) it suffocates.”47 If writing suffocates sound, why would the judicious omission of punctuation marks count as a reverence of sound? Are 154

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punctuation marks not precisely one of the few ways in which sound—with “sound” I mean a voicing beyond the spoken signifier—makes itself “heard” in a text? Seen from another perspective, the opposite is equally true: by notating even a kind of sound that is largely excluded from writing, sound could also be seen as more inescapably forced into the straitjacket of visual signs, and thus perceived as less of a lack. In other words, when sparingly used, punctuation marks signal absences that they would otherwise supplement and thus erase. According to Adorno, punctuation marks move between different media and types of significations. Their primary aim is internal to language itself: They are signs of recitation (Zeichen des Vortrags); they do not diligently serve the intercourse (Verkehr) of language with the reader, but hieroglyphically serve a kind of intercourse that plays itself out inside of language, following its own tracks. Superfluous, therefore, to suppress them as superfluous: then they only hide themselves. Any text, even the most densely woven one, cites them of its own will, friendly spirits ( freundliche Geister), with whose bodiless presence the language body (Sprachleib) nourishes itself.48

Here, punctuation marks become friendly spirits, not specters of difference. They do not distance a text from itself (as Derrida has it), but rather stand under the sign of relationality. Invoked as traffic signs earlier in Adorno’s essay, they here serve the traffic, or intercourse (both are Verkehr in German), of language. The function of punctuation marks is not to interrupt, but rather to aid the flow of language. Without bodies, punctuation marks nurture the textual body. But, unlike in Derrida’s reflections, the sustenance provided by punctuation marks is not difference. Instead, their multiple functions facilitate textual coherence and provide a richer reading experience. Such “friendly spirits,” then, are maybe closer to a parasitic logic as formulated by Michel Serres in The Parasite (Le parasite): parasitic energy is not about transgression or systemic disruption, but rather about coding, decoding, and recoding existing systems that depend on the parasite for their functioning and change.49 What happens to punctuation marks in Chinese texts? Their use in modern Chinese results from a complex history of negotiation between Chinese tradition and Western examples as the hallmark of scriptural modernization. Although originally adaptations from Western systems of punctuation, AllogrAphies

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Chinese punctuation marks are now no more foreign to the Chinese language than punctuation marks are to English—not foreign at all. In order to put emphasis on punctuation marks, to make them stand out from the text they punctuate, literary experiments are needed, such as those by the Taiwanese author Wuhe.50 Wuhe’s work frequently pays creative attention to punctuation marks, to the point where they become creative catalysts rather than mere experiments on a textual micro level. Wuhe’s use of punctuation oscillates between understatement, the apparent omission of punctuation marks, and overinvestment, the proliferation of punctuation marks, often coupled with an obsessive prioritizing of one kind of mark over others. For instance, Wuhe’s novel Chaos and Confusion (Luanmi 亂迷), published in 2007, is markedly obsessed with punctuation marks—in that it completely does without them.51 The heated critical debates about this highly experimental text— reminiscent of a long cryptic poem rather than a novel—became polarized around the issue of tradition versus experimentation.52 While some celebrate the text as a destruction of traditional writing, others emphasize its readability.53 Punctuation, however, is never the central point in the incipient criticism on Chaos and Confusion, despite its being the most striking feature of the text at first glance. In spite of their differences, critics tend to see Wuhe’s work with(out) punctuation marks not as a phenomenon in its own right, but rather as merely an addition: either just another example of linguistic excess that breaks the limits imposed by communication, and thus negligible, or proof of the implicit existence of linguistic rules, and thus dispensable. In an essay about Chaos and Confusion, Kim-chew Ng, the author of “Allah’s Command,” even dismisses the absence of punctuation marks as a false lack: since Wuhe’s text still follows the rules of word order, punctuation marks are superfluous anyway, since unimportant for an understanding of the text.54 If word order makes punctuation marks a dispensable extra, does this mean that Chinese writing, because of its grammatical structure, does not need punctuation?55 Ng’s argument replicates Chinese views about punctuation, namely, that it can be dispensed with; these are views that Western linguistics often fustigate as opening the door to double entendre and undecidability. Should we read Wuhe’s omission in terms of a scriptural purism then? Namely, letting the Chinese text revert to a traditional typeface, in which all these little dots and strokes have been weeded out in order to stage the sinograph in splendid isolation? One thing we have learned from 156

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Adorno, though, is that whenever we omit punctuation marks, they just make their presence (or rather absence) felt all the more. Rather than reverting to a “purer” Chinese—of doubtful existence or definition anyway—Chaos and Confusion uses textual spacing, underlined by the absence of punctuation marks, so as to point to graphic genre conventions: its text either fills all the space of a page without sentence or paragraph breaks, or takes its clue from poetry by organizing itself in uneven lines surrounded by blank space. This type of spacing that we associate with poetry is, of course, a Western convention. In traditional Chinese, poetry is usually not graphically set apart from other genres thus. In order to play with spacing, to tarry with graphic genre conventions, Wuhe’s text needs a “Western” page setup, where text runs from left to right, top to bottom, front to back.56 Even in its absence, punctuation favors intercourse within a text, though not because its lack would liberate the sinograph and underscore its graphic or material character. This would just mean capitalizing upon a fetish that connects materiality and writing with the specter of another script, the sinograph. Not all marks are equal. Even though Derrida equates them, punctuation marks are not the same as spaces between characters or letters, between words (in most European languages, but not in Chinese), or between lines and paragraphs. Punctuation marks do not interrupt or disrupt a text per se. Rather, they inhabit interstitial spaces (between words, phrases, and sentences) and recode them. Wuhe redistributes space between signs against certain conventions, as well as eliminates the little marks that occupy, and thus erase, the importance of textual spaces. He draws attention to the fact that graphic principles of spacing and, by omission, punctuation marks and their functions determine the way in which a text flows and stagnates, in which it withholds or allocates emphasis. The experiment of Chaos and Confusion thus upholds the graphic importance of textual components beyond sinographs (or, by extension, letters). If we still read such a text according to conventions, claiming with Kim-chew Ng that the lack of punctuation marks does not matter, then this shows that we as readers and writers are still slaves to automatically internalized syntactic and graphic rules. In contrast with Chaos and Confusion, which uses punctuation marks only in that it visibly omits them and supplements them generously (or not at all) with blank spaces, Wuhe’s novel The Remains of Life (Yusheng 餘 生), published in 1999, does not signal breaks and continuities of actions or thoughts through textual spacing. Rather, the text runs on without chapter or paragraph breaks. While periods are exceedingly rare, commas, as well as AllogrAphies

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brackets and Chinese quotation marks, are often the only means to ensure the text’s readability.57 The result is an increased flexibility in the connection of different actions and thoughts, often attributed to different characters. The novel is fictionally framed as the first-person narrator’s research journal, in which he jots down his findings as he investigates the Musha Incident, an uprising of the indigenous Atayal against the Japanese colonizers in 1930s Taiwan; the findings are interspersed with his experiences among the remaining Atayal and his own random musings. One and the same sentence can convey the protagonist’s actions on different days, as well as witness different voices in the course of the protagonist’s fieldwork. The virtual avoidance of the period and the absence of paragraphs convert the comma into the most important punctuation mark. The comma’s interruption—unlike the period, more a pause than an endpoint—emphasizes contiguity and creates a connection even there where it separates textual chunks from one another. In The Remains of Life, the tiny strokes of the comma, instead of the more permanent break of the period, create an interstice in language, a space left open for dialogue, much as corporeal contact needs the almost imperceptible space or gap between bodies. The novel underlines this conceptual function of the comma when it describes the protagonist’s research. Unlike your normal fieldworker, he does not tape the interviews, nor does he take notes during the conversations. Rather, when he sits down to write after a day of listening and observing, his personal impressions are inextricably mixed with the voices and opinions he “records.” When he listens to his interviewees, Wuhe’s protagonist experiences an uncanny binding of the self to the speaker and his or her words: “I listened until my own condition ceased to exist, as I listened I merged into the speech of my vis-à-vis, each sentence was taken in without a sound in this process of merging, we fell silent for a while, speaking and listening both need a pause (doudian 逗點), this pause is an empty interstice (jianxi 間隙) a pure halt, where there is no reflection on the past nor preparing for the future.”58 For this dialogic fusion not to result in a unification that would force one of the parts to submit to the other in the interest of a larger whole, both parties have to meet in the interstices (jianxi 間隙), the gaps between words, the tiny moments where conversation comes to a temporary halt, where both speaking and listening cease without being absent. As this passage suggests, such pauses, or “逗點” (doudian), find expression in the space of the written text, with the help of the comma—another possible translation of “逗點.”59 Wuhe’s novel thus dictates a different rhythm for

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our reading process, visualized spatially as tiny, temporary interruptions in the textual flow of characters. It would be tempting to translate the interstice created by the pause of the comma with the Derridean term “brisure,” a word that indicates both a break or rupture and a connection and hinge.60 Unlike Derrida’s “brisure,” though, the comma’s interstice in Wuhe’s novel draws on the multiple signifying possibilities of punctuation marks: instead of introducing the disruptive graphic force of spacing into a text dominated by phonetic principles, the comma attempts to transcribe a sonic phenomenon beyond the voicing of meaningful linguistic units, namely, the necessary pauses and breaks between them.61 In other words, Wuhe’s manipulations of punctuation marks within his sinographic texts insist on their polyvalence. There where punctuation marks are omitted, as in Chaos and Confusion, they do not lead to textual purism— a return to a Chinese text before and beyond the (Western) straitjacket of punctuation—but open the field for a reflection on the link between graphic organization and literary genre. There where the conventions of punctuation are bent, for instance, by replacing most periods with commas and dispensing with paragraph breaks in The Remains of Life, a different textual rhythm simulates for a reader that she has become part of the textual voices, rather than watching them from a distance. Wuhe’s unconventional uses of punctuation marks do not interrupt the text and succumb to a Derridean fantasy of distancing a text from itself. Rather, like Adorno’s “friendly spirits,” they activate different relations in a text, leaving it open to other motions with and in, but never against, it. The intercourse availed in a text by punctuation marks also, potentially, points beyond signification, as well as beyond specific culturally coded signifying systems, toward the multiple mediality that lies dormant in every text. Wuhe’s novella “Secret Notes of a Homosexual” (“Yiwei tongxing lianzhe de mimi shouji” 一位同性戀者的秘密手記), from the collection of experimental work The Sea at Seventeen (Shiqisui zhi hai 十七歲之海), pushes the textual intercourse of punctuation marks to literal and figurative extremes.62 In the text, punctuation marks, especially the small circle that denotes a period in a Chinese text, free themselves from their syntactic subservience and take on other signifying functions. The narrative consists of random notes and fragmented reflections of the homosexual of the title and other characters associated with his environment, replete with truculent scenes that border on parody in their excess. Much like other texts by Wuhe, “Secret Notes” is obsessed with the abject. AllogrAphies

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Li Shunxing 李順興 has described Wuhe’s strategy as one that turns the abject into language.63 By the same token, one could say that Wuhe crafts language itself as the abject, through concrete graphic strategies. Wuhe’s texts are certainly obsessed with promiscuity, penetration, and abjection beyond the level of content. However, the linguistic “intercourse” that interests me here is not of the order of crude analogies between bodies and signs, but rather resides in the destabilization of signification through an infestation of the sinograph with other graphic systems. “Secret Notes of a Homosexual” invests heavily in sexual and textual intercourse, especially through the obsessively recurring imagery of anal penetration, marked by an excessive repetition throughout the text as well as on the micro level of a sentence, where a term often appears as a series of two or more—of terms for the buttocks and the anus, especially “ass” (kao 尻) and “asshole” (kaokong 尻空). And yet, anal penetration is expressed also beyond its designation through Chinese characters, namely, through the manipulation of the sequence and distribution of the text, for example, through a strategic insertion of blanks. For instance, the omission of the word “penis” in the following passage from “Secret Notes” points to the adoption of a different sexual and textual logic: 16 An Adolescent’s Little Cock Every time I saw my old man come home exhausted after work my mother incessantly haranguing not letting him have one moment of release I feel a primitive impulse really want to kneel down hold my old man in my mouth make him not regret to have fathered such a bastard son64

In a text that has no qualms about speaking of sexuality—especially of sexual acts that some might view as deviant or perverse (not merely male homosexual intercourse, but an imagery of homosexual incest)—the omission here does not simply serve the purpose of censorship. The blank, or hole, in the text might stand in for the father’s penis (or phallus?), but only as a lack: not merely as an erasure of heterosexuality or paternal power, but, maybe, as a “real” investment in that which is penetrated rather than in that which penetrates. The penis becomes marked (as a present absence) only in that it is being taken in (as omitted) by the text. In this text, punctuation marks, especially the idiosyncratic Chinese period, the “。,” play an important role. Through the constant contiguity 160

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with terms that designate anal penetration in direct or indirect ways, as well as because of the scarcity of punctuation marks in some of the text’s passages, the “。” is often resignified as the endpoint of sexual desire, no longer merely a syntactic stop: 被 入 。 感 到 一 種 無 限 的 幸 福

13 不 可 思 議 的 滋 味

13 An unbelievable feeling Penetrated 。Feeling a kind of limitless happiness

（245）

The punctuation mark here—creatively chosen for obvious mimetic reasons over and above the comma—is pictographically invested. This becomes even more evident in the following example, in which the strategic placement of the “。” strangely isolates “入” (ru, “to enter,” “to penetrate”) from a syntactic point of view, but opens up an interesting variety of readings once we recode the former punctuation mark as a strange pictograph that stands in for the rectum: 爸 Son of a bitch of a father’s AIDS 。Penetrate 爸 的 他 A I D S 。 入 （278） The “。” fills the linguistic hole (or blank) in different ways. It not only acquires different meanings according to different signifying regimes—as a AllogrAphies

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syntactic stop, as a pictographic icon—but also, potentially, designates penetration, that which penetrates, and that which is penetrated. Here, a punctuation mark assumes the guise of a sign not merely by serving the aim of sequencing, but by usurping the place of a Chinese character. Similar textual manipulations avail themselves of alphabetic letters in the form of double agents. In this sense, “小O” (xiao O, “little O”)—less a character than a personified, as well as sexually invested, part of the body— is given textual protagonism. Here, linguistic intercourse glides from the investment of the punctuation mark to that of another, namely, alphabetic, script.65 Here, one letter of the alphabet, the “O,” both suggests an abbreviated name (allowing the bearer to remain anonymous) and functions in an iconic way, as an enlarged version of “。” and as the part of the body to be penetrated: “penetrating little O inch by inch” (286). The “O,” however, does not stand on its own, but appears frequently in conjunction with “Q,” for instance, in the expression “little O’s Q-power” (xiao O de Q gong, 小O的Q 功) (272). Here, “Q功” (Q-gong) mockingly references “氣功” (Qigong) as well as alludes to “Q” for “queer.” In a pictographic sense, “Q” acquires yet another meaning that becomes clear in the following passage: “Everybody has O, but being able to Q is not that easy” (273). In other words, the presence of “little O”—or “。”?—(rather than Lacan’s objet a) in itself accomplishes nothing, unless the “O” becomes breached and turns into a “Q.” The expression “little O’s Q-power” thus activates a sexual desire that is conventionally framed as passive, namely, the capacity of being penetrated and of deriving pleasure from it.66 The allographic “intruders” in Wuhe’s “Secret Notes of a Homosexual”— both the alphabetic letters and the reinvested punctuation marks—open up spaces, textual holes, that can be penetrated, not only by different significations, but also by different medial or signifying systems. Wuhe’s “Secret Notes” uses the Chinese period—“。”—as a hinge between different scripts and different signifying systems. By omitting it in places for which rules of punctuation dictate it, and by putting it in strange locations in his text, Wuhe overdetermines the “。” as a syntactic marker that doubles as pictographic sign. But “。” not only bridges the gap between sinographs and punctuation marks. In its blown-up version, as “little O,” “。” also breaches the difference between sinographs and alphabetic letters. Strangely integrated in such a way, via the crutch of punctuation marks, the presence of alphabetic letters in Wuhe’s text conjures up neither exotic

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fascination nor textual violence. Usually, the inclusion of Chinese characters within alphabetic text produces a signifying hole or a hole of signification. The Chinese sign, almost irrespective of its meaning, signifies (as) strangeness, activated either for Orientalist thrills or, in its Derridean variant, for conceptual emphasis, so that one’s own script becomes theoretically invigorated via its scriptural other. In both cases, Chinese writing denotes nothing apart from cultural and textual otherness. The appearance of alphabetic letters in a sinographic text is different. Because of the global sway of the alphabet, because of its phonetic code, letters lend themselves less to the role of symbols of difference.67 After all, the Pinyin transcription system in the PRC uses alphabetic letters to spell out the pronunciation of Chinese characters. It is not the presence or absence of another script in any given text that matters. Instead, all depends on how different signs are used, what kind of contiguities emerge, what strange echoes (both graphic and sonic) and alliances a text can suggest for its readers. The different sets of signs in “Secret Notes” become conduits to a reflection on the multiple expressive possibilities of graphic systems, because their experimental use pushes them into the interstices of scripts and signifying functions. Not only can one signifier have different signifieds, but one signifier can also make sense according to different signifying economies, media systems, and cultural and linguistic contexts. What allows for a constant recoding of signs is not innate to any one particular script, but consists in a creative combination and tension between different sets of signs and expressive possibilities instead. Every single sign can become other, under certain circumstances. These dormant differences, dependent on multiple signifying principles and medial facets, are ultimately a more fundamental trait of language use than the differences between languages and scripts. Of course, different languages and scripts are not the same. However, they are tools of communication rather than essentially different systems. Access to them depends on contextual contingencies or on efforts of language acquisition, not on cultural belonging. So, Chinese not as an allography, a script as the cipher of absolute otherness, but, through the specific examples discussed here, as a potential caveat against essentializing scriptural difference, and an invitation to think writing systems and languages as internally heterogeneous and happily promiscuous in contact with other scripts and sets of signs. The sino-grammatologies at work in authors such as Kim-chew Ng or Wuhe point beyond graphic

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identity politics. They contest both the presumption that written signs produce meaning in a fixed way and the univocal link between such an unyielding script system and cultural identity. In order to live up to such allographic experiments with the Chinese script and its parasitical kin, punctuation marks, to eschew and plot against the compulsion to think only in terms of absolute sameness and otherness, to make tools of communication into symbols of being, we need different script politics as well as alternative cultural epistemologies.

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5 TechnogRaphies

Radical design In his essay “Electronic Revolution” of 1970–1971, William S. Burroughs praised the Chinese language for its resistance to mutation. The American writer—notorious for his statement that “language is a virus from outer space”—illustrates his reflections on the use of subliminal visual and sonic signals as weapons with the example of Chinese. By cutting up and rearranging image and sound recordings, so Burroughs muses, those exposed to the medially scrambled material might be subconsciously induced to experience certain emotional states. In the guise of a virus—or triggering the incubation of a latent virus in the organism—small units of sound and image can thus ideally be used to control an individual or a mass of subjects.1 Continuing his reflections on the equation of the virus and communication—not merely as an “allegorical comparison”—Burroughs reflects on how a language can become a viral weapon on the one hand, and how language itself can be immunized against viral intervention on the other.2 The Chinese language serves as his model for a linguistic system inured to contamination: A far-reaching biologic weapon can be forged from a new language. In fact, such a language already exists. It exists as Chinese, a total language closer to the multi-level structure of experience, with a script derived from hieroglyphs, more closely related to the objects and areas described. The equanimity of the Chinese is undoubtedly derived from their language being structured for greater sanity. I notice the Chinese, wherever they are, retain the written and spoken language, while other immigrant peoples will lose their language in two generations.3

The essay reiterates known prejudices about the Chinese language by assigning it the status of an ideal: its pictographic, and thus supposedly more direct graphic system, the absence of the copula “to be,” and the absence of the direct article as well as of the logical construction either-or. On the surface, Burroughs’s stereotypical view of Chinese resonates with the hallucinations about the other language par excellence throughout Western history, from Leibniz to Pound and beyond. The new question that Burroughs raises, however, links language survival inextricably with advances in media technologies. For Burroughs, Chinese as a “total language” with a long tradition is the answer to the threat of viral mutation in an era of radical changes in media. Turned into a weapon, Chinese can go viral as the perfect medium for subliminal ideological manipulation precisely because it withstands viral attacks itself. In Burroughs’s bid to illustrate the link between media messages and psychic and affective dispositions, Chinese becomes, once again, a metaphor for mediality. Chinese is both the perfect embodiment of new media possibilities and its antidote. In this fantasy of a language immune to the viruses that have infested Western languages such as English, Chinese itself is described according to a paradoxical logic. Apparently, Burroughs wants to have it both ways: in the guise of language as a weapon, Chinese seems the most viral of languages; and yet, being the least susceptible to mutation, it also presents itself as the least viral of languages. The contradictory desires that Burroughs projects onto Chinese raise fundamental questions about language. Language is susceptible to the influence of other languages, forced to adapt to social, cultural, and medial changes, and shaped over time by the practices of the community of language users: so what makes (or breaks) a language? What allows us to define a given language as one? What enables a given language or script to withstand the test of time, the challenge of new media, and the pressure of other languages in intercultural contexts? Its basic simplicity or its multilevel complexity? Its resistance to change or its adaptability? Its potential to influence other languages or its ability to be impacted by other languages? What allows a language to survive? And what does survival mean when we talk about languages? Burroughs’s contradictory notion of Chinese as at once virtually unchanging and ideally suited to the changing media landscape of the 1970s resonates strongly with some of the reflections on more recent changes in media: the so-called digital turn. The digital revolution of the past decades has spawned equally anxious reflections on the status of language, media, and, ultimately, human existence. The digital turn divides critics into different camps: one 166

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sings the praises of unlimited opportunities for communication; the other stages a decisive battle between code as the realm of machines and natural languages as a token of humanity. For the latter, the digital revolution signals the advent of an age in which computer code erases human languages altogether. From the vantage point of such prophets of language’s doomsday, code and languages are framed in a quasi-ecological logic of competition and survival, though the outcome, the extinction of natural languages, seems to be assumed from the outset. In this scenario, the “life” of writing systems is particularly at stake. After all, assumably, speech could still play the role of sounding code into humanly processable signs after sequences of 1s and 0s have become the only form of “writing.” Not only specific scripts—as the gradual obsolescence of writing systems such as the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Germanic runes, and the Mayan glyphs shows, it is by no means uncommon for a script to fall out of use—but potentially the very concept of written language as we know it seems at risk. For the Chinese language and its script, attitudes vis-à-vis the digital revolution are similarly polarized. On the one hand, critics have prematurely started to bemoan the demise of the Chinese writing system and thus, by extension, of Chinese culture. On the other, the digital turn confirms for some—as for Burroughs several decades earlier— that the sinograph has become the medium of choice, now more than ever, because of its alleged suitability for and compatibility with digital media. The former camp is constantly haunted by the anxiety that Chinese culture and its tradition will disappear under the pressures of globalization and new media challenges. This cultural angst expresses itself through a discourse of language lost, which foremost signifies, in a Chinese context, the corruption of the written expression, especially in the age of the hegemonic role of English in popular and net culture.4 If China coquetted with the alphabetization of its language in the age of semicolonialism and of the awakening of national awareness in the late nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, now the gradual corrosion of the sinograph embodies one of the worst nightmares, not only of the PRC, but also of other places importantly shaped by Chinese culture. The threat to language, reiterated incessantly by traditionalists, finds its expressive outlets increasingly in the fields of typographical and book design, where the Chinese script of the future is envisioned in many instances as a fragmented script that is vanishing stroke by stroke.5 These designs, as typographically embodied reflections on the demise of the sinograph, often have a somewhat ironic side effect: in the interest of readability they communicate their message through a Technographies

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still recognizable medium, even as they spell out its death. In their visualization of a disappearing sinograph, these designs unintentionally point to the potential resilience of the script: Chinese characters remain recognizable, even with several strokes missing. Paradoxically, the obverse might be true for experiments that aim at undermining the graphic regime of Chinese.6 Whereas typographic designs that paint the horror vision of the disappearance of Chinese can only do so by retaining the legibility of the sinographs used, radical alterations of Chinese writing that aim to take flight from the script of tradition, for instance, in visual art, seem unable to rid themselves of the label Chinese. One of the most famous expressions of contemporary Chinese art emerges from such sinographic tensions between resilience and radical change: the installation piece A Book from the Sky (Tianshu 天書) that the PRC artist Xu Bing 徐冰 worked on between 1987 and 1991, with numerous exhibitions all over the world following.7 The piece originally bore the title A Mirror for Analyzing the World: The Millenarian Scroll (Xin shi jian—Shijimo juan 析世鑒—— 世紀末卷), but the artist quickly adopted the label with which the Chinese audience had appended the art work: A Book from the Sky, which refers to the mumbo jumbo of mystically inspired sects, and is thus a common term for nonsense, rather than being indicative of transcendence or profound meaning. The piece impressed audiences all over the world with its massive scale: it consists of matching gigantic scrolls suspended from the ceiling with innumerous Chinese books in traditional binding converting the ground into an ocean of pages. None of the characters with which the scrolls and books had been filled, using the laborious method of printing with handcarved wooden type, however, was recognizable as forming part of a Chinese lexicon: they had all been invented by the artist himself. Three years of grueling experimentation, carving, and printing finally added up to the desired result: the absence of linguistic meaning on a grand scale. In the context of the Chinese avant-garde art that emerged in the 1980s in the PRC and frequently experimented with challenging or obscuring meaning, many critics have read Xu Bing’s work, with its fixation on writing, marks, and traces as an undermining of the Chinese script from within, and thus as a critique of Chinese culture in general, especially because of the central role the Chinese script plays in cultural self-definition. However, going through the motions—or reproducing the empty forms—of the sinograph, and thus of Chinese culture, compounds disavowal and affirmation.8 The interpretations of this and similar artworks as reactions against Chinese 168

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culture and more specifically the Communist regime’s use of language and art as cogs in its ideology machine, rendered many art objects and performances fascinating to a global audience, especially after the Tian’anmen Incident of June 4th, 1989, which led many artists, including Xu Bing, into exile. Audiences abroad proved eager to “understand” non-Western art as imbued with the aura of political resistance. Perceived as a turn against cultural traditions, such art—according to the tacit consensus—could be savored potentially without a deeper understanding of Chinese culture. This holds especially true—so some critics argue—for A Book from the Sky because of its linguistic politics: the work disburdens audiences from linguistic competence, since, in front of Xu Bing’s art installation, all audiences are equal—equally baffled by the semblance of meaning in artistic form.9 However, only an audience with knowledge of written Chinese can actually discern the fact that the beautiful graphs of A Book from the Sky are not real Chinese characters, whereas a non-Chinese audience might take them at face value, unless they are told otherwise. Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky gives aesthetic form to a double ambivalence. On the one hand, it both celebrates the form of the Chinese script and delinks it from the system of meaning and knowledge that is the content of Chinese culture. On the other, A Book from the Sky deprovincializes Chinese art by opening it up to a global audience, but only because it also cashes in on the iconic value of a script easily recognizable as Chinese. Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky is one of the most famous examples of a phenomenon that abounds throughout the tradition of Chinese writing and has become particularly prevalent in recent decades, especially in art, poetry, and graphic design: the crafting of pseudographs, graphs that look like Chinese characters, since they are made up of the elements of Chinese characters, the strokes and radicals, yet do not form part of the linguistic system of Chinese, since they have no lexicalized meaning. The susceptibility of the Chinese script to pseudographic experiments lies in the rules of its graphic construction. Because of its small set of letters, any falsified sign in an alphabetic (or phonetic) script would immediately be recognized as the odd letter out. Not so with sinographs. The vast lexicon of Chinese often causes a native speaker and reader of Chinese to encounter unknown characters. Much as unknown words in alphabetic scripts are made up of familiar components (the letters), unknown characters in Chinese are made up of familiar components, recurring groups of strokes, the radicals. However, since there are many more radicals than alphabetic letters, and since Chinese characters are not constructed as a linear series of radicals but distribute Technographies

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varying numbers of radicals in different graphic positions in an imaginary square space, the possibilities of combination are almost infinite. As long as pseudographs abide by (sino)graphic rules, they are convincing look-alikes, recognizable at a second rather than at a first glance. The creation of pseudographs is to Chinese writing as glossolalia is to speech: a potential challenge to the Chinese linguistic and cultural tradition as a whole, as well as a pure language (or, rather, script) emptied of the responsibility to signify. However, because pseudographs mostly follow the laws of sinographic construction that determine how the most basic elements (the strokes) are put together and how conventionalized groups of strokes (the radicals) are distributed in the imaginary square that a character orients itself in, pseudographs are still recognizably Chinese, whereas glossolalic articulations sound distinctly other to the glossolaling subject’s mother tongue. Pseudographs, then, are radical designs of Chinese, designed according to and thus still beholden to the laws of a Chinese graphic regime, but de-signed, or voided of signification, brought into a realm where graphe exists at least potentially independently of meaning.10 Can pseudographs, as sinographic look-alikes, really challenge the Chinese script and its cultural value? Chinese writing has long been closely linked to a calligraphic tradition that values scriptural beauty, sometimes at the expense of discernible meaning. In Chinese calligraphy, the boundaries between writing as the production of signification and art as the creation of visually pleasing forms were never quite as rigidly defined as in the Western tradition, which tended to divorce image and texts, at least after the Middle Ages and until experiments with textual visualities began to proliferate in the twentieth century.11 A Chinese written text, transmuted by the hand of an artist, could aim at aesthetic enjoyment rather than at the comprehension of its content, especially whenever calligraphic style distanced the text from a distinctly readable script. Whereas Chinese calligraphy rarely dispenses with the possibility of reading entirely, avant-garde calligraphers such as Gu Wenda 谷文達 or Qiu Zhenzhong 邱振中 take the additional step from obscurity to the erasure of lexicalized meaning by calligraphing pseudographs. In his pieces from the series Sinographs in Need of Verification (Daikao wenzi xilie 待考文字系列) of 1991, Qiu pushes calligraphy toward total unintelligibility.12 Qiu writes his pseudographs in particularly opaque calligraphic styles. Gu Wenda’s pseudographic piece Mythos of Lost Dynasties (1983–1987) uses another Chinese script potentially unreadable for the average Chinese: ancient seal script.13 In contrast to Qiu’s pseudocharacters, 170

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whose abstract shapes make reading difficult, the strokes and characters of seal script are clearly recognizable. However, their rounded form and the composition of strokes are different from currently used forms of Chinese, which makes the written text unreadable for readers not versed in the history and evolution of the Chinese script, its formal diachronic mutations. Both pieces base their experiments on already opaque sinographic forms.14 Working within a tradition in which obscurity, though not total erasure of meaning, forms part of the convention, such works have to go to great lengths to announce that their beautifully executed forms are not actual Chinese characters, but merely look-alikes. By inventing nonlexicalized characters in a font that none but the specialized can read, these artists heap obscurity upon obscurity, which makes obscurity actually difficult to discern and in need of being announced, through the (non-pseudographic) titles of these works. But, if a certain disregard for signification and an emphasis on formal beauty already form an integral part of Chinese calligraphy, what would it mean to double sinographic opacity? In the face of calligraphic obscurity, does it matter that the beautiful shapes are not really Chinese characters? Would this not attest even further to the graphic stability of the sinographic script system? Not quite. The apparent futility of such pseudographic experiments underlines the specificity of their sinographic medium, the different script forms that constitute the tradition of Chinese writing. Even though the Chinese script is often praised for its stability, since the Chinese, as is claimed, unlike any other culture, can actually read texts from hundreds and thousands of years ago with little preparation, Gu’s and Qiu’s calligraphies underline the changes and fluctuations in a seemingly stable tradition. After all, these script forms are not easily readable for the uninitiated. Much like pseudographs, characters executed in seal script or idiosyncratic calligraphic styles are part of the Chinese script system, not because they are readily readable, but because a master narrative of cultural coherence and scriptural stability incessantly scripts them as recognizably Chinese. Every Chinese has been taught to recognize these different script forms unquestioningly as Chinese, even and especially when they cannot read them. Unlike the work of radical calligraphers like Gu or Qiu, the unintelligibility of the sinographs in Xu Bing’s installation is not coproduced by the difficulty or opacity of the font or script type used. His pseudocharacters can be clearly distinguished—stroke by stroke. (See figure 5.1.) They are rendered in a slight variant of Song type (Songti 宋體), one of the canonical printing types routinely in use since the Ming Dynasty.15 Technographies

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FiguRe 5.1 Printing block for the title page of Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (1987). Reprinted with permission from the artist.

Apart from an appreciation of the beauty of A Book from the Sky and the meticulous work of its creator, the importance of Xu Bing’s work lies in the creation of a matrix of Chinese writing, in the visualization of the techne of character formation as a combinatorial system. As Lydia Liu asserts about the pseudographs in A Book from the Sky, “these nonsense characters make better mathematical sense than they do linguistic sense.”16 After all, emptied of meaning, Xu Bing’s pseudographs suggest a matrix of combinations and permutations, rather than constituting a sign system. The sinographic system is based on two principles: a combination of small elements and rules of graphic distribution. Even though, as Lydia Liu suggests, the five basic strokes seem to be the smallest discrete units of a sinographic algebra, their combination, unlike a sequence of numbers, but not unlike the different lines and curves of alphabetic writing, has to obey 172

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implicit rules of spacing and distribution before being recognizable as forming Chinese characters. While suggestive for apparent reasons—five basic units would lie between the binary desert of digital code and the larger number of alphabetic letters—the five strokes are an abstraction. It would be unthinkable to formulate the number of rules and exceptions necessary to generate signs that looked like characters from these strokes, unless we have already internalized set graphic shapes.17 Whenever artists, writers, or designers draw attention to the combinatorial nature of Chinese writing, they rarely start at the level of strokes, but tend to highlight radicals (bushou 部首) as the smallest building blocks of Chinese characters, and of written Chinese in general. The art critic Lothar Ledderose describes the Chinese character as a unique sign system made up of smaller units—the different strokes, the radicals, and finally the characters that form sentences and longer texts—though one in which the positioning of discrete units shows much variability without being arbitrary: The Chinese found a middle way between the extremes of reduction to the mathematical minimum and boundless individuality. In their characters the average number of strokes is higher than four, and they did not set them into neat quadrants. Rather, they allowed for a great variety in size and relative position of the strokes. The character system has to be more complicated than mathematically necessary, because the human brain does not work like a simpleminded computer. An essential part in all perception processes is the recognition of known elements. (Perception theory teaches us that in identifying shapes, our eyes and brain rely on the repetition of information.) It is easier to remember slightly more complex shapes in which some parts are familiar than shapes in which the repetition is reduced to the minimum. If we miss a bit of the information, recognition of familiar forms allows us to grasp the meaning of the whole unit all the same. On the other hand, it would be equally impractical and counterproductive if each character were a completely individual creation. Between the extremes of merciless reduction and boundless individuality a solution was developed: the module system.18

Ledderose’s description of the Chinese script as modular establishes a strong link between graphic construction and perception. As a compromise between complete arbitrariness of creation and mechanical combination, Technographies

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the sinographic system ensures the intelligibility of each graph through gestaltic repetition, availing itself of the human ability to recognize patterns. The apparent redundancy of the system—the large number of strokes and radicals—actually serves as an in-built graphic white noise. Seemingly superfluous, these elements are really crucial for the transmission of information, since they absorb possible distortion. However, if the construction of Chinese characters is modular in the way Ledderose suggests, are all modules equal? On the level of radicals this is true in principle, but not in practice. Radicals, though they might vary slightly according to their position in a character, are fixed graphic shapes that combine to form a character—some radicals can be characters in their own right. Radicals are combinations of strokes, but, unlike the individual letters of the alphabet, they can express meaning: for instance, the water-radical “氵” tends to appear in sinographs that designate the idea of liquidity. However, radicals and their combinations can also indicate sound rather than meaning: in the character 桂 (gui, “cassia tree”), for instance, the left part, “木” or tree-radical, indicates meaning, whereas the component on the right— “圭”—expresses sound.19 Especially for complex characters composed of many different radicals, it often becomes difficult or impossible to assign any specific function to each radical. Their perception as radicals resides, rather, in a graphic unit, as a distinct form comprising purposefully arranged strokes in conventionalized shapes. This raises the question of the status of radicals. On the one hand, radicals are simply graphic shapes—composed of different strokes—that are recurring elements in characters. However, in order to look up characters in a dictionary, all Chinese characters are distributed into different radical classes. Radicals are then listed according to stroke number, and characters classed under these radicals are further organized by the number of remaining character strokes. Of course, this is simply a pragmatically useful, conventional system, much as the order of the alphabet is ultimately arbitrary though fixed through a history of use. However, it also shows that not all radicals are equal. In order to attribute one radical to each character, certain radicals, generally those that express meaning or are to be found at a character’s left or upper part, are privileged as the ones by which a character can be recognized. Consequently, not all experiments that draw attention to the modular character of sinographs are equal either. For instance, “Rhapsody on Contemplating the Waves” (“Guan lan fu” 觀瀾賦), part of the web novel Fashions of an Age (Mou dai fengliu 某代風流) by the Taiwanese author Cao Zhilian 174

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曹志漣, “radicalizes” sinographic design even under the duress of minimal textual cohesion. All characters of this text, a poetic interlude (rhapsody or fu) in a narrative, have been selected for the presence of the three dots of the water-radical “氵” (or its full character variant “水”): 泠水洌洌，汝沐渼波；湜泉湉湉，汝潛清淵；潾水泂泂，汝泊汀沚； 滄海泱泱，汝漂茫茫。盪湖波泯泯，溯湖浪濤濤，泛江流澐澐。 沸波淡沱河漢，洪涔湝湝滄溟，潮汛漫漫涯涘。沒湫湫，溺沍涸， 漫漶潦潦。20

Cao’s rhapsody insistently repeats one radical, thus luring the readerly mind away from the automatic connection between shape and meaning toward a graphic appreciation. Through repetition, it seems to achieve an analytical apperception, a pattern recognition on the level of character elements, and not, as in the normal reading process, on the level of the overall gestalt of a character that a reader then connects to a memory of meaning and sound.21 Cao’s text displays a graphic variation of Roman Jakobson’s definition of the poetic function of language: the application of paradigmatic criteria on a syntagmatic level.22 According to Jakobson, poetic word choice is dictated by contiguity with other signs, through either similarity or contrast.23 This becomes especially visible in the structural features of highly regulated literary forms, for instance, meter, rhyme, or alliteration in poetry. Jakobson’s theory of the poetic function of language, developed in the cultural context of a phonetic script, tends to highlight phonetic repetition or contrast. However, Jakobson’s theory is equally valid from a graphic point of view.24 In the context of sinographic texts, attention to graphic as well as phonetic repetition makes particular sense, because the modular character of the sinographs allows for the repetition of components on the level of the written sign in contrast to alphabetic or other phonetic scripts.25 What might be a largely unconscious process in the creation of Chinese texts, namely, that character choice is prompted by previously selected characters with similar elements or, on a phonetic level, similar pronunciation, comes to the forefront as a visible strategy in Cao’s radical design.26 Cao’s work draws attention to the materiality of language, illustrating with zeal (and some exaggeration) Roman Jakobson’s definition of the poetic function of language, namely, the influence of syntagmatic combination on the selection of words or, in Cao’s case, single characters. Technographies

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But the radical that Cao’s rhapsody underlines stands out from other (sino)graphic components: not only does it have a meaning-bearing function, but it also turns out to be mimetic in character—after all, the three dots, or drops, of the radical visualize the idea of water and invoke the “view” or “contemplation” of the waves that the title promises.27 In other words, radical sinographic design, such as the repetition of radicals in Cao’s text, can foreground a very limited aspect of the techne of character construction, one that, though potentially analytical, might ultimately return to a mimetic myth of Chinese writing in a slightly updated form. Another type of experiment with the components of the graphic system of Chinese achieves its cultural anchorage by emphasizing meaning as well as graphe. This is the case in experiments that have a neographic, rather than a pseudographic, thrust; they avail themselves of ideographic principles to craft new characters whose meaning—though not part of the lexicalized vocabulary—is easy to guess. For instance, the mainland poet Yang Lian 楊煉 uses a neograph as the title of one of his most famous works, the long poem Yi, published in 1989, a kind of Yijing 易經 (Book of Changes) for our times. Yang Lian himself calls the title of the work, Yi , a “noncharacter” (wu zi zhi zi, 無字之字), and likens it on several occasions to Xu Bing’s pseudographs.28 Unlike Xu Bing’s graphic experiment, Yang Lian’s newly crafted Chinese character is not devoid of meaning. Instead, the poet takes great pains to lexicalize it. The graph comes with its own pronunciation (yi) and tone (first tone), as the poet indicates carefully at the beginning of his text, both in Pinyin transcription and in the older method of transliteration through two Chinese characters, in which the first indicates sound and the second tone, which is used mainly in commentaries on classical texts.29 Consisting of two pictographs, “人” (ren, “human being”) and “日” (ri, “sun”), in a style reminiscent of ancient Chinese seal script, Yang’s title combines two character (which are also radicals) to form a new one. As the connection of heaven and man, Yang Lian’s yi forms a counterpart to the yi 易 of the Yijing. Yi in the title of the classic is most commonly translated as “change,” but its exegetes also point to the pictographic substratum of the character: a combination of “日” and “勿” (as an alternative form of wu 物 or “animated thing”).30 Rather than a radical commentary on Chinese writing, Yang Lian’s neographic intervention uses ideography, the combination of two pictographs, one of the six ways of character formation, the liu shu 六書. The creative resources of the sinographic script subtly reinforce the meaning of the work as a whole:

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a repositioning of man in the universe.31 Rather than challenging the sinographic regime and its tradition, Yang Lian’s neographic character displays the adaptability of Chinese writing, its openness to new meanings and ideas. By drawing on the Chinese tradition of the commentary, with its set ways of defining rare words, applied here to a neographism, Yang Lian’s textual move inscribes itself within the long tradition of Chinese culture. However, by aligning himself with Xu Bing’s graphic experiments, Yang Lian also advocates for a flexible, not slavish, use of Chinese tradition in order to enlarge its textual archive and enrich its sinographic medium. Whereas Yang Lian desires his “noncharacter” to be readable and goes to great lengths to achieve this, the Taiwanese poet Chen Li 陳黎 engages in a poetic reflection on the unreadability of pseudographs. One of the poems of his collection Light/Slow (Qing/man 輕／慢), published in 2009, “A Difficult Poem That Is Easy to Read” (“Yi shou rongyi du de nan shi” 一首容 易讀的難詩) contains four lines of cryptic characters. At first glance, Chen Li’s strange characters seem to exhibit their unreadability. Chen Li had created the pseudographic text first in his earlier collection Worries and Freedom Well-Tempered (Kunao yu ziyou de pingjunlü 苦惱與自由的平均律) where it had appeared on its own, just designated as “A Love Poem” (“Qingshi” 情詩).32 Now, the last lines of the text are recontextualized, imagined as an opaque Chinese poem cherished by Pindar, the famously difficult poet of Greek antiquity: He liked to read a Chinese poem called “Love Poem” because this poem, so they say, was equally difficult to read irrespective of if it was translated into Greek or not33

At face value, the poem’s new frame, especially with its reference to Pindar, emphasizes the strange link between pseudographs and translation. Since these signs are “fake,” they are not in need of translation; they are as cryptic to native readers of Chinese as to somebody who reads and writes in ancient Greek, such as Pindar. As in the case of Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky, the opacity of pseudographic text transcends the limits of specific languages and is thus universal. However, Chen Li’s poem presents such a translation as an actual possibility, even though, of course, the absence of meaning, or the fact that meaning is transferred to graphic form, makes these signs unique

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to their specific script. These look-alike characters on the one hand do not need translation, but on the other are untranslatable, since no adequate way of translating, or, indeed, transgraphing, pseudo-Chinese into pseudo-Greek exists. For Chen Li, pseudographs cannot simply signify the absence of signification or the impossibility of translation. The very gesture of framing part of the former stand-alone text of “A Love Poem” in a subsequent work almost remedies an earlier oversight, or else embodies a sustained manipulation of the reader. In Light/Slow, a part of Chen Li’s poems that are commentaries on individual Chinese characters is dedicated to glossing some of the supposedly inexistent Chinese signs from “A Love Poem” and “A Difficult Poem That Is Easy to Read,” even supplying information on their voicing in his notes to the poems. After presenting these Chinese characters to readers as supposedly unintelligible sinographics, Chen Li provides them with meaning and cultural context: many of these signs turn out to be rare characters or to belong to the vocabulary of regions or ethnicities at the margins of Chinese culture.34 Irrespective of the facticity or fiction of these glosses, they open up the system of the Chinese script once we can read these signs (or imagine that we are reading them) not simply as spurious play that merely reactivates the rules of character construction, but as the possibility of other uses of sinographic material at the margins of a linguistic system and its norms. In Chen Li’s poem, graphic experimentation ultimately returns to the question of meaning, especially to the question of the connection between cultural meaning and graphic form. The Taiwanese experimental poet Hsia Yu 夏宇 approaches Chinese pseudographics from yet another vantage point: the six noncharacters that form the text of “Another Kind of Ethics” (“Lingwai yizhong daode” 另外 一種道德) in the collection Rubbings: Ineffable (Moca: Wu yi ming zhuang 摩擦．無以名狀) of 1995 are neither readable nor graphically pleasing.35 Rather, they strike a reader as extremely unbalanced, with poorly distributed radicals or, at times, the omission of elements that are needed to form “proper” characters or radicals. For instance, one of Hsia Yu’s characters combines the radical “門” (men) and the radical cluster “品” (pin)—a valid pseudographic creation but for the lack of one of the little box shapes. The poem’s made-up characters transgress the rules of radical design and joyfully exhibit the manual cut-and-paste technique of the collection as a whole, where single characters, clusters of characters, and lines appear cut out from another text, then crudely pasted back together. The translucency 178

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of the paper used lets the reader divine characters or parts of characters from the original reverse. The poetic text has become a palimpsest. Hsia Yu’s pseudographic practice works to underline, and bring to an extreme point, the script and material politics underlying the work as a whole, which features, in its majority, recognizable and readable characters. The pseudographs of “Another Kind of Ethics” represent just one facet of a general process of collage: the cut-out aesthetic of the poetic text that consists of material recycled from previously published work, the palimpsestic jumble formed by sinographic text on both sides of semitransparent paper, and finally, in the form of the pseudocharacters that bring collage to the level of each single sign. Because of the clumsiness of their execution, as well as because of the unlikely distribution of character elements, Hsia Yu’s signs do not pose as “real” characters. Rather, they draw attention to textual recycling and recombination as creative principles. These examples of pseudographics all use sinographic material at the level of character elements to create new, unknown, or nonlexicalized characters. And yet, they also show profound differences in their connection or disconnection of graphic elements and meaning, in their regard or disregard for sinographic rules, and in their medium specificity: all use the Chinese script, but each comes in its specific style, mode of production (calligraphy, collage, printed text), and textual materiality (book, scroll). The Chinese script, with its modular construction, already is a radical design. Consequently, pseudographic experiments, with their tension between the modular and the gestaltic, between deconstruction and reification of the Chinese script, do not automatically combat or undermine the sinograph or Chinese culture as a whole. It is not the foregrounding of one element, for instance, the emphasis on the modularity or even mathematical principles of pseudographs, and thus of Chinese characters, that renders these experiments radical or resistant. Rather, their conceptual and aesthetic strength lies in the interplay of different creative strategies, in the emphasis on medial multiplicity within and with the sinographic medium. From this vantage point, we can reevaluate the fascination of Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky. Unlike the pseudowriting of Gu and Qiu, his work is based not on the art form of calligraphy, but on the artisanal skill of printing and type carving. Rather than artistic mastery in the bold strokes produced by the individual artist in a fleeting, ephemeral spur of creation that crystallizes endless acts of practice and the long process of planning and meditation, A Book from the Sky works with another logic of permanence and transience, Technographies

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that of matrix and reproduction, both on the level of each single character and in its medium of textual (re)production in the tradition of xylography or woodblock printing. Amid all the different sinographic experiments that creatively de-sign Chinese writing, Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky stands out for its unique combination of sinographics, the radical-based invention of new characters, graphic materiality, and the tradition of artisanal printing and bookmaking. Different types of creativity play together to produce Xu Bing’s installation: the work of the inspired designer with a keen sense of the possible combinability of elements to craft viable and aesthetically pleasing graphs, the skill of the artisan who carves the wood types, the exactitude of the printing specialist who sets the types for printing, and the mechanized copying of the printing press.36 If Xu Bing thus conjures up a technologized and radicalized embodiment of the Chinese script in a double sense, he approaches it through aesthetics— on the level of spatial constellation and distribution of elements and on the massive level of the art installation. On the one hand reproducible, on the other auratic, the pseudographs in A Book from the Sky are doubly and triply “touched” by the artist. It is the paradoxical combination of terms conventionally dissociated by us that makes for part of the fascination of Xu Bing’s work: invention and repetition, contact and distance, sense and nonsense, script and image, origin and copy, tradition and innovation, ephemerality and duration. These contradictions also mark our perception of and anxieties about the digital turn, new media, and the importance of code. Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky might capture our contemporary imaginary particularly strongly, because it both symbolically models some features of new mediality, such as modularity, reduplication, and the white noise of code, and nurtures our nostalgia for the pretechnological through individual design, wood carving, xylography, and the material presence of the art installation as a whole. For the radical design of Chinese, a similar tension is given aesthetic shape as A Book from the Sky oscillates between a swansong to the graphic integrity of the Chinese written sign and the celebration of the modular energy of the script that aligns it—symbolically if not (yet) pragmatically—with new script and media technologies. But what about the link between script and cultural identity? Does the conservation of sinographic form, even though divorced from meaning, attest to the stability of Chinese? Does this just constitute an empty shell, a script void of meaning and communicative function, the nightmare scenario of a writing system overly enamored with cultural 180

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identity politics? Or does the pseudographic potential of sinographs actually show a way toward script flexibility and adaptability? Xu Bing’s pseudographs still reproduce the visible forms and medial traditions of Chinese writings. However, some of Xu Bing’s subsequent experiments further engage the question of the malleability of Chinese under the pressures of new media and interculturality. After the success of A Book from the Sky, Xu Bing continued to work with script experiments, though they never pushed intelligibility to the limits to such a radical extent, nor did they strike a similarly compelling balance between appeal and anxiety. Rather, the radical design of this masterpiece becomes restricted, or rather, redirected, in much of what follows. In Square Calligraphy, in contrast to the radical “otherness” of a script that is unreadable—though still recognizable as belonging to a specific script tradition in form and execution—Xu Bing stages a momentary alienation of English by transgraphing it into a script that looks very much like Chinese writing, with similar rules of spacing and distribution.37 Each word becomes a character, which accounts for a large number of different forms (much as with sinographs), but the recurrent elements are much more limited in number than Chinese radicals: the letters of the English alphabet are each slightly recrafted to adapt to a more Chineselooking shape. No longer is the Chinese script vacated of meaning, but it has to be read by identifying its component parts in English as stylized alphabetic letters. In this exercise of transgraphing—Xu Bing actually set up a kind of classroom setting and designed a calligraphy copybook for the teaching of Square Calligraphy during his exhibitions—English words become transmuted into the auratic shapes of Chinese character look-alikes, almost, but not quite. In the same move, Xu Bing becomes, once again, a supplemental inventor of writing, the Chinese calligraphy teacher and designer for a rapt international audience. Is Square Calligraphy Chinese or English? Does it conjure up the specter of Chinese undermined by global English, reduced to a graphic husk, or rather the mutability and resilience of the sinographic matrix? Xu Bing’s experiment definitely produces an intriguing fusion of two scripts, but the distribution of work—all content English, all form Chinese— might echo a history of prejudice against sinographic materiality a bit too closely for comfort. Square Calligraphy’s move at first glance from total opacity to an auratic opacity, which dissolves into English at a second glance, was followed by a return to iconic principles in A Book from the Ground, a kind of counterpoint to A Book from the Sky. In a recent talk, Xu Bing described two of his Technographies

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most important artistic reflections on writing as democratic projects:38 his most famous installation A Book from the Sky and the more recent A Book from the Ground. The former, consisting of a breathtaking arrangement of scrolls and books, all carefully printed with hand-carved wooden types of inexistent Chinese characters, according to Xu Bing, is unintelligible to everybody, Chinese and non-Chinese readers alike, even though possible ways of seeing might differ widely. In contrast, the latter, an attempt at crafting a writing system with existent icons that could easily translate and mediate between natural languages, allows access to everyone, irrespective of his or her mother tongue or script. A Book from the Ground serves as a kind of archive that compiles a collection of existing icons, mostly used in signs. During the exhibition, interactive screens allow the audience to “translate” text from their native language into icons, thus crafting a supposedly universally readable text. Of course, this is just another installment of the age-old dream of a universal language, now adapted to the age of digital media and machine translation. All can be translated here, but not because of a digital code in which each language is potentially translatable—and in which each language thus also becomes translatable into another language—but because of a new reference to iconicity. Xu Bing’s reflections on Chinese writing in A Book from the Sky, with its analytics of radicals and components, came close to a system that doubly flaunts its untranslatability: it cannot be translated into meaning, and does not have to be translated, precisely because it has no meaning that could be rendered in another language. In A Book from the Ground, there where the Chinese script drops out of the picture, one of its symbolic energies comes back with a vengeance, though no longer wedded to a specific linguistic and cultural context. In A Book from the Ground, Xu Bing, a bricoleur of existing icons, a facilitator—with the help of computers—of interlingual translation through the medium of icons, proposes a brave new world of visual transparence. Is this a utopia of communication or the erasure of writing as such? Even there where Chinese visibly disappears, it comes back, as Xu Bing references the iconic potential of the Chinese language as an important inspiration for just such a script of icons. However, how should we read Xu Bing’s turn and return to the iconic, with, through, and beyond the Chinese script? Have we returned to the dream of an international language that allows easy communication between different cultures, the old utopia of language philosophers in early modernity, or Esperantists, with the only difference being that the suggested medium is pictograms coupled to a machine 182

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translation program? What is the status of the iconic in Xu Bing’s A Book from the Ground? And what makes the iconic inspiration essentially Chinese even though its form no longer echoes its graphic regime? Rather than replicating digital media, A Book from the Ground actually adds another, supplemental, even superfluous sign system to the digitalized translation process. By translating linguistic signs into a code of 1s and 0s, and then back into another set of signifiers, computers are not in need of icons. The effect of the work of art does not lie in facilitating the process of translation, but in, yes, its visibility, since it creates, in however restricted a way (so restricted that in spite of Xu Bing’s explanations, critics like me are tempted to read the project as ironic), a virtual space that is not determined by one’s language. This “space” consists in a common visual experience, independent of corporeal presence. However, is this space—the computer screen, which is inhabited by an iconic regime that erases language only to be itself virtually made superfluous by the digital code that really rules its production—not also the space where writing, as linguistic and material practice, disappears? Or does the supplementarity of icons, the fact that they do not function like digital code, point to the multiplicity of linguistic communication, and thus to the resilience of languages and scripts?

undeR e(RasuRe) The catastrophic scenario of the sinograph’s assassination often indicts the Internet as one of the main culprits. The computer—hailed by some as the salvation of the Chinese script in the face of the onslaught of the alphabet— also has a decisive effect on the practice of writing. Even though the imaginary of the sinograph as calligraphy has lost nothing of its symbolic force, for the most part, Chinese texts are no longer handwritten, but typed on the computer or a mobile phone. When the fingers’ selection of a key supersedes the direct relation between the hand’s movement and a character’s shape, the structure of character memorization and reproduction inevitably follows suit. In theory, this is equally true for phonetic scripts. In practice, however, for the logographic script of Chinese, the fact that most Chinese users of digital devices depend on phonetic input systems exacerbates the problem. All evidence points to the fact that this decreases the mastery of Chinese writing even among the highly educated—at least in situations where the input prostheses are not readily at hand. Technographies

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In contrast, critics in the other camp—less pessimistic when it comes to the effects of digital media, but no less conservative—react to the challenges of digitality by claiming a profound resemblance between the essence of the sinograph and the semiotics of new media. For instance, the Taiwanese art critic Jiang Xun 蔣勳 equates computer icons with Chinese characters in his bestseller The Beauty of Chinese Calligraphy (Hanzi shufa zhi mei 漢字書法 之美), published in 2009: I often look closely at this symbol that resembles both a graph and a picture [he speaks of the oldest extant sinographic text] and think that it is very much like the messages my students would send via SMS or Skype. Sometimes the messages would consist of sinographs, at others they would insert iconic symbols (tuxiang fuhao 圖像符號), such as emoticons. A broken red heart stands for desperation or sadness; a smiling face expresses a feeling of happiness or contentment. Sometimes these icons show the directness of a pictographic mindset (tuxiang sikao de zhijiexing 圖像思考的直接性) better than complex or verbose sinographs. Among the categories of Chinese character formation there are the ideographs (huiyi 會意). Within the system of sinographs, the ideographs especially express the bond between sinographs and images. This is what the Ancients meant when they referred to the “common origin of writing and painting” (shu hua tong yuan 書畫 同源). Mankind uses both writing and images for their respective functions. Many are worried that today’s youths overuse images, and that this could lead to the decline of Chinese writing. I am not that pessimistic. . . . When we read the written symbols of the dawn of human civilization, they are actually very much like the “Martian Script” (huoxingwen 火星文) that adolescents use today. . . . Chinese writing, with its tradition of several thousand years, has followed in its course up to today’s SMS and emoticons. And it is really nothing like what conservatives describe as falling from the Classics and betraying the Way. On the contrary, this phenomenon can make us reconsider the secret of the unceasing vitality of the Chinese script.39

Jiang Xun’s reasoning is symptomatic of what one might call a neopictographic turn that both co-opts Western biases about the sinograph and reactivates a tradition of pictographic myth at work in some Chinese reflections on language.40 Such an endorsement of an updated pictographic bias for the purpose of an affirmative cultural self-description, however, also reveals a profound misconception of digitality. The resemblance between computer 184

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icons and sinographs is, at best, superficial. The invention of computer technology might well be the outcome of an ideographic and postphonetic turn in language, as Lydia Liu boldly argues in The Freudian Robot.41 In any case, the visual output of digital media is not its core characteristic, but a mere surface phenomenon that translates sequences of 1s and 0s for the convenience of the human eye.42 Ultimately, the fact that the sinographic logic of the likes of Jiang Xun fails to grasp the basic principles of digitality is not the most important issue. But does such a description actually even do justice to the script politics of Chinese writing? In other words, is it a valid and helpful way for those who use it as well as those who do not to imagine the Chinese language? Or, to return to the question of linguistic survival, does the de facto equation of computer icons and Chinese characters really serve to safeguard the sinograph, rather than rendering it unnecessary, at least symbolically speaking? Examples of the use of Chinese writing with digital media, such as the Chinese pendant to Netlish, the so-called Martian Script (huoxingwen 火 星文), and reflections on the digital turn, for example, in the experimental poetry of the Taiwanese writer Hsia Yu, differ from such reductive readings. They neither decry the demise of Chinese nor celebrate a revival of the sinograph in the guise of computer icons. Rather, they foreground the semiotic and formal complexities of language in its interaction with digitality. The Martian Script embodies one of the most ardently discussed “corruptions” of Chinese writing in recent years. What is loosely called Martian Script seems to have evolved among Taiwanese cybernauts, rapidly spreading to other Chinese-writing users of the Internet in the PRC and Hong Kong, with different variants based on region and subculture communities. The users of Martian Script—the name is clearly indicative of its strange, outlandish appearance to the uninitiated—not only do not attempt to correct the spelling mistakes that are the outcome of phonetic input methods, such as Zhuyin in Taiwan or Pinyin in the PRC, but make them an integral part of a new lingo. When students were asked to gloss examples from Martian Script side by side with comments on Confucianism in the Chinese language and culture section of Taiwan’s 2006 Central College Entrance Examination, public opinion ran amok. Apart from questions of social, economic, and regional justice—the skill of reading Martian Script was perceived to be clearly connected to access to computer technology and an Internet connection—the scandal revolved mainly around the fact that the Board of Education, in its desire for up-to-dateness, seemed to endorse tendencies subversive of proper Technographies

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Chinese diction in youths selected to become part of Taiwan’s highly educated elite. Whereas some saw this as an ephemeral fad, Martian Script, others feared, would quickly spread from the web jargon of teenagers to all of Taiwanese society and negatively affect the Chinese competence of future generations. So far, Martian Script has neither disappeared nor massively “contaminated” the Chinese written in Taiwan or elsewhere, even though advertising has begun to use it moderately, especially when a product sells itself as technologically savvy, such as the e-banking does in the slogan displayed on vans of Taiwan Post: “e 次 ok,” easily translated as the English “it’s okay” once you voice “次” (as “ci”) but with the added reference to the increased comfort of e(lectronic) banking, “e(ach) time,” when one activates the meaning, not only the pronunciation, of “次.” Martian Script is radically hybrid.43 Based on the Chinese writing system, it shares some expressive possibilities with international Internet and textmessaging lingo: the use of emoticons, a tendency toward abbreviations, and the substitution of letters for numbers common in alphabetic computer scripts, such as l33t (leet), coined from the word “elite,” an initially exclusive transliteration to distinguish a culture of Internet geeks from newcomers and to evade censorship filters. As a language of teenage and adolescent computer users, Martian contains a lexical substratum heavily influenced by the vocabulary fashionable in youth culture. As a composite sign system, Martian Script features Chinese characters or their components, phonetic symbols (such as Zhuyin in Taiwan), alphabetic letters, numbers, computer icons, and punctuation marks. It also reflects regional differences. For instance, in Hong Kong Martian, the Cantonese pronunciation of a character often motivates its substitution for a homophone, where homophony would not exist in Mandarin Chinese. Taiwanese Martian Script, with its basis of traditional Chinese script, uses symbols from the nationwide phonetic transliteration system Zhuyin, and at times reflects the Taiwanese or Hakka pronunciation of characters that are phonetically substituted.44 Apart from frequently used words or expressions that seem to have found their conventional Martian Script form, the language—if we can call it a language at all, or if it is one language rather than many different ones—is constantly evolving, as its users choose between different ways of rendering one and the same Chinese character in Martian, making the resulting text more or less difficult to read for the uninitiated or the partly initiated. The wide range of Martian strategies operates in the interplay of different scripts (Chinese, Zhuyin, alphabetic letters, numbers, and pronunciation 186

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marks), languages (Chinese, English, Taiwanese, Hakka, and Cantonese, with some Japanese by way of Manga), and signifying principles, including phonetics and pictographs. As such, it offers a vast reservoir of possibilities for redesigning the Chinese writing system. The following examples constitute a mere sampling of the potential varieties of Martian Script.45 Not all of the strategies outlined are used at all times, and they vary according to user, online community, region, and input methods:46 1. Phonetic Principles (a) Signs have to be read purely for their phonetic value, often combined with abbreviations: Zhuyin symbols (particular to Taiwanese Martian): ㄇ (phonetic value “m”) instead of 嗎 (ma), a question particle Alphabetic letters: “i” is substituted for “愛” (ai, “to love”); “GG” for “哥哥” (gege, “brother,” “bro”) Chinese characters are used to transliterate English: “十卜” (shibu) means “support” (in Hong Kong web communities) Numbers with Chinese voicing, intelligible as Chinese or English: “3Q” as “san q,” that is, “thank you”; “99” (jiujiu) for “舅舅” (jiujiu), that is, “uncle” (b) Other Chinese characters are substituted for the “correct” character on the basis of homophony or near homophony (sometimes only present in Taiwanese, Hakka, or Cantonese, sometimes irrespective of tone): “我” (wo), that is, “I,” becomes “挖” (wa) (in Taiwan) or “窩” (wo); “巧” (qiao) instead of “好” (hao) (in Hong Kong), that is, “good”

2. Graphic Principles (a) Alphabetic letters are substituted by numbers:47 “88” for “BB,” as in “byebye,” or the common Chinese transliteration, a lexicalized loanword from English, “拜拜” (baibai); “8,” via “B,” that is, 不 (bu, “no”) (b) The graphic appearance of Chinese characters is altered: Substitution of simplified for traditional characters or vice versa, depending on which script type is used less commonly, that is, Hong Kongers or Taiwanese would switch to simplified characters, Mainlanders to traditional characters

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Substitution of radicals, at times producing rare or nonexistent characters: “莪” instead of “我”; “侑” instead of “有” Character splitting: “口牙” instead of “呀”; “奚隹” instead of “雞”; “車欠石 更” instead of “軟硬” Variant: substitution of Chinese radicals by alphabetic letters: “T系” for “係” (c) Pictographic uses of punctuation marks, letters, and numbers (often taken over from MSN symbols or chat icons); similar uses are rare for Chinese characters: ^Q^, mischievous smile (tongue lolling); , sorry; @/”, snail; Orz, the pictograph of a prone body, expressive of deepest gratitude; 囧rz, as above, but with the use of the Chinese character (jiong, “bright”)

Of course, this practice produces incorrect characters and mixes scripts. Of course, constant exposure to incorrect characters most likely affects the users’ ability to correctly reproduce sinographs, since the mnemonic link between a character’s graphic shape, its meaning, and its voicing, which is necessary for such a reproduction, is diversified. From a slightly different angle, though, the Martian Script gives graphic shape to different movements of diglossia within and beyond Chinese that dominate the everyday pragmatics of the language. On a phonetic level, most Chinese native speakers switch between the official Mandarin and a regional dialect, another Sinophone language, or a nonSinitic language. In Hong Kong or Taiwan, the definition of what constitutes the official or unofficial Sinophone language(s)—with English thrown into the mix in Hong Kong before the handover of the English colony to the PRC in 1997—depends largely on the cultural and linguistic identity politics implemented by those in power. The spoken diglossia intersects with a graphic one between the Chinese written character in its simplified form (used in the PRC) or traditional form and the different phonetic transcription systems. These graphic systems supplement the sinograph, but they are actually the first complete script taught in school in the PRC or Taiwan respectively, while Chinese characters are introduced little by little. Reading primers as well as children’s books gloss Chinese characters with these phonetic symbols, until the moment at which the level of competence makes them redundant.48 As mentioned, for most computer users, it is these signs that are typed in and that are “transliterated,” almost by magic, into the sinographs that appear on screen. In Sinophone places, full literacy depends not merely on the correct production of Chinese characters and their standard pronunciation, but more 188

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and more on switching between different registers and scripts. And this scenario does not yet account for the pressures (and pleasures) of Anglophone or Japanese articulations disseminated on a global scale. From this perspective, rather than diminishing literacy, Martian Script actually becomes a training ground for different types of linguistic competence, as well as their easy combination and the switch from one to the other. In this sense, and this sense only, Martian Script is actually more complex than the sinograph. What it lacks in grammatical elegance and lexical variety, it makes up for in the variation of signifying logics and creative possibilities on the level of each individual sign. Especially in its flexible, not-yet-conventionalized form, Martian activates the mental capacities necessary for written expression to the highest degree. Instead of being a conventionalized shortcut between signified and graphic signifier, decoding each sign requires, in most instances, an experimental, combinatorial approach that toggles between different signifying logics. This implies, on a level that might remain unconscious for most users, a better understanding of the principles of Chinese writing in particular, and of written signification in general. Counter to the critiques of script traditionalists who see the essence of Chinese writing threatened by the Internet, Martian Script is not a “dumbeddown” version of the sinograph, and thus a symptom of sinographic decadence. Instead, Martian constitutes a highly sophisticated mixed sign system that supplements Chinese writing in age-specific and media-specific contexts. Since it does not subscribe whole-heartedly either to principles of simplification or to pictographic strategies, Martian’s avatar of web-compatible Chinese defies the neopictographic enthusiasm of those who see Chinese characters newly embodied in computer icons. At a closer look, the complexity of Martian easily surpasses the portraits of it drawn by critics, for instance, in a critical poetic piece by Lu Boru 盧柏儒 featured in the fourth issue of the Taiwanese poetry journal On-Time Poetry (Xianzai shi 現在詩), published in 2006, along with a cluster of experiments with different “Chinese” scripts, such as Zhuyin symbols, petroglyphs, and the so-called birdand-insect script (Niao chong shu 鳥蟲書). Lu’s piece, “Martian Encroaches Upon Earthese” (“Huoxingwen ruqin lanxingwen” 火星文入侵藍星文), consists of three different texts: a letter in Martian script (either made up or copied), its transcription into another type of experimental script invented by Lu, and an essay that translates the letter into standard Chinese as the basis for a reflection on Martian in general.49 (See figure 5.2.) Technographies

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FiguRe 5.2 Lu Boru’s pseudo-Martian “poem” “Martian Encroaches Upon Earthese.” Reprinted with permission.

Lu’s essay polarizes Martian script into two extremes: phonetic and iconic phenomena. Of these two, the author clearly champions the pictographic as the adequate medium for a Chinese “code,” and fustigates the “terrifying shapes” that derive from the input system of Zhuyin, as well as the often esoteric character variants that result from voicing sinographs in Taiwanese or Hakka. The scenario Lu invokes, somewhat at odds with the constant diglossia at work in Taiwanese society, is one in which phonetic transcription begins to override the standard pronunciation of Chinese characters. For Lu, the sound of other Sinophone languages becomes interference, as voicing encroaches upon graphics and as sinographs are no longer homophones, as in standard Mandarin, and can no longer be “translated” back into the “correct” character that conventionally expresses the signified. In this sense, the fact that Martian thrives on the phonetic indeterminacy of the Chinese script is viewed extremely critically wherever it is not tamed by the imposition of a standard pronunciation. On the other hand, and much more generously, Lu underlines the iconic character of Martian. For Lu, computer-generated signs—emoticons or mimetically used punctuation marks, letters, or numbers—become recognizable as a type of pictograph, and thus as closer to the bedrock of Chinese writing. In Lu’s attempt at creating a different kind of Martian, pictographic and pseudopictographic strategies abound. Not in vain does the author invoke the six strategies of building Chinese characters, the liu shu, canonized by such authorities as Xu Shen 許慎, the author of the first graphically organized Chinese dictionary, Explanations of Simple and Compound Characters (Shuowen jiezi 說文解字): the image of a sun stands in for the word “day,” an originally pictographic character (ri 日), and the picture of an elephant replaces the adequate sinograph (xiang 象) to express “like” or “such as,” another meaning of “象” or its variant “像,” and thus reminds readers of the pictographic etymology of the term. In other instances, a character is simply typographically altered, not unlike some sinographs embodied in strange scripts, in the shape of plants, animals, or bird tracks.50 Lu’s creation is symptomatic of a turn to the iconic—as supposedly more in tune with Chinese tradition—in the face of (Sino)phonic diversity on the one hand and the reign of digital code on the other. Evidently, neither Martian in its different forms nor Lu’s pseudo-Martian, neither phonetic nor pictographic distortions, are truer to the Chinese script. But that is not the point. What the juxtaposition of Martian with Lu’s impoverished pseudo-Martian shows is, by contrast, the ability of the Technographies

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sinograph to admit different elements without being reduced to a single one. Martian script, while by no means simply identical with Chinese writing, points to the structural wealth and the complex variety of sinographic writing. Counter to expectation, simplification is not the overriding drive of Martian. Features that speed up typing, such as abbreviations and the use of simple icons, are counterbalanced by others that complicate the input process, such as the splitting of characters into two components; some icons require such an unusual (and often lengthy) series of signs that writing the corresponding word or short expression (in either Chinese or English) might actually take less time. More generally, the radical mix of script sets always implies additional steps to switch from one script to another. But anyone who has ever sat beside a student texting at top speed on his or her mobile phone in a Chinese university classroom no longer believes in the need for further speed anyway. A related characteristic of Martian points to its communicative intent. While the borrowings of abbreviations and icons from cyberspace might indicate an international thrust, even a desire for communication across regional, linguistic, and cultural boundaries, the opposite is true. In spite of its international components, the different Martian scripts are often specific not only to a region, but to a web community. Exclusivity, not transparency, is the goal of Martian. It allows communication within, and thus identification with, a particular group of individuals at a time when personal contact and physical contiguity are becoming less important or less viable for the constitution of a community. An important function of Martian lies in the exclusion of the uninitiated, in the definition of group boundaries in a medium that has made some (but not all) social categories more permeable, at least in cyberspace. Consequently, Martian is also a cryptographic tool. Nowhere is this more visible than in the substitution and manipulation of the Chinese characters. With all the fascination with web lingos and the iconic, Martian mostly treats combinations of alphabetic letters, Arabic numerals, diacritical marks, and punctuation markers as building blocks of pictographs, but rarely sinographs.51 Martian Script overwhelmingly designs Chinese characters with a view to signifying obscurity by highlighting their phonetic and “analyzing” their combinatorial potential. Martian Script is both a reaction against and a parasite upon the impact of digital technology on the translation between languages and scripts, as Emily Apter invokes it in Translation Zone: 192

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It is becoming clear that digital code holds out the prospect, at least, of translating everything into everything else. A kind of universal cipher or default language of information, digital code will potentially function like a catalytic converter, translating beyond the interlingual and among orders of bios and genus, liquid and solid, music and architecture, natural language and artificial intelligence, language and genes, nature and data, information and capital. The idea behind “everything is translatable” is an ideal of informatic commensurability—with promiscuous commutations made possible through a common code.52

On the one hand, the existence of Martian Script depends on the digital revolution that allows the conversion from one sign into another, one script into another, and one language into another, which is ideally only a mouseclick away and without any loss of information. On the other, Martian’s flexible transgraphing techniques actually attempt to carve out a virtual linguistic niche in cyberspace that would prove incomprehensible, and thus impenetrable, to outsiders. Of course, such a graphic exclusionism was immediately countered by the mushrooming of online conversion tools that claimed to make Martian Script accessible and readable to everybody—with the help of digital encoding and decoding technologies. Rather than an erasure of Chinese writing, Martian Script embodies a process of resignification and redesign of a written tradition by negotiating between speech and writing, Sinophones and Englishes, phonetic and sinographic writing, digital code and natural language. As such, Martian evokes an endless series of possible permutations of each single sign in a digitally empowered move that, however, swerves away from the aim of linguistic transparence so prevalent in the dream of universal, computer-assisted translatability. Martian seems to hold a peculiar answer to the question of linguistic survival: what makes languages and scripts emerge and persist in the digital age is not a particular essence, such as iconicity or pictographic substratum, but rather the multiplicity and versatility of its signifying strategies, since this is a feature that no digital code can translate or replicate. At least not yet. Whereas Martian Script merely implies and, indeed, practices a kind of Chinese script with multiple formal and semiotic possibilities, poetic reflections on digitality multiply stage a creative crossing between Chinese writing and digital media, for instance, in the work of the Taiwanese poet Hsia Yu. Nowhere is this more visible than in the poem “The Disappeared Image” Technographies

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(“Shi zong de xiang” 失蹤的象) from her poetry collection Ventriloquism (Fuyushu 腹語術), published in 1991, and in her poetry collection and art object Pink Noise (Fenhongse zaoyin 粉紅色噪音), published in 2007.53 Whereas “The Disappeared Image” uses a complex intersection of image, textual signification, and digital principles to play with the anxiety of the erasure of the sign, Pink Noise employs machine translation to reflect on the material and medial conditions of literary creation. At first glance, Hsia Yu’s seemingly unassuming poem “The Disappeared Image” flirts with the iconic principle so prevalent in efforts to update Chinese writing for the new media, since it strategically replaces a Chinese character, “象” (xiang, “image”), with images reminiscent of computer clip art. At a second glance, however, through an intertextual reference to the exegetical tradition of the Chinese classic Book of Changes (the Yijing 易經 or Zhouyi 周易), the poem also evokes the realm of the digital, since the hexagrams of the Yijing, figures of six interrupted or uninterrupted lines used for divination, have also been read as a protobinary sign system. In the end, “The Disappeared Image” privileges neither an iconic nor a digital reading of the sinograph. Instead, Hsia Yu uses the visual and intertextual potential of her poetic text for a reflection on the meaning of signification especially in a digital age that seems to spell the disappearance of older sign systems. (See figure 5.3.) The title of the poem “The Disappeared Image” becomes a program: throughout the text, each time the character “象”—“semblance” or “image,” but also “elephant”—should appear in the text, the sign is replaced by an image, or rather by icons typical of computer clip art. In the poem, “象” disappears in a number of ways. Most evidently, the sign “象” is missing, except for its appearance in the title of the poem—an initial presence that renders its subsequent disappearance visible for a reader. Even though the sign “象” is substituted by images, what disappears with “象,” paradoxically, at the very moment in which images appear in the text, is the pictographic substratum of “象.” Taking the pictographic myth at face value by replacing the word “image” with images, the poem points to the discrepancy between images and sinographs. It illustrates the absurdity of the prejudiced asseveration that a Chinese character refers directly to a thing, as if it were an abstracted image of that thing. Replacing a Chinese character with an image, or expressing the category “image” by providing concrete images, such as icons of animals, fruits, and other everyday objects, highlights one of the problems of the pictographic 194

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FiguRe 5.3 Hsia Yu, “The Disappeared Image.” Reprinted with permission.

myth, that of abstraction. In other words, if a sign stands in for a specific referent, how does such a signifying regime bridge the gap between a specific object (this elephant here) and its category (elephants) or between a concrete object (elephant) and an abstract concept such as “image”? Of course, “象” is also the sign for elephant—an animal conspicuously absent from the group of animal icons in the poem—and, as such, is pictographic at base. In this sense, the process that makes the signifier for “elephant” stand in for the meaning “images in general” is a metonymical one, including a double transition from the concrete to the abstract: one animal stands in not for its class of concrete objects (animals), but symbolizes the very structure of representation in which one sign stands in for a group of discrete, specific objects. “象” has become a metasign. Implementing the genealogical return to the image on the basis of “象,” however, through Hsia Yu’s play with icons, allows the reader to grasp the fundamental arbitrariness in the connection between meaning and sign, even as it activates the pictographic remainder of the character at the same time. We can trace an etymography for “象” that leads us back to the referent “elephant” on iconic tracks.54 And yet, unless we form part of the linguistic Technographies

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community of literate speakers of Chinese, the sinograph “象” as such does not reveal its meaning(s) for us. It is not universally readable, but depends on conventions within a community of speakers who activate the different meanings of the sign effortlessly and, for the most part, automatically, according to context. From this angle, “象” does not disappear, but rather emerges as a sign that consists of a multiplicity of meanings according to different signifying principles: pictographic and symbolic ones, as well as metonymical and metascriptural ones. And yet, the vertiginous play with presence and absence staged in “The Disappeared Image” is not yet over. The text the poem rewrites with (or without) “象” is a quotation; it reproduces a key passage from the philosopher Wang Bi’s 王弼 (226–249 ad) General Remarks on the Book of Changes (Zhouyi lüeli 周易略例), a treatise on the Chinese classic the Book of Changes. The passage, from the section “Elucidating Images” (“Ming xiang” 明象), reads as follows: Since the words (yan 言) are the means to explain the images (xiang 象), once one gets the images, he forgets the words, and, since the images are the means to allow us to concentrate on the ideas (yi 意), once one gets the ideas, he forgets the images. . . . Therefore, someone who stays fixed on the words will not be one to get the images, and someone who stays fixed on the images will not be one to get the ideas. The images are generated by the ideas, but if one stays fixed on the images themselves, then what he stays fixed on will not be images as we mean them here. The words are generated by the images, but if one stays fixed on the words themselves, then what he stays fixed on will not be words as we mean them here. If this is so, then someone who forgets the images will be one to get the ideas, and someone who forgets the words will be one to get the images. Getting the ideas is in fact a matter of forgetting the images, and getting the images is in fact a matter of forgetting the words. Thus, although the images were established in order to yield up ideas completely, as images they may be forgotten.55

What emerges in this passage can be read as a theory of signification as an interdependence of three concepts: idea (yi 意), image (xiang 象), and words (yan 言). As Ming Dong Gu suggests, Wang Bi invented a proto-Saussurean concept of the sign, in which xiang as a mental image serves as a bridge between yan (the signifier) and yi (the signified).56 Each factor in the process of signification is an indispensable step to understanding, but both image 196

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and word have to be forgotten (or disappeared) in order to reach meaning. The order in which these three concepts are arranged places meaning (yi) closer to the image (xiang) than to the word (yan). And yet, without the word—which might be disregarded afterward—we cannot access the image, and thus cannot access meaning either. If we follow Ming Dong Gu’s reading—leaving aside that it smacks of a comparative euphoria that rereads Wang Bi’s hermetic text through the lens of modern semiotics—the image has been put under erasure in Wang Bi’s text even before Hsia Yu’s irreverent, icon-laden citation. When we read Wang Bi’s reflections in the light of modern theories of signification, both the image and the word become merely a means to an end, namely, to the attainment of meaning. Hence, the disappearance of the image also points to the notion of signification that aborts the here-ness of the referent as well as erases its own materiality by treating the signifier not as object, but as mere instrument. This is the place where xiang has lost all traces, since it no longer retains its material (traceable) form after exhausting its signifying function. And yet, the very multiplicity of disappearing xiang in the poem actually makes it impossible for a reader not to zoom in on the different avatars and the multiply mediated materiality of the sign. This becomes even more evident once we translate Wang Bi’s passage from a general reflection on signification back to its concrete context. When Wang Bi writes of xiang, he does not mean just any pictograph or image, but rather a very specific one: the broken or unbroken lines that form the hexagrams commented on in the Book of Changes. There, the hexagrammatic images are accompanied by text (yan) that provides a commentary for a given constellation, as well as for the individual lines. In this context, the hybrid text of sinographs and icons in Hsia Yu’s poem activates yet another sign system that qualifies as “image,” albeit of a very different kind: the lines of the hexagrams. By opening up Chinese writing to yet another code, the poem also puns on the larger philosophical context of Chinese hermeneutics. Hsia Yu reverses the practice of exegetical commentary—an addition that frames while also preserving a canonical text—with faulty or incomplete citation, which replaces a crucial character with heterogeneous elements. But this minor change—itself an irreverent play with a revered classic—results in a complete rewriting of the text, even as its creative mechanism, the replacement of xiang, echoes the content of Wang Bi’s famous passage.57 By now, the poem’s title, “The Disappeared Image,” has taken on a vertiginous multiplicity of meanings. And yet, the little icons, and their contiguity Technographies

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not to art, but to computer-generated clip art, remind us of yet another trait of the specific image under consideration here: a hexagram can be read as digital at base, made up of broken and unbroken lines that correspond to the function of 1s and 0s in digital code. In the face of the digital, the image, as well as language itself, disappears, not only in the service of the idea that it is supposed to express and transport, but also as the abstraction of a series of 1s and 0s. Or does it? Of course, as a pragmatic system of divination, the equation of a digital system with the hexagrams is not quite correct. Even though, at a first glance, the two types of lines in the hexagram look like digital code, the performative context of divination and the exegetical tradition of the Book of Changes and its commentaries actually allow a multiplicity of signifying systems to emerge. This multisystem translates numerical values into the hexagrams in the act of divination, transmutes them into different contiguous or opposite hexagrammatic constellations, appends these with names and commentaries, and thus allows for the diviner-reader to correlate the sign with the specific real-life situation that is the questioning ground for divination.58 This does not mean that the constellation of broken and unbroken lines that forms a hexagram might not be reread creatively vis-à-vis a digital system, or even vis-à-vis the pictographic myth. It does mean, however, that such a rereading needs to involve a complication of signification and mediality, not a mere reassignment of categories. Hsia Yu’s poetic tarrying with iconic principles on the one hand and with the realignment of one of the oldest Chinese sign systems, the hexagrams, with a digital imaginary on the other unhinges any univocal strategy for a sinographic updating in the face of the new media, as well as disclaims the anxiety of the loss of Chinese writing. There where xiang is supposed to disappear, it reappears in a puzzling multiplicity in Hsia Yu’s poem. The replacement of xiang with icons contests the erasure of the material sign. On the one hand, even though the images are equivalent neither to xiang nor to the hexagrams, they function in a similar way, as material signs that bow to and disappear in the face of meaning. On the other, the self-reflexive gesture of disappearing xiang exposes the economy of signification as disappearance and suggests its impossibility. The three types of signs that are designated as xiang—sinographs, icons, and hexagrams—obey very different signifying logics, but support one message: the disappearance of signs is an illusion, since they merely transmute into other (no less material) signs. To claim that a Chinese character is a picture or to read the hexagrams as a digital system merely entails a back-and-forth 198

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of affirmation and negation. It fails to explain the creative by-product of the fantasmatic investment of the sinograph, namely, that it becomes a changing and changeable cipher of mediality, one that moves between different systems of media and signification. In this respect, Hsia Yu’s “The Disappeared Image” is a sinographic text in a strong sense. It does not only use Chinese characters and reflect on their meaning and cultural expressivity. Instead, by projecting a seemingly simple strategy, the substitution of a sinograph with clip art images, it lures the reader into a maze built of levels of meaning and cultural references. There where a poem seems to herald the decay of writing (or, at least its iconic reduction), writing, in the shape of the graphic sign xiang, with its multiple forms and meanings, emerges as a new force. This is not simply another essentialist depiction of Chinese writing, but rather the radical awareness of language as translation. By playing with erasure in “The Disappeared Image,” Hsia Yu debunks the anxiety of language lost that dominates so many reflections on the digital. Instead of seeking refuge in reducing Chinese writing to the iconic, as the proponents of a neopictographic turn intended to put the sinograph in sync with digital media do, Hsia Yu saturates a single sign with so many different layers of meaning that it ceases to exist as a mere shorthand of a given signified, but becomes a catalyst for a constant process of meaning making and code, as well as media, switching. The fact that a sign can have multiple meanings, or indeed, that it is merely a cipher (if not a stopgap) for a potentially endless flow of significations, has become common currency in the context of poststructuralist theory. However, to conceive of the sign as the flexible, temporary outcome of potentially unceasing processes of translation means a bold move in reframing digitality and writing. From the perspective of translation—not as a perfect rendering of sense, but as a constant reassessment of the sign in its flexibility and versatility—digital code no longer signifies as the other to writing, but instead becomes one specific example of the potential inherent in writing itself. Writing will not disappear in the era of digital codes, simply because translation is at the heart of digitality as that which defines it. Code without languages or semiotic systems to translate from and into, without any interface, has no reason to exist. Hsia Yu’s poetry collection and art object Pink Noise, published in 2007, explores precisely this question of interface and translation, of language and code. The book visually plays on transparence and opacity with its unique medium: sheets of transparent plastic, bound into a small book, onto which the poetic text is imprinted in black (English or French) and pink (Chinese).59 Technographies

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Precisely because of the translucent quality of its “pages,” the poems of Pink Noise are extremely difficult to read, since each text forms part of an amalgam of alphabetic letters and Chinese characters graphically bleeding through from subsequent or anterior plastic sheets. The result is palimpsestic, creating a three-dimensional space out of invisible “skins” and textual thickness. The materiality of Hsia Yu’s poem-object puns on ephemerality and persistence, since it simulates the fleeting, spectral presence of signs on a computer screen through a medium that endures time unaltered: in contrast to paper, with its relatively short life span, the plastic sheets of Pink Noise in their nonbiodegradable limpidity might traverse decades and centuries without decay.60 In Pink Noise, the complex imaginary of erasure that marks Hsia Yu’s earlier poem “The Disappeared Image” reappears massively on different levels of the text, which becomes an art object. What is at stake here, however, is not only the precarious yet joyful coexistence of presence and absence in the digital medium: the screen output of the past—just seconds or years ago—now becomes invisible, but it has left more or less indelible traces in the mysterious “depths” of computer memory. Hsia Yu’s poetic experiment hinges upon the erasure of language. The interview of Hsia Yu by Ah Weng 阿翁 that concludes the second edition of Pink Noise tellingly refers to itself as “Poetry Interrogation: At the First Crime Scene of a Linguistic Murder” (“Wen shi: Yuyan mousha de di yi xianchang” 問詩—語言謀殺的第一現場).61 But in what does the “linguistic murder” thus attributed to Pink Noise consist? The thirty-three pairs of poems in the collection have been generated with the help of a translation program, Sherlock—hence the pun on translation as linguistic crime. This is how Hsia Yu herself describes the process: I dumped a bunch of stuff into the program—Shakespeare, Poe, Pushkin— to translate into Chinese and it set my head whirling: Yes, this must be the word noise I’ve been looking for! Why not do a poetry volume filled with lettrist noise? For a year I played with this program as if I were stoned out of my mind and composed 33 poems. My sources for a lot of the lines in the English-language text were phrases I’d found in the endless chain of blogs and in the many websites that popped up when I clicked hyperlinks in spam. I lineated the texts to look like poetry and ran them through Sherlock and then revised the English and ran it through again, often repeating the process many times depending on the translation’s context. Finally, I juxtaposed the English and Chinese versions to resemble a bilingual volume of “poetry in translation.”62

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The guiding principles of Hsia Yu’s experiment—she herself hesitates to call it poetic—echo the paradoxical fascination of the work with decay and decadence. The very literal fidelity of Apple’s translation program Sherlock leads to noise and thus to the creative energy of (mis)translation: white noise takes on a pink hue. Fed with fragments of mainly English (and some French) sentences or expressions encountered on the Internet, Hsia Yu’s ghost in the machine unceasingly spawns Chinese “text.” The outcome of this process of authorial bricolage appended with machine translation embodies both the crumbling of language and its liberation into an unconscious, automated process of creation. In the computational circuits of the “lethal lover” Sherlock—a program that proclaims the unreliability of its translations— linguistic material is both recycled and trashed. But even the creative interstices of machine translation await their demise, once ever more perfect translation tools aspire to human-like (and yet superhuman) linguistic competence and thus usher in the waning of distorted translations. At that future moment, the intervention of the poet—the selection of fragments and the decision regarding the number of translation processes—will have become superfluous, as will have poetry in this form: it will simply have to search for another linguistic and medial outlet. For now, it is still the software that “dies” first, like Hsia Yu’s version of Sherlock, which ceased to function in 2008, leaving the book as material survivor.63 In the meantime, Pink Noise thrives on linguistic specificity and the lack of transparence in the translation between digital code and real languages. In this context, Pink Noise is a bilingual—or, if we count code, trilingual— work in a strong sense, since expertise in both languages, comprehension of both scripts, is needed for a full appreciation. But the two languages, English and Chinese, are not interchangeable. According to Hsia Yu, the structure of Chinese allows it to react differently to the challenge of noise. The flexibility of syntax and word type in Chinese, features that have been routinely faulted as sources of opacity in the Chinese language, actually foster intelligibility in Hsia Yu’s simulation: through all distortions, the Chinese text produced is still readable. In other words, Chinese lends itself more readily to becoming the host language of the poet’s (and the machine’s) strange translation than English. In the face of the digital, in tune with the synesthesia of sound and graphics in the form of lettrist noise, the visual imaginary of the Chinese script is still strong. But in spite of its mythical origins as a system inspired by traces in nature, the myth of the essence of a Chinese script has been put under erasure. Instead, the medial and signifying polyvalence of Technographies

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the sinograph beyond itself has become of the utmost importance. Instead of being at the murder scene of language, we have witnessed the digitally assisted genetic mutation of Chinese: Chinese writing evolved from the traces and tracks of birds and animals, the sound of the wind, and ripples on water. Even today, when I encounter a sentence pieced together or assembled in some quirky fashion [as the ones produced by Sherlock] my vision is awash with an intuitive pleasure. The strange freedom of Chinese writing seems to come with the keenness of animal instincts, evolving over time as if it knew no limits. Chinese can be written to resemble Western languages, to resemble English, French, or Japanese, and you can still understand it, whereas none of those languages could be composed to resemble Chinese and still remain intelligible. This is the one thing I’m always after: to test the malleability of the Chinese language in the hope of pushing it beyond its imaginary horizons.64

Hsia Yu’s reflections on the Chinese script through Pink Noise forge a new way of conceiving of linguistic survival in the wake of the digital revolution, in the force field of globalized communication. In the poet’s comments, the sinograph has lost nothing of its mythical power, and yet, its very force does not derive from any given essence, or any exclusive linguistic or semiotic principle or feature, but rather from its very malleability. Instead of painting the new media as the doom of Chinese writing, the poet shows deep interest in the creative possibilities that lie in the necessary translation of code. When Apter sees the digital era as one in which everything has become translatable, it is also the point at which everything has to be translated. Unlike the ideal of a seamless transition from one text to another, with the help of digital code, these processes of translation are (still) far from producing a perfect rendering. In the transmission and manipulation of information, from one language to another, from image to text, from script to code, the inevitable interference of white noise clouds the transparence of the crystal screen and the glass fiber conduits. This is where new meaning emerges, rather than a pure replication or reproduction of existing information. Hsia Yu’s poetic experiments do not so much offer an alternative reading of digitality as point to a radical change in perspective. Instead of using the media anxiety that is a common symptom of any change in media paradigms and systems of representation as a return to purist, univocal imaginaries of the Chinese script, her poems celebrate flexibility and multiplicity as the very 202

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factors that guarantee the survival of the Chinese script and of writing in general. Hsia Yu’s poetic reflections intentionally endorse a paradox in the face of the digital challenges to script cultures: Chinese constitutes a particularly stable linguistic and script system precisely because it translates well. By extension, we now have an answer of kinds to Burroughs’s question of what allows a language to survive. The code to linguistic survival does not subscribe to rigidity, but to mutability. The survival of Chinese writing depends on flexibility and change, not on an immutable fetish of cultural essence, or it does so only insofar as mutability becomes an alternative identity. The survival of specific languages and scripts, as well as of language and writing as such, is inextricably tied to adaptability—and not only because of the digital turn. Yet adaptability depends on a rich repertoire of different signifying principles. There exists no antidote to changes of languages and scripts, since, as media of communication, their essence lies in their adaptability to changing social, political, and cultural contexts and to the needs of the communities of users. In any case, linguistic conservatism is not such an antidote, but, by any reckoning, one of the main obstacles to linguistic survival. The sinograph, like any other script system, will not weather the current language crisis—if indeed such a crisis exists—because of any inherent, essential quality, be it iconic power or modular tendencies. Rather, its embrace of a model of translation, its framing of signs as being in constant movement between semiotic systems and media, allows for the adaptation to new contexts, the absorption of new energies, and the inventions of new forms and communicative possibilities. It is this feature that will allow writing to embrace the possibilities of digitality without being reduced to becoming code.

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concluSion BeyonD Sinology

Sinographic DilemmaS The digital age makes everything translatable, but it also highlights that everything is in constant need of translation, and, indeed, always already virtually translated: from letters to code, from numbers to graphic shapes, from script to script, from language to language. Hand in hand with intercultural and transnational pressures, as ideologies and imaginaries race to catch up with and adapt to digital challenges, questions of production and reception, of linguistic specificity and medial embodiment, of agency and power become ever more virulent. What does the case of the Chinese script tell us about the fate and possible future of writing in the age of new media and interculturality? Under these new conditions, we are faced with the necessity to rethink mediascapes and their symbolic value, as the mediality of writing emerges as a battlefield of opposing desires. The present moment, a crucial juncture of medial and intercultural pressures, exemplifies a profoundly paradoxical structure inherent in the links between scripts, media, and cultural identity. Whenever the Chinese written character, or actually any script, aspires to become a medium for cultural identity, it pits difference against sameness, alterity against identity, flexibility against stability, and multiplicity against univocity. Where we might expect Chinese identity politics to invest in using the Chinese written character as a univocal marker of Chineseness, to situate itself squarely on the side of stability and sameness, more complex affective investments and script politics emerge. This depends on a fundamental semiotic divergence at work whenever the Chinese written character becomes a script of identity. Vesting Chinese

writing with the essence of Chineseness, indeed vesting any single language or script with the essence of a culture (the term “culture” often substituting for political structures such as the nation-state), splices the sinograph’s semiotic function in a symbolic process that makes it a carrier of cultural and national identity: in addition to its function as signifier, an instrument of communication and representation, the sinograph, by way of its graphic form, also has to carry the additional semiotic burden of Chineseness. Situations of intercultural and medial stress add complexity to this picture. Much as they make identity politics more desirable, they also render the idea of a sinograph “in translation” between different cultures and media necessary and appealing. Intercultural stress relativizes a given language and its script as just one possible system among many. And yet, cultural contact also exacerbates the necessity of positive and negative self-definition, there where languages and scripts, such as the sinograph, become the pawns of identity or alterity politics. On the one hand, globalization and increased intercultural contact exert pressure on the idea of cultural and national essence, but they also increase the need to think about one’s own culture and language as a global commodity. For a language and its culture to thrive and flourish under such “duress,” it has to travel and lend itself to translation. New media change and challenge existing distributions of communicative functions, potentially privileging nonlinguistic means of representation and devaluing linguistically and culturally specific scripts. But digitality also offers new medial imaginaries, new symbolic shapes according to which existing scripts can be reinvented and charged with new ideological, cultural, and aesthetic value. When language and writing become as technologically assisted as they are in today’s communication, the illusion of their essence might become an attractor and catalyst for media nostalgia as a reaction. Digital technology can induce more heavily entrenched media politics that police cultural and symbolic boundaries, while also pragmatically facilitating the processing and safeguarding, the gathering and dissemination, of information—potentially on a global scale. This leads to a paradoxical tension. On the one hand stands a return to and fetishization of a script essence that will survive and resist translation between languages and cultures as well as between different media, like a stubborn remainder. On the other stands a desire to rethink a script as akin to new media and digital principles—an argument made by proponents both of the alphabet (its letters are a combinatorial sign system with a limited number of components) and of the sinograph (it has an ever smaller number of basic components, five strokes, or 206

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alternatively it is closer to the visual interfaces of digital media because of its iconic elements). The tendency to vest cultural identity in the medium of script while at the same time adapting its “old” technology to digital imaginaries and global challenges often weds medial updating to a conservative turn. Scripting identity in these contexts negotiates between sameness and difference, stability and adaptability, univocity and multiplicity. This tension is frequently managed by strategically highlighting some specific semiotic functions of media for ideological emphasis while downplaying others. The Chinese language(s) and its script(s) are especially apt examples of such processes of medial management, since they have been fetishized in particularly strident ways—both within and outside of their own cultural contexts. Chinese has been “medialized” by being equated with other media, for instance, in the pictographic myth that turns the sinograph into an image. At the same time, this has often meant isolating parts of its linguistic systems from any pragmatic and holistic linguistic context: to rend speech from writing, to tear characters or their components out of (con)texts. Much as the sinograph symbolically becomes another medium, it is also stripped of the polymediality at the heart of writing. The fantasy of Chinese as a cipher for identity or alterity functions particularly well whenever one of its semiotic levels or medial functions becomes singled out and isolated from its complex cultural and linguistic contexts. The symbolic management of mediality, caused as well as contested by interculturality on the one hand and the digital turn on the other, puts multiplicity constantly under erasure: It tames and restricts the permeability and hybridity of linguistic and scriptural traditions, as well as curtails the polymedial and polysemiotic nature of writing. At the same time, however, it also has to constantly invoke the multiple medial facets of the sinograph. For example, the display of “Chinese Characters” during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics symbolically sought to tie Chinese writing to an unbroken chain of cultural tradition, but each of its activated links, from seal-script characters to digitalized displays, could also be read as different elements that showcase the hybridity rather than the continuity of the Chinese script and its medial avatars throughout the ages. In a similar way, the symbolic “updating” of the sinograph by Chinese artists and thinkers who compare the pictographic facets of Chinese writing to the icons of the computer age actually brings up the question of cultural specificity: what is Chinese about those? While the media power play in the digital age Beyond sinology

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requires the sinograph to be more flexible, more translatable, more like other scripts, languages, or codes, this symbolic self-strengthening by way of the sinograph ultimately requires national identity politics to proclaim medial multiplicity while at the same time trying to contain multiplicity to create a stable and discrete vision of the sinograph as cultural and national symbol, against, above, but, most importantly, different from other writing systems. This results in an oscillation between sinographic flexibility and permanence, between openness and closure. Medial and intercultural pressures bring out the tensions between the two poles of script politics: In order to imagine the sinograph in new medial forms—or old forms in new clothing, for instance, as combinatorial, modular, or iconic—its versatility is celebrated. And yet, this also triggers attempts to tame or limit multiplicity in the interest of identity politics, by stabilizing the link between Chineseness and its sinographic cipher. This dilemma is not only at work when the sinograph functions in a context of national self-description, for instance, in the recent national calligraphies of the PRC. In a slightly different form, it also operates in the long history of sinographic dreams and hallucinations in the West, when we turn from identity to alterity politics, from cultural self-definition to a construction of cultural otherness in which the other script—and Chinese writing has been the supreme example of such an othering mechanism throughout the centuries—becomes the mark of total difference. As a radically different system, the sinograph is put to use as a negative mirror for the purpose of Western self-definition. However, and more interestingly, it is also frequently endorsed as a positive model. For instance, early film theory that compared the new medium of moving pictures to hieroglyphs or ideographs sought to articulate, and thus to symbolically control and contain, a difference in medium by way of cultural difference expressed through a difference in writing system. But to translate one difference with another also means introducing and assimilating the cultural other at the heart of one’s own system: if the moving picture is (like) Chinese writing, the other script and its logic have already entered Western culture and media. For the proponents of concrete poetry, the tension between total cultural and relative medial difference is even more pronounced. There, a figment of the other writing system, in the form of the ideograph, aims at excavating a suppressed vitality inherent in phonetic script traditions themselves. From a cipher of radical otherness, sinographic writing has been translated into a difference at the heart of sameness. 208

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Sinographic mimicry In an age of transcultural flows in the global marketplace, the supposed correlation between identities and their producers and performers has become increasingly unpredictable, far from being confined to either a Chinese selfdefinition or a scenario in which Chinese writing, seen through a non-Chinese lens, functions as a marker of cultural alterity par excellence. One of the consequences of globalization and new media networks is also that the brokerage of identity can be disconnected, to a certain degree, from its site of production. Instead, identity has become a commodity to be brokered like a logo by whoever has elaborated the most convincing design, without, however, losing any of its essentialist aura. Such a marketing of designs and ideas leads to interesting intercultural conjunctions, for instance, when another’s identity marker is produced elsewhere. The ideographic REN Building that will grace Shanghai’s Bund is one case that illustrates the new vicissitudes of the Chinese written character as a medium for culture in especially stark terms. As an architectural design, REN embodies a “translation” between different cultures in which alterity and identity politics collude, wedding interculturality to concrete situatedness. The Danish group of architects BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) has adopted mimetic alterity as a marketing strategy: it has undertaken to design “the Landmark of the People’s Republic of China,” the so-called REN or People’s Building—of course in sinographic form.1 The building that some blogs hail as the “Eiffel Tower of Shanghai” will take the shape of the Chinese character “人” (ren) for “person.”2 What will change the face of Shanghai’s Bund, with its colonial architecture, appears like the pinnacle of national calligraphy in spatial form. The two feet of the 人-shaped skyscraper will connect water and land. Its two legs, one with conference facilities dedicated to the mind, the other, with sports- and water-culture centers, to the body, will come together in a gigantic hotel complex—expressing the ultimate harmony accessible to the mobile, rich bodies of future customers. The transparent glass construction, with its steel exoskeleton, as well as the building’s flowing forms, suggests the accessibility of the interior, an intertwining of outer and inner space. In contrast to REN’s inside, which reserves access to the privileged, the wave-like extensions of the “feet,” which serve as esplanades, as well as the square between the legs that is sheltered from the elements but lets light through, are indeed designed as open, public spaces. Beyond sinology

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A charming story of translation serves as a rationale for the sinographic design of REN; it is told by BIG itself in the contrived ingenuity of a series of slides in comic style entitled “Found in Translation.” Apparently, REN owes its existence entirely to a series of coincidences, of translations and creative misreadings. Here is REN’s prehistory according to BIG: Circa 2003, BIG’s precursor, PLOT, proposes a spa project for the Danish city of Umeå, which features an architectural innovation that joins two buildings into one. Perceived as insufficiently attuned to the context and specific space at hand, the project fails. Two years later, a Chinese businessman gives the Umeå model a sinographic reading, by identifying the architectural shape as “人.” (See figure 6.1.) Henceforth, the project, renamed REN, acquires a new meaning and, prospectively, another cultural context that BIG will activate to its fullest extent. With the interpretive help of a feng shui master who further authorizes the design as “Chinese” by identifying its different shapes as embodiments of the five elements, REN is featured at Shanghai’s Creative Industry Week in 2005. Not surprisingly, the model makes the cover of the Shanghai newspaper Wenhui bao, and is singled out for its ideographic shape (zixing 字形) among hundreds of other projects from all over the world. Originally proposed for the EXPO, REN is currently scheduled for construction on the Bund. So much for the power of reinterpretation that allows a Danish product to reinvent itself as Chinese, once it has been scaled up to “Chinese proportions,” to thrice the size of the original building planned for Umeå—in harmony with the monumentality and megalomania rampant in Chinese architecture that fascinates Chinese and international planners and architects alike. REN, out of place in Umeå for the understated Northern European taste, found its true place by translation, once the Scandinavian architects became used “to dealing with symbolism at such a blatant level” and learned to relish it.3 In the end, all are happy—the BIG group, which can construct its building in a place that guarantees it unprecedented visibility, and the Chinese, from BIG’s translators who “immediately started digging the People’s Building” to the mayor of Shanghai whose enthusiasm for REN is quoted as follows by BIG: “Shanghai is the city in the world with most highrises. But to me it feels as if the connection to the Chinese roots has been severed. But here, I see for the first time an architecture capable of bridging the gap between the ancient wisdom of China, and the progressive future of China.”4 BIG’s quotation resonates with the tension between Chinese tradition, identity, and modernity, now expressed in the “medium” of architecture. The REN project embodies 210

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Figure 6.1 The invention of REN, from BIG’s “Lost in Translation.” © Bjarke Ingels Group. Reprinted with permission.

the fundamental contradictions at work in the sinographic scripting of identity: iconic architecture has to communicate the idea of Chineseness beyond its real location. Of course, global firms depend on big projects like these more than China needs symbolic help from a group of Danish architects. REN will take its place among other signature architecture from international masters of architecture that keeps mushrooming in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, showcasing China as a global superpower. It will join such mega buildings as Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV tower or Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest in Beijing, which are examples of China’s addiction to architectural megalomanias, better known in theory under such terms as Charles Jencks’s “iconic building” or Deyan Sudjic’s “edifice complex.”5 However, as an example of an assisted scripting of Chineseness in architectural form, by foreign architects for a Chinese site, meant for global circulation, REN’s lesson in translation reveals more than just China’s new economic power or the global reshaping of identity markers as logos. Site-based, architecture also has to become “medial,” to go “viral,” to be transformed into images for the purpose of global circulation. Hence, the need to give these transcultural buildings a Chinese face, one that translates and travels well, that is intelligible both at home and abroad.6 Of course, the use of a sinographic design, the ideographic rendering of architecture, guarantees, in Shanghai, but not in Umeå, a Chinese coding of REN’s architecture. Of course, architecture—design as the marriage of function, meaning, and aesthetics—often expresses an idea, though rarely as literally as with the People’s Building.7 REN’s ideographic architecture certainly expresses the idea of Chineseness—after all, it is a gigantic Chinese character made of steel and glass. But what of its other expressive content, namely, “人”? As a single character, “人” designates the individual person rather than the collective, as in the compound “人民” (renmin, “the People”). BIG’s choice to interpellate the human individual in one of its incarnations in the logic of the Chinese nation-state, the People’s Republic of China, has elicited some puzzlement on diverse Internet blogs: is this a misreading on the part of BIG, a pandering reference to communism, a postmodern critique of that very ideal, an expression of human hubris in its hope to dominate the world, a symbolic marriage of old and new embodiments of Chineseness?8 Or is it a symptomatic expression of the recent ideology of harmony propagated by the Chinese state, in which individual and collective find a new balance? BIG itself markets REN as another avatar of the little-loved EXPO mascot Haibao, another incarnation of the character “人,” as a light-blue plush puppet. After 212

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all, the motto of the 2010 World Exposition in Shanghai centers on the city space and its inhabitants: “A better life, a better city.”9 But rather than being expressive of any particular, univocal meaning, even such blatantly iconic buildings as REN suggest a multiplicity of possible readings, particularly in the translational space opened up by intentional or arbitrary misreadings between cultures and media. Maybe the double meaning of REN, that is, Chineseness and “the People,” is not really meant as a felicitous conjunction, but points to a disjunction instead. After all, what is Chineseness? An essence or a fabrication? And who are “the People”? An existing community or a symbolic construct? And how are both ideas expressed in the shape of REN? In theory, architecture, much like calligraphy, consists in a combination of hermeneutics and haptics, a cohabitation of the visual and the spatially experiential. The “reading” and corporeal discipline elicited by a building no longer works through the scripted interactive performance of hand and eye, but as the organization of space that affects the movement of bodies through it. Apart from its iconic content, architecture, as “physics,” has a direct impact on corporeality. What kind of link between space and meaning does a building such as BIG’s REN project conceptualize? For all the effort put into the sinographic mimicry of Chineseness, can REN communicate its meaning also in the medium of architecture? The People’s Building, as icon, can be read as “人,” but is it of or for the individual bodies that physically constitute “the People”? Or is this a tongue-in-cheek reminder that “the People” are really only the few wealthy consumers, community turned into consumption? Based on an unresolved tension between form and meaning, REN relies on semiotics more than on haptics. It is merely symbolic of “the People,” but its real use is restricted to the privileged bodies of the few; its power is iconic, without crystallizing into a physical space that could create “the People” through the experiential force of shared space. If REN, via the Chinese script, fails to perform “人,” does it become just another example of the global game of architectural name-dropping, now in the service of a precariously embodied national allegory? Or does REN showcase the contradictions inherent in ideographic architecture and sinographics in general, namely, the mismatch of its double semiotic function and the divergent meanings of its different media, the iconic and the spatial? Does REN embody the wedding of Orientalism and Sinocentrism or does it construct a monumental critique of just such essentialisms? At the close of the video presentation for the REN building produced in 2006, when virtual night falls around the silhouette of the REN model, the Beyond sinology

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building is transmuted into the black strokes of the character according to which it is shaped: “人.”10 Then the addition of a horizontal stroke transforms “人” into yet another character: 大” (da, “big” or “BIG”) This sinographic sleight of hand seems symptomatic of a work of sinographic architecture whose elegant design also proposes new, contradictory perspectives on the translation between medial expressions and cultural identities. Symbolically, by crossing out REN—as well as its different meanings?—BIG puts its own mark on a “Chinese” project by having the last word, or rather stroke. And yet, sinographic play here does not remain restricted to the commissioned construction of identity elsewhere, to a process of transcultural mimicry in the age of global capitalism, but is also embraced as a new logo for a Danish firm of architects.

BeyonD Si(g)nology Beyond Sinology has paid particular attention to sinographic texts in a strong sense, those that highlight and reflect the paradoxes of script politics, and their play with medial and cultural boundaries, with difference and sameness. And yet, if the sinograph can embody both an instrument of nationalism and a medium that precludes the univocal formulation of cultural essentialism, how can we decide which function it fulfills in any given case? What gives us the right to read sinographisms against the grain, against their apparent intention? The implicit logic of sinographic identity politics needs to point to the medium. In other words, whenever the Chinese script becomes instrumentalized for questions of cultural identity, it no longer merely works as a signifier that erases itself in the face of the content it communicates. On the contrary—to tamper with a well-known sentence by Marshall McLuhan— the script becomes the message. Consequently, this turn toward the material and medial specificity of signification opens a space for reflecting upon the status of the sinograph. This in-built critical potential can be activated or left dormant. It is also, at best, a double-edged sword, since its logic cuts both ways: if Chinese writing transports more than just the message of Chineseness, by the same token, sinographisms that work against Sinocentrism also, by disavowal, add to the very script tradition they seek to open up and destabilize. This also means that positionality, cultural ideology, and sinographic script politics are not automatically aligned. For instance, sinographic 214

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expressions produced at cultural centers might not necessarily buy into Euro- or Sinocentrisms. By the same token, sinographic (or Sinophone) articulations at the margins cannot be naturalized as resistant interventions. Both critical sinographisms and their analyses have to adopt wayward strategies instead. Mere elisions, critiques, or deconstructions of the sinograph might fall short of the aim to free the Chinese script from its Sinocentric burden. Instead, reinventing the Chinese script involves an unceasing negotiation between erasure, disavowal, and reification, a management of design and de-sign. How can we analyze these complex constellations around Chinese culture and its scripts? With the help of a new method of reading, a new sinology that this book has tried to model. By scrutinizing examples of sinography, understood not merely as Chinese writing, nor merely as the textual production of China, but as texts that reflect on and experiment with the sinograph as medium, Beyond Sinology pushes for a more situated as well as medially responsible approach to cultural difference. Rather than essentializing the bind between mediality and identity, for instance, by reducing the sinograph to a hallmark of Chineseness, or, in a reverse move, to an avatar of alterity, we might want to connect both terms by multiple, as well as flexible, interfaces. Rather than merely translating cultural differences onto medial ones or vice versa, we might want to allow concretely situated medial practices to formulate their own theories, stage their own transcultural and transmedial energies. What does it imply to update sinology, to work “beyond sinology,” as my book title suggests? It means to make it possible to talk about “China” without engaging in an Orientalist perspective at home in the Western tradition of Sinology, or returning to a navel-gazing of Chineseness and China’s own, as a kind of Guoxue 國學 of national essence, though also without forgetting the ideologically tinted genealogies of work on things “Chinese.” To move beyond si(g)nology, if you allow me the pun, means (1) to redefine sinology and its traditional understanding of what counts as “Chinese,” and (2) to consider writing as more than just a sign system by highlighting the links between writing and other media, as well as its ideological and political investments. Beyond sinology (without the “g”) marks the fact that new work on China—China understood as a phenomenon constructed by different discourses from different positions—has to take into consideration the hybridity at work in the category “Chinese,” as well as the fact that sino-objects Beyond sinology

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are importantly in dialogue with and shaped by (as well as shaping) cultural expressions elsewhere. In order to understand “China,” we also have to reflect on the mechanisms that form “China” from different perspectives and in different ways. To reach beyond sinology means to understand Chinese culture as an internally heterogeneous group of articulations that strains against and blurs the limits of its “Sino” label. The Chinese writing system is not the homogenous, timeless system thinkers and artists have dreamed about in China and the West. Instead, the sinographic objects under analysis here form part of an internally diverse tradition, one constantly in flux through contact and tension with other cultures, languages, and scripts. Interculturality, globalization, and diasporic experiences create a climate in which Chinese writing has to assert as well as redefine itself constantly. Beyond signology (with the “g”) addresses the question of the medium. It is not only the outcome of the scripting of China, that is, the crafting of cultural identity as one’s own or as cultural otherness, that counts; we also have to consider by what kind of media this “writing” is done. To reach beyond the sign means to pay attention to Chinese writing in its concrete materiality in different contexts, as well as to the contested politics that determine its interpretations and ideological uses. The sinograph lends itself especially well to such a consideration since it foregrounds the multiple possibilities inherent in any writing system: connecting the visual and the sonic, the iconic and the symbolic, the combinatorial and the gestaltic. Reflecting on Chinese writing, not as an essence, but as a medium with different material embodiments and symbolic alliances, allows going beyond a reading of China as a sign, toward a reading of China as a fluctuating, medium-specific work-in-progress. Paying attention to the multiple medialities, materialities, and meanings of such a sino-scription also precludes any automatized equation between the sinograph and a cipher of Chineseness. Though formulated with the help of mostly contemporary examples, beyond si(g)nology as a way of reading is applicable to other historical moments, other foci of investigation, and other cultural contexts, precisely because it makes awareness of medial, cultural, and historical particularities an integrative part of its method. The new si(g)nology I am proposing here is not simply a method that describes its object (“China”) in however complex terms but that is aware that by describing “China” we also script it. Whenever we write and talk about “China,” we make conscious or unconscious choices as to what belongs or does not belong to this object, which of its parts will become visible or remain invisible, what will be central to the idea 216

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of “China,” or what will remain at its periphery. Doing si(g)nology means shouldering the responsibility of taking an active part in actually making and constructing “China.” Some caveats are in order here: This does not mean that our object of inquiry does not exist out there, only that it becomes intelligible as object only through discursive acts. This also does not mean that we are at liberty to construct it any which way, since ours is only one voice in a dialogue regulated by different institutional patterns and shaped by the historical and ideological genealogies of our discipline. Our implication in shaping “China” also means that we have to negotiate constantly between our need for talking about a stable referent and our strategic desire for complexity, hybridity, and resistance intended to make our work groundbreaking and cutting-edge. Does my own desire for a methodology beyond si(g)nology turn the sinograph into a cipher, rendering my project Orientalist, albeit on a metametalevel? Maybe. And by the same token one could accuse it of Sinocentrism, or indeed, of sinographocentrism. But both Orientalism and Sinocentrism need some indispensable ingredients—in this respect both are actually quite similar—that Beyond Sinology constantly critiques and contests: (1) an absolute claim of discursive agency, (2) a constant elision of differences in perspective, as well as of internal multiplicities, diachronic change, and ruptures, and (3) a persistent disavowal of its own political investment. In contrast, for me, the sinograph is an important test case for material and medial practices that constantly block and disallow reductive thinking. This book uses the sinograph, as a culturally specific, as well as transcultural, phenomenon, as a special case of a more general economy that links writing systems and cultural identity or alterity. It does not claim that all examples are the same, nor does it think that some examples are per se better suited for theory building than others, or only strategically so. Instead, theories of mediality and cultural difference themselves have to work in and as translations or, indeed, transcriptions. Instead of merely scrutinizing movements between spaces, cultures, languages, and media and their symbolic charges, they are themselves implicated in the movements they describe, as well as invested in culturally (or interculturally) specific media politics. This book is no exception, even as, or especially because, it attempts to show the conceptual danger behind theory’s participation in or blindness to its own, often culturally motivated, media politics. That theory itself cannot claim a pristine metalevel, that cultural difference not only underpins and drives it, but is actually partly produced and Beyond sinology

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negotiated by it, does not invalidate theoretical work, but rather makes it stronger, precisely because this means cutting through the disavowed difference between theory as abstraction and cultural articulations as concretion and exemplarity, as the object, but not as an integral player in the formulation of theory. Instead, we might allow texts in a broad sense to formulate their own theory, as well as not to be blind to the fact that examples matter in their situatedness, in their medial specificity, and that theories have concrete—if tacit or erased—imaginaries behind them that determine our thought. We have to put theory more vigorously back in its place, to not relegate it to a less important position; but we also have to take stock of its own movements in intercultural and medial transcription. Intercultural and transmedial texts— and that includes theoretical texts—always carry their own cultural situatedness and effect their own translation in and of space; they are not bound by an identitarian essence, nor reified as a fetish of difference, but produced in and as translation or, indeed, transcription. A movement beyond si(g)nology then also attempts to model a different way of connecting theoretical thought and the specificity of cultural material, one in which the general notion of the sign underlines, instead of erases, the specific contexts and practices of the sinograph.

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Notes

IntroductIon: ScrIpt polItIcS 1. As discussed throughout this book, the Chinese term wen has multiple meanings beyond that of writing, including all things cultured. To translate wenzi as “Chinese characters” or “sinographs” already elides the complexity of the term. 2. One section of the Sayings of Confucius (Lunyu 論語) is particularly prominent: “All within the four seas are brothers.” This is in tune with the message of global peace and harmony that became the frequently invoked motto of the Olympic Games in Beijing: “One World, One Dream.” 3. See the discussions of Hegel in Jacques Derrida, “Le puits et la pyramide,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 79–127. Christopher Bush provides a good overview of Western prejudice about and obsession with Chinese writing in Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6–19. 4. The Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet writes the following about the Kangxi emperor in a letter to Leibniz in 1701: “Those who have said that the prince and inheritor of the Empire was learning or had learned a European language have been mistaken. It is true that the emperor fancied sometimes to have us write letters of our alphabet in front of him, and to have us read from our books, as have the princes his children, but never with the aim of learning them.” Rita Widmaier, ed., Leibniz korrespondiert mit China: Der Briefwechsel mit den Jesuitenmissionaren, 1689–1714 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1990), 160. For a thorough account of the West’s speculations about the Chinese writing system, see Michael Friedrich, “Chiffren oder Hieroglyphen? Die chinesische Schrift im Abendland,” in Hieroglyphen: Altägyptische Ursprünge abendländischer Grammatologie, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003), 89–116. While accounts of Western fascinations with

5.

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7. 8. 9.

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12. 13.

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the sinograph abound and are being increasingly supplemented with looks at the Chinese tradition, almost no text investigates the perception of the alphabetic script in China prior to the nineteenth century. See Jing Tsu, “Sinophonics and the Nationalization of Chinese,” in Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, ed. Jing Tsu and David Wang (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 93–114, in which Tsu narrates the fascinating tensions between regional languages and attempts at script reform during the last decades of the Qing dynasty. Herder developed this concept in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2002), defining language and culture as the property of a community, and thus as the foundation for a nation: see chapter 11, section 2, “Das sonderbare Mittel zur Bildung der Menschen ist die Sprache” [Language as the particular medium for human education], 314–324. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 84. Ibid., 134, emphasis Anderson’s. This does not mean, however, that so-called classical Chinese, or wenyan wen 文言 文, was an unchanging, monolithic system. Rather, it experienced major shifts over the centuries and varied according to register and genre. Texts written in a so-called vernacular, which equally varied over time, had existed for centuries. Indeed, due to the cross-pollination of both types of written languages (or registers), the boundaries between one and the other were often permeable. David Damrosch, “Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and the Formation of World Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 68, no. 2 (June 2007): 195–219, quotation at 206–207. Of course, the influence of the Chinese writing system in East and Southeast Asia can be construed in terms of cultural imperialism—more so, for instance, than the prevalence of Latin in Medieval Europe. This rationale has been variously implemented to underpin the desinicization of writing systems of non-Sinitic languages in a discourse of nationalism. The example of Korea, in which the syllabic, phonetic script Hangul has replaced virtually all use of sinographic Hanja after the country’s independence from Japan, is a case in point. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 154, emphasis added. Ibid., 13. As pointed out by many critics, Chinese language reformers, such as Hu Shi 胡適, for instance, in his essay “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” 文學改良芻議 [Some modest proposals for literary reform], published in 1917, espoused the independence of European vernaculars from Latin as a model for Chinese language reform. See, for example, Gang Zhou, “Language, Myth, Identity: The Chinese Vernacular Movement in a Comparative Perspective” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Davis, 2002). I concur with Zheng Min’s 鄭敏 position that the comparison between the European vernaculars and the so-called Chinese vernacular is problematic: see Zheng Min, “Shijimo de huigu: Hanyu yuyan biange yu Zhongguo xinshi chuangzuo” 世紀末的回顧：漢語語言變革與中國新詩創作 [Looking back at the end of the

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14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

century: Chinese language reform and the creation of Chinese new poetry], Wenxue pinglun [Literary criticism] 2 (1993): 5–20, quotation at 8. However, my critique of this comparison has a different focus: the equation of Latin with written classical Chinese obscures the differences between script, linguistic form, and pronunciation. This allows Anderson, for instance, to skirt around the paradox between print language and phonetic mystique in his discussion of national language politics. For a thorough and detailed account of attempts at script reform in China, see John DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). See Wang Hui 汪暉, Xiandai Zhongguo sixiang de xingqi 現代中國思想的興起 [The rise of modern Chinese thought] (Beijing: Sanlian Wenhua, 2004), vol. 2, part 2, pp. 1512–1513. See DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China, 230ff. Hu Yuzhi 胡愈之, “ ‘Wusi’ yu wenzi gaige” “五四”與文字改革 [“ ‘May Fourth’ and script reform”], originally published May 1949 in Jinbu ribao 进步日报 [Progress]. It is also published in Hu Yuzhi wenji 胡愈之文集 [The complete works of Hu Yuzhi] (Beijing: Sanlian, 1996), 5:250–253, quotation at 250. See Hu Yuzhi, “Xin wenzi yundong de weiji” 新文字運動的危機 [The crisis of script reform], in Complete Works of Hu Yuzhi, 452–464. Wang Hui discusses the insurmountable differences between the Chinese language reform movement and the realities of different spoken expressions in China: see Wang Hui, “Fangyan wenti yu xiandai yuyan yundong” 方言問題與現代語言運動 [The problem of local languages and the modern language reform movement], in The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 1507–1526. See DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China; and Jing Tsu, “Sinophonics and the Nationalization of Chinese.” This is in contrast to the example of other countries, such as Turkey, which espoused an alphabetic script in 1928 in its turn to modernity—and erased its cultural tradition by dispensing with the Arabic writing system. For an analysis of language reform in Turkey, see Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Both Turkey and Japan were important models for different ideas concerning language and script reform in China: see DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China, 237–254. The simplified characters currently used as the standard script in the PRC, designed by the Chinese Committee on Writing Reform in 1954, were introduced in 1956, with subsequent additions of simplified forms. The simplification consisted essentially in reducing strokes in especially complex characters or radicals, as well as in substituting sinographs with many strokes with graphically simpler homophones. See William C. Hannas, Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 9–25. Kim-chew Ng 黃錦樹 theorizes the sinograph’s symbolic power as a kind of graphic uncanny in his study of the idea of a “Chinese essence” that emerged in the late Qing:

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24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

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see Kim-chew Ng, “Hun zai: Lun zhonguoxing de jindai qiyuan, qi danwei, jiegou ji (fei) cunzai lun tezheng” 魂在—論中國性的近代起源，其單位、結構及（非） 存在論特徵 [Haunted: The origin, components, structure, and (non)presence of Chineseness in early modernity], in Wen yu hun yu ti: Lun xiandai zhongguoxing 文與魂與體—論現代中國性 [Textuality, soul, and body: On Chinese modernity] (Taipei: Maitian, 2006), 15–36. The term “secondary graphology” is my own, coined as a critical echo to Walter J. Ong’s “secondary orality” as a technologically mediated return of orality, as formulated in Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1988). This is documented and described in detail by a near contemporary of Bi Sheng, Shen Gua 沈括, in his Mengxi bitan 夢溪筆談 [Essays from the torrent of dreams]: see Qian Cunxun 錢存訓, Zhongguo zhi he yinshua wenhua shi 中國紙和印刷文化史 [A cultural history of paper and printing in China] (Guilin: Guanxi Shifan Daxue Chubanshe, 2004), 183–184. In Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China, Kai-Wing Chow severely criticizes this “sinological” discourse and its most influential examples: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); and Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (London: Verso, 1997). Kai-Wing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Qian Cunxun analyzes the difference in print medium from the perspective of social and cultural functions: see Qian Cunxun, Cultural History of Paper and Printing, 203–204. In the Chinese context, printing also fulfilled the function of preserving a text—where the storable and reusable woodblock negatives acted as embodied cultural capital. Thomas Francis Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), 179. One exception is Constance R. Miller, Technical and Cultural Prerequisites for the Invention of Printing in China and the West (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1983). According to Miller’s description, the early development of print in China, as well as its prevalent use of the woodblock technique, derived from a less strict divide between image and script, as well as between art and handicraft, in China in comparison to Europe. Zheng Min, “Looking Back at the End of the Century,” 17. Hannas, Orthographic Dilemma, 258 and 259, respectively. Other input systems (used mainly by professionals) rely on a combination of character strokes and radicals, such as the Cangjie 倉頡 system. John Cayley suggests that the development of digital media itself is based on an alphabetic bias: see Cayley, “Digital Wen: On the Digitization of Letter- and CharacterBased Systems of Inscription,” in Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary

IntroductIon: ScrIpt polItIcS

Theory, ed. Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits (London: Routledge, 2003), 277–294. Michel Hockx’s thoughtful comments and his unpublished manuscript, “For Poetic Effect: Uses of Chinese Language in Electronic Poetry,” were crucial for developing some of the thoughts here. 34. From a slightly different perspective, Lydia Liu suggests a similar view by claiming that new media are fundamentally postphonetic. See Lydia Liu, “iSpace: Printed English After Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006): 516–550; and Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

1. corpographIeS 1. Friedrich A. Kittler, Daten → Zahlen → Codes (Leipzig: Institut für Buchkunst, 1998), 21. 2. One case in point is the pervasive metaphor of the death of a language: see Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 53ff. 3. Haun Saussy, “Impressions de Chine, Or How to Translate from a Nonexistent Original,” foreword to Stèles, by Victor Ségalen, trans. and annotated Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 1:xi–xxxiv, quotation at xiii. 4. Ibid., xiii, emphasis added. 5. See Lu Xun 魯迅, “Hanzi he ladinghua” 漢字和拉丁化 [The sinograph and latinization], in Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 [The complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1981), 5:447–449, quotation at 448–449. 6. Hu Yuzhi 胡愈之, “You du wentan” 有毒文談 [On poisonous discourse], in Hu Yuzhi wenji 胡愈之文集 [The writings of Hu Yuzhi] (Beijing: Sanlian, 1996), 3:549–555, quotation at 553. I have translated xingsheng 形聲 as “phonetic” here. To be more precise, this is one of the six categories of the formation of Chinese characters, the liu shu 六書, which consists of the combination of a phonetic component with a radical that indicates meaning as a general category. 7. Kim-chew Ng 黃錦樹 comments on Hu Yuzhi’s metaphor of language as an example of hauntology: see Kim-chew Ng, “Hun zai: Lun zhonguoxing de jindai qiyuan, qi danwei, jiegou ji (fei) cunzai lun tezheng” 魂在—論中國性的近代起源，其單 位、結構及（非）存在論特徵 [Haunted: The origin, components, structure, and (non)presence of Chineseness in early modernity], in Wen yu hun yu ti: Lun xiandai zhongguoxing 文與魂與體—論現代中國性 [Textuality, soul, and body: On Chinese modernity] (Taipei: Maitian, 2006), 15–36. 8. This imaginary is prevalent in many of the writings of Chinese language reformers from the end of the nineteenth century well into the twentieth century. A discussion of the debates around language and script reform in modern Chinese culture in all their complexity would exceed the scope of my argument here. Hence, I limit my

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discussion to examples that highlight the metaphoric connection between the sinograph and death in particularly provocative ways. Hu Yuzhi, “On Poisonous Discourse,” 554. There are, of course, other examples, such as the role of Japan in Roland Barthes, L’empire des signes ([Geneva]: Albert Skira, [1970]), the fixation on pre-Colombine South America in Georges Bataille, La part maudite (Paris: Minuit, 1967), or Michel Leiris’s work on Africa, for instance, Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). One frequently critiqued example is the reflection in Julia Kristeva, Des chinoises (Paris: Des Femmes, 1974), based on the theorist’s experiences during a tour through China, then in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, which wedded Maoism with archaic and yet (supposedly) still prevalent matriarchal structures in China. Critiques of Kristeva’s reading of China can be found in the essay “French Feminism in an International Frame” in Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), as well as in Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). See also the discussion of the French Tel Quel theorists and their fixation on China in chapter 3 of Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). This is partly due to the sources these theorists draw on for their reflections, since most of them have no or only a basic understanding of the Chinese language themselves. For instance, Kristeva was influenced by François Cheng’s work on classical Chinese poetry and Derrida draws heavily on the work of the French sinologist Jacques Gernet in Of Grammatology. Julia Kristeva et al., eds., La traversée des signes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 38. For examples of this kind of work, see the reading of Barthes in Marie-Paule Ha, Figuring the East: Segalen, Malraux, Duras, and Barthes (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000); and Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See François Lyotard, Discours, figure, 5th ed. (Paris: Klincksieck, 2002), 14. Ibid. See Sigmund Freud, “Fetischismus,” in Das Ich und das Es: Metapsychologische Schriften, 8th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000), 327–334. Rey Chow begins her book The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work with a critique of the self-referential trap of theory after the linguistic turn, illustrated by Foucault’s nostalgia for a preclassical system of signification of resemblance and contiguity in The Order of Things. Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Gérard Genette, Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie (Paris: Seuil, 1976), 9, emphasis Genette’s. Originally, one chapter of this book discussed Leibniz’s use of the sinograph as a model for a philosophical language. A shorter version of the original chapter was

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21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

published as “What Original? Origin Stories, Script Teratologies, and Leibniz’s Hexagrammatologies,” Comparative Literature 65, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 26–35. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 10; translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), xix. Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 7; The Order of Things, xv. See Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XVIII: D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 77. For annotations to the use of Chinese characters in different of Lacan’s Seminars, see Guy Sizaret, “À propos de ce qu’il y a de chinois dans les séminaires de Lacan,” http://www.lacanchine.com/L_Seminaire_ Sizaret.html (accessed July 15, 2012). Lacan, Séminaire XVIII, 45–46. Ibid., 87. The full reconstruction of this part of the lecture is difficult. The text suggests that Lacan showed (or at least referred to?) different forms of the character “人” (ren), but the edition of the seminar by Jacques-Alain Miller published in 2007 does not provide detailed information. It seems clear from the text, however, that Lacan uses the historical evolution of the Chinese script to demonstrate—erroneously—the noncoincidence between “人” and the image of man, because of the different shape of the character in ancient seal script. In his preface to the Japanese translation of Écrits, published in 1972, Lacan refers to the Chinese script as an alien yet integrated presence within the Japanese language that consequently highlights the indirection of signification within its very linguistic system. See Jacques Lacan, “Préface à l’édition japonaise des Écrits,” La lettre mensuelle de l’École de la cause freudienne 3 (October 1981): 2–3. Lacan, Séminaire XVIII, 46. The uncritical equation of the nation body with the totality of the bodies of its citizens already constitutes a complex figurative shift, one that Roberto Esposito equates with a sacrifice in his discussion of Thomas Hobbes: see Esposito, Communitas: Origine e destino della comunità, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 2006), 3–28. Elizondo, Cuadernos de escritura (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 74. Elizondo was also deeply impressed by Fenollosa’s and Pound’s emphasis on the ideographic principle in poetry, taken up by the Latin American, especially Brazilian, avant-garde, as well as the international concrete poetry movement. In his autobiography published in 1966, Elizondo professes the influence of Pound: See Elizondo, Salvador Elizondo (Mexico City: Empresas Editoriales, 1966). He also wrote several short essays on ideographic poetry, for instance, Elizondo, “José Juan Tablada,” in Escritos méxicanos (Mexico City: ISSSTE, 2000), 57–71; Elizondo, “A próposito de Xadrez de estrelas de Haroldo de Campos” and “Ideograma: Teoría y canon de la poesía concreta,” in Pasado Anterior (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007), 76–79 and 223–226, respectively. For a thorough discussion of lingchi, both in the contexts of Chinese law and European fantasies, see Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

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32. See Eric Hayot’s analysis of Bataille’s use of the photograph in “Photograface” (unpublished manuscript) as well as in Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). While the European circulation of lingchi up to the work of Bataille and contemporary artistic reenactments and performances—such as in Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 32–51—are well documented, the Latin American reception and circulation of lingchi, channeled through Bataille’s Tears of Eros, is less studied. Two years before Elizondo published Farabeuf, with its structural and thematic focus on lingchi, Julio Cortázar included a scene in which a group of bohemian intellectuals look at a series of execution photos in Paris in his novel Rayuela [Hopscotch], 18th ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 2005), originally published in 1963. The Paris-based Cuban novelist and critic Severo Sarduy dedicated parts of his essay Escrito sobre un cuerpo [Written on a Body], published in 1968, to Bataille and to lingchi-themed texts in Latin America in the 1960s: see Sarduy, Obra Completa, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl (Paris: ALLCA XX, 1999), 2:1119–1194, esp. 1126–1137. 33. Several critical studies of Farabeuf treat the conjunction of execution, photography, and experimental style, for instance, Adriana de Teresa, Farabeuf: Escritura e imagen (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996); and Juan Carlos Ubilluz, Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in the Latin American Erotic Novel (Cranbury, N.J.: Rosemont Publishing, 2006). 34. Elizondo, Cuaderno de escritura, 61. 35. In contrast to Elaine Scarry’s claim that pain radically unmakes signification, Elizondo’s novel incarnates pain in the form of a body-as-sign. See Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 36. Elizondo, Cuaderno de escritura, 59–60. 37. Salvador Elizondo, Farabeuf: Crónica de un instante (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006), 128–129; English translation: Farabeuf, trans. John Incledon (New York: Garland, 1992), 100. In both Spanish original and English translation, the tone of the Chinese word liu is notated incorrectly, as second instead of fourth tone. 38. I am less interested in the concrete correlation of the text with the hexagrams, but rather in the logic of this mechanism and what it means for the text. A more detailed, but not always well-informed, analysis of the Yijing in Farabeuf is provided in Joung Kwon Tae, La presencia del I Ching en la obra de Octavio Paz, Salvador Elizondo y José Augustín (Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1998). 39. Elizondo, Cuaderno de escritura, 129. 40. For more thorough discussions of Chinese performance art, see Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the 20th Century, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Jean-Marc Decrop, Modernités chinoises (Paris: Skira, 2003); and Silvia Fok 霍少霞, Zhongguo xingwei yishu: Shenti yu changyu 中國行為藝術：身體與場域 [Performance art in China: Site and body] (Taipei: Artist Publishing, 2010).

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41. See Fok, Performance Art in China, 54. 42. The history of tattooing is replete with pejorative connotations of a body thus inscribed, from the mark of savagery and lack of civilization to the practice of branding or tattooing slaves and criminals. For a short history of tattooing, see Ulrike Landfester, “1771: Die Geburt der Tätowierung aus dem Geist der Schrift,” in Kalender kleiner Innovationen: 50 Anfänge der Moderne zwischen 1755 und 1856, ed. Roland Bogards, Almuth Hammer, and Christine Holm (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 13–20. 43. For Qiu Zhijie’s whole “Tattoo” series, see www.qiuzhijie.com/worksleibie/Photography/tatoo.htm (accessed July 12, 2012). 44. Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 92. 45. In the late nineteenth century, the historian Heinrich Wuttke claimed that tattooing was the earliest form of writing, and that the human body was the earliest archival surface: see Wuttke, Geschichte der Schrift und des Schrifttums von den rohen Anfängen des Schreibens in der Tatuirung zur Legung elektromagnetischer Dräthe (Leibzig: Fleischer, 1872). For a discussion of the paradoxical force inherent in the archive itself, see Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive: Une impression Freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995). 46. Song Dong, “Printing on Water,” www.artslant.com/ew/works/show/472046 (accessed March 10, 2013). 47. For a more thorough discussion of the multiple meanings of wen, see chapter 4, “Allographies.” 48. A similar (typo)logic is at work in the logo of the 2010 World Exposition in Shanghai. The three embracing human forms that seem to float up from the numbers for the year 2010 express the idea of “world” through a double mechanism: through the iconicity of human contact, as well as through the shape of the icon, which is also readable as the character shi 世, which signifies “world,” especially in the compound shijie 世界. 49. For a discussion of Western body alphabets, see Ina Schabert, “Das Doppelleben der Menschenbuchstaben,” in Zeichen zwischen Klartext und Arabeske, ed. S. Kotzinger and G. Rippl (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 95–106. 50. See the description of the sports icons as pictograms on the official website of the Beijing Olympic Games 2008, http://en.beijing2008.cn/63/32/column212033263.shtml (accessed March 12, 2011). 51. One example, a design by Li Mingliang 李明亮, the winner of the Chinese Element Bronze Prize in the category typographic design in 2007, “rewrites” the sports icons in the so-called Song font. It is included in China Advertising Association, ed., Zhongguo yuansu guoji chuangyi dasai huo jiang zuopinji 中國元素國際創意大賽獲獎作 品集 [Winning work from the third international design award The Chinese Element] (Xiamen: Zoyosun, [2009]), 144–145. 52. The Chinese Element features several significant examples apart from the one I discuss more thoroughly here: for Long Jianqiu’s 龍鑒秋 and Cai Bin’s 蔡斌 “Hongzi xilie” 紅

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53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

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字系列 [Red character series], see ibid., 72; and for “Aoyun wu xing” 奧運五行 [Five olympic movements], an advertisement campaign for Nokia, see ibid., 33. Ibid., 121. See Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1998 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11. Media theorists often emphasize the connection between the development of visual technologies and warfare: see Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon—Film—Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986), 3–6 and 188–203. Roger Chartier espouses a reading of writing as disciplining mechanism that draws heavily on Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). Foucault’s own subsequent work proposes less univocal, more complex scenarios of an individual’s relation to power. Roger Chartier, “Macht der Schrift, Macht über die Schrift,” trans. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in Schrift, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Munich: Fink, 1993), 147–156. This is true for all international events of similar importance, irrespective of the host culture of the moment, if not always backed up by quite such an awe-inspiring scope. See Emily Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 10. See ibid., 1–20. Though the expression “neutral black” sounds ironic, in this context, as the color code of Chinese calligraphy, black really erases ethnic specificity. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 145, emphasis Bhabha’s. For an intellectual history of the Great Wall, see Carlos Rojas, The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). Rojas comments explicitly on the use of the Wall as a symbol during the opening ceremony: see 60–62. An earlier filmic version, largely unsuccessful with audiences, Jingke ci Qin Wang 荊 軻刺秦王 [The Emperor and the Assassin], directed by Chen Kaige 陳凱歌 (Beijing Film Studio, 1998), paints Qin Shi as a bloodthirsty, power-mad tyrant. Other readings from a different political perspective underline the movie’s representation of Chinese pacifism in tune with Confucian values: see Wang Shouren and Zhao Wenshu, “China’s Peaceful Rise: A Cultural Alternative,” boundary 2 33, no. 2 (2006): 117–127. The English subtitles of the version I used underline a national reading by translating tianxia as “my homeland.” See Feng Lan, “Zhang Yimou’s Hero: Reclaiming the Martial Arts Film for ‘All Under Heaven,’ ” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 1–43. Through a discussion of recent returns to the concept of tianxia by mainland intellectuals, Feng shows how the term is used to designate a globalism with Chinese characteristics. Yingxiong 英雄 [Hero], directed by Zhang Yimou (Beijing New Picture, 2002).

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67. As Claude Lévi-Strauss argues in his famous diatribe against writing in Tristes Tropiques, writing is an indispensible technique for enabling the administrative control mechanism necessary for the smooth functioning of large state apparatuses. LéviStrauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955). 68. See Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1–8. 69. Sheldon Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 160. 70. Most critics comment in one way or another on the link between calligraphy and swordsmanship: see, for instance, Maurizio Marinelli, “Heroism/Terrorism: Empire Building in Contemporary Chinese Films,” Asian Cinema (Fall/Winter 2005): 183–209. 71. Jean-François Billeter, The Chinese Art of Writing (New York: Skira/Rizzoli, 1990), 273. The scenes of mental combat throughout the movie are further proof of a subtext of Chinese thought in which inner and outer action—both expressions of an ideal of activity—become interchangeable.

2. IconographIeS 1. This fantasy is not limited to Western dreams about Chinese writing, since some Chinese theories of the sinograph subscribe to similar ideas. The first etymological dictionary of Chinese, Explanations of Simple and Compound Characters (Shuowen jiezi 說文解字), compiled during the Han dynasty (around 100 ce) by Xu Shen 許慎, constitutes an early Chinese theory of a graphically motivated link between sign and thing through the sinograph. In Configurations of Comparative Poetics, Cai Zong-Qi compares Western proponents of the pictographic bias with a number of Chinese versions of motivated relations between reality and sinographs, such as those by Xu Shen and Liu Xie 劉勰, the author of a fifth-century treatise on aesthetics, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diao long 文心雕龍): see Cai ZongQi, Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 171–202. 2. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 230. 3. Fenollosa’s original version, as well as his drafts and related material, is now available to the reader in Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). All subsequent page numbers refer to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 4. In De la grammatologie, Derrida credits Fenollosa’s essay as the event that ushered in a break in the phonographic bias supposedly at the heart of Western metaphysics, and thus as the detonant for the beginning of the reign of écriture: see Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 139–140.

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5. More recently, Fenollosa’s essay has been redeemed as an object of studies that focus precisely on the mechanisms of exoticism, for instance, in the analysis in Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse, and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011); and Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 6. Contemporary digital media, for instance, still largely rely on the paradigms of analog visual and sound media, even as they construct an antagonistic image of newness visà-vis older media: see D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4–5. 7. In her study of the cultural context for Edison’s invention of the phonograph, Lisa Gitelman shows the intricate connections between practices of textuality and the new medium: see Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 12–14. 8. For Miriam Hansen, these changes entailed not only a loss of earlier social and economic networks, but also the emergence of new modes of sensory perception: see Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (April 1999): 59–77. 9. Much as the surgeon opens and dissects the body, so the filmmaker dissects and reassembles reality: see Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 3rd version, in Abhandlungen: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, bk. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 471–508, esp. 495–496. 10. For excellent discussions of the history of optic media, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); and Friedrich Kittler, Optische Medien: Berliner Vorlesung 1999 (Berlin: Merve, 2002). 11. In Haun Saussy’s edition of the final draft of Fenollosa’s essay, dated around 1906, Fenollosa explicitly indicates a “photograph of a man looking at a horse” as illustrative material (80). Fenollosa’s practice of illustration by way of lantern slides is also highlighted by Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era. Kenner relates this, in passing, to Fenollosa’s images of the moving picture (see 289). 12. These references to a specific technology of simulating moving pictures are later edited out; maybe this was because they themselves became “dated” material as the precursors of moving pictures evolved into film. 13. The image of hieroglyphs or Chinese ideograms was not only used for coming to terms with the new medium of film. For instance, Antonin Artaud describes his theater of cruelty as a hieroglyphics of theatrical elements: see Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 90. Jacques Derrida underlines the ideographic and hieroglyphic thrust of the theater of cruelty: see Jacques Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” in Mimesis, Masochism, & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 49–50. Lindsay formulated his theory of hieroglyphic film independently from Fenollosa’s account of Chinese poetic diction as akin to moving pictures, since the essay was not available until several years after The Art of the Moving Picture was published. However, Lindsay as a poet was aware of imagism as a new direction in poetry as propagated by Ezra Pound. He exhorts the imagists to explore the new visual medium of film, rather than remain confined to poetic diction: see Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liveright, 1970), 267. No direct mention of Fenollosa is made, even in the edition published in 1922, though Lindsay compares the possible longevity of his new hieroglyphics with that of the Chinese ideographs (see 254). The edition used here is a reprint of Lindsay’s second, amended version of the book, published in 1922. Citations are given parenthetically in the text. On the whole, the basis of Lindsay’s hieroglyphics in The Art of the Moving Picture is a study of the Egyptian script. In passing, he refers also to Native Indian scripts as “New Mexico Hieroglyphics” that are “more patriotic, and more organic . . . than the Egyptian” (25), and he mentions the Japanese and Chinese script as a calligraphic tradition that fuses penmanship and brushwork (see 210). See the discussion of Lindsay in Joachim Paech, “Zur filmtheoretischen Hieroglyphen-Diskussion,” in Hieroglyphen: Altägyptische Ursprünge abendländischer Grammatologie, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich: Fink, 2003), 367–383. Like many early film theorists, Lindsay sees film as a purely visual medium, unmixed with sound, even music. His definition of film excludes sound: “All motion pictures might be characterized as space measured without sound, plus time measured without sound” (134, emphasis Lindsay’s). Or, in a slightly different vein: “Moving objects, not moving lips, make the words of the photoplay” (189). In Discours, figure, Jean-François Lyotard suggests that this division is itself a historical phenomenon, in contrast to, for instance, medieval manuscripts that combine writing and image. For Lyotard, the figural, the interruption of meaning by the graphic force of the image, resurfaces in Western modernism. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure, 5th ed. (Paris: Klincksieck, 2002). See also the adaptation of Lyotard’s concept of the figural for film in D. N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), 21, emphasis Pound’s. Jan Assmann, however, gives an account of a more ideographic use of hieroglyphs in his essay “Etymographie: Zeichen im Jenseits der Sprache,” in Assmann and Assmann, Hieroglyphen, 37–64. Since hieroglyphs and sinographs are under discussion as ciphers, not as linguistic systems, this difference is of less interest to proponents of a general ideography at the turn of the nineteenth century. For a discussion of hieroglyphics in the work of Vachel Lindsay and H. D., see Gabriele Rippl, “Hieroglyphen-Faszination in der anglo-amerikanischen Moderne,” in Assmann and Assmann, Hieroglyphen, 327–351.

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22. See Christian Metz, Langage et cinéma, 2nd ed. (Paris: Albatros, 1977), 204–205. In “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing,” Miriam Hansen gives a short outline of the concept of film hieroglyphics in early film theory. Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique 56 (Spring/ Summer 1992): 43–73, esp. 58. Walter Benjamin refers to and quotes Abel Gance’s description of film language as hieroglyphs, reading it as a return to a quasi-religious, cultic significance of images: see Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 1st version, in Abhandlungen: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, bk. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 431–469, esp. 447–448. 23. Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot,” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 82–92, quotation at 82. 24. He advances this perspective not only in the published version of his essay, but also in his suggestions to pronounce classical Chinese poetry according to the Japanese Sino (or On) voicing, a form supposedly closer to the original voicing. 25. Kenner, Pound Era, 162. 26. Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement, 73–74. 27. “Yingpian yishu lun” 影片藝術論 [On the art of film], in Liu Na’ou quanji 劉吶鷗 全集 [The complete works of Liu Na’ou], ed. Xu Zhen 許蓁 and Kang Laixin 康來新 (Tainan: Tainan County Cultural Affairs Bureau, 2001), 2:256–280, quotation at 260. This essay was originally published in installments in Film Weekly (Dianying zhoubao 電影周報), from July 1 to October 8, 1932. 28. See “Dianying jiezou jianlun” 電影節奏簡論 [A simple discussion of filmic rhythm], in Complete Works of Liu Na’ou, 2:306–312, quotation at 307. This essay originally appeared in Contemporary Cinema (Xiandai dianying 現代電影) 6 (December 1, 1933). 29. Throughout his essays on film, Liu mentions Pudovkin but not Eisenstein. References to Fenollosa are also absent from his texts. 30. Part of Liu’s critique of intertitles, apart from the fact that they interrupt the rhythm and illusion of film, is based on pragmatic considerations, namely, the limitations of a cinema burdened with too much text in the context of a society with a high rate of analphabetism, especially in the countryside. If film, according to Liu, is an art for the masses, an embodiment of internationalism, and a universal language, the exaggerated use of subtitles endangers film’s social function: see “Zhongguo dianying miaoxie de shendu wenti” 中國電影描寫的深度問題 [The problem of depth in Chinese film description], in Complete Works of Liu Na’ou, 2:285–294, quotation at 286. This essay was originally published in Contemporary Cinema 3 (May 1, 1933). For a historical sketch about the development of intertitles in silent film, see Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 89–122. 31. Liu, “On the Art of Film,” 276. 32. Ibid., 278.

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33. See Liu, “A Simple Discussion of Filmic Rhythm,” 312. 34. See Liu, “Ecranesque,” in Complete Works of Liu Na’ou, 2:282–284, quotation at 283. Originally published in Contemporary Cinema 2 (April 1, 1933). 35. Or rather, Liu chooses to talk of “rhythm” without providing any culturally specific examples. 36. See the analyses of the importance of modernist intercultural and medial imaginaries through the ideograph in Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 37. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11–13. 38. Joachim Paech, “Zur filmtheoretischen Hieroglyphen-Diskussion,” in Assmann and Assmann, Hieroglyphen, 367–383, gives a thorough overview of film theory in its relation to hieroglyphs and ideographs. 39. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 30. 40. Other examples of film theory display a more critical attitude toward the prevalent analogy of writing and film. Christian Metz thoroughly analyses (and refutes most) possibilities in which writing and film can be compared (see the last chapter of Langage et cinéma, “Cinéma et écriture”). From a different angle, Tom Conley explores concretely how the appearance of writing in film creates a space for the reflection of filmic mediality. In other words, he does not collapse film and writing, but treats different facets and forms of writing as one of the media that appear in and shape the multimedial space of cinema. Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Inspired by Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the figural, D. N. Rodowick analyzes the intersection of textual and pictorial imagination in film: see Rodowick, Reading the Figural, 76–106. 41. The following discussion merely highlights the parts of Miriam Hansen’s argument that are especially relevant for my own discussion of the use of sinographs and hieroglyphs through a selective collapse between image and text. Other important parts, such as her discussion of Adorno’s understanding of mimesis, as well as her analysis of Adorno’s genealogy of mediality (the history of a split between image and sign that returns with a vengeance in mass media), are not addressed. Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing,” 43–73. 42. Even more complex constellations of image and writing, of hieroglyphics, ornaments, and arabesques, can be found in the work of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. For some examples of provocative analyses of critical theory’s media politics, see the discussion of Kracauer in Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing”; Richard W. Allen, “The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity: Benjamin, Adorno, and Contemporary Film Theory,” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 225–240; and Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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43. Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing,” 56. Norbert Bolz provides a slightly different approach to the bifurcation of writing in modernity, one that is not without a tinge of media determinism: in the age of mass media, writing shifts from Schrift (script) to Beschriftung (labeling, especially in the context of captioned images). See Bolz, “Die Schrift des Films,” in Medien (Diskursanalysen 1), ed. Friedrich Kittler, Manfred Schneider, and Samuel Weber (Opladen: Westdeuscher Verlag: 1987), 26–34, quotation at 30. 44. A similar strategy is at play in some film theories, especially whenever avant-garde film tries to distance itself from mainstream cinema by describing its production and reception in terms of writing and reading, and by equating the image to entertainment film. One example is Paech’s discussion of Abel Gance: see Paech, “Zur filmtheoretischen Hieroglyphen-Diskussion,” 369. 45. For analyses of Pound’s “Chinese,” see Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 30–71, and the first part of Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 46. See the excellent analysis of Segalen’s Stèles, in Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 72–102, as well as his and Timothy Billings’s recent edition and translation: Victor Segalen, Stèles, vol. 1, trans. Christopher Bush and Timothy Billings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2007). 47. José Juan Tablada, Li-po y otros poemas (Mexico City: Círculo de Arte, 2005), n.p. 48. The name Noigandres shows the poets’ debt to Pound, since the name, a word of disputed meaning in a poem by the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, appears in Pound’s Canto XX: see Rogério Camara, Grafo-sintaxe concreta: O projeto Noigandres (Rio de Janeiro: Rios Ambiciosos, 2000), 10, note 2. 49. Augusto de Campos, “Pontos—Periferia—Poesia Concreta,” in Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, Teoria da poesia concreta: Textos críticos e manifestos, 1950–1960 (São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1975), 25. 50. Even though Eugen Gomringer, for instance, draws mainly on Mallarmé’s notion of the constellation, the ideogram and the pictogram are among the forms of concrete poetry listed in “Definitionen zur visuellen Poesie,” in Konkrete Poesie: Deutschsprachige Autoren: Anthologie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972), 165ff. 51. Jean-François Bory, Once Again, trans. Lee Hildreth (New York: New Directions, 1968), 79. 52. Ibid., 55. 53. Gonzalo Aguilar, Poesia concreta brasileira: As vanguardas na encruzilhada modernista (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2005), 190. 54. Pedro Xisto, “Zen,” in ibid., 199. Another similar example is Décio Pignatari’s “Life” of 1958, in which the letters of the title are combined to form the sinograph “日”; see ibid., 198. 55. Haroldo de Campos, “Ideograma, anagrama, diagrama: Una leitura de Fenollosa,” in Ideograma: Lógica, poesia, linguagem (São Paulo: Cultrix, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1977), 9–113, quotation at 98.

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56. Haroldo de Campos draws both on Roman Jakobson’s formalist reflections on the poetic function of literature and on Jean Starobinski’s edition of de Saussure’s anagrammatic theories: see Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), 350–377; and Starobinski, ed., Les mots sous les mots: Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 57. de Campos, “Ideograma, anagrama, diagrama,” 97 and 100, respectively. 58. Claus Clüver, “Concrete Poetry and the New Performance Arts: Intersemiotic, Intermedia, Intercultural,” in East of West: Cross-Cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference, ed. Chen Xiaomei and Claire Sponsler (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 33–62, quotation at 34. 59. Pierre Garnier, Spatialisme et poésie concrète (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 147–149, quotation at 148. 60. Ibid. 61. Eugene Eoyang, “Concrete Poetry and the ‘Concretism’ of Chinese,” Alphabet 17/18 (1971): 4–9, quotation at 4 and 9, respectively. 62. Ding Xuhui 丁旭輝 asserts that concrete poetry is the creative backbone of modern Taiwanese poetry: see Ding Xuhui, Taiwan xiandai shi tuxiang jiqiao yanjiu 臺灣現 代詩圖像技巧研究 [Research on the concrete techniques of Taiwanese modernist poetry] (Gaoxiong: Chunhui, 2000), x. However, the poet and critic Xiao Xiao 蕭蕭 claims that image poetry is only a small, if important, fraction of Taiwanese modernist poetry: see Xiao Xiao, Xiandai xin shi meixue 現代新詩美學 [The aesthetics of new modernist poetry] (Taipei: Erya, 2007), 287. 63. The term juxiang shi 具象詩 (or juti shi 具體詩), translations of “concrete poetry,” are now commonly used almost interchangeably with the more common tuxiang shi 圖像詩 (image poem), even though they did not appear in the earlier criticism on what can be called Taiwanese “concrete poetry.” Some poets prefer other terms, such as Lin Hengtai’s concept of fuhao shi 符號詩, or “symbol poem.” The critic and poet Xiao Xiao draws a strict distinction between the image poem and the visual poem (shijue shi 視覺詩): see Xiao Xiao, Aesthetics of New Modernist Poetry. In this chapter, I use “concrete poetry” as an envelope term, but draw on specific terminology where appropriate and necessary. For a tentative beginning at mapping the different terminologies extant in Taiwan poetry criticism, see Xiao Xiao, Aesthetics of New Modernist Poetry, 287–295. In recent years, there has not only been a new surge of concrete poetry in Taiwan—for instance, in Chen Li 陳黎, Qing/man 輕／慢 [Light/slow] (Taipei: Er Yu, 2009)—but also increasing critical interest in the phenomenon (see some of the studies referenced in this chapter) and new editions of relevant material, such as a collection of essays by the Taiwanese poet Do She-sun 杜十三, Do She-sun zhuyi 杜十三主義 [Do She-sun-ism] (Taipei: Wen Shi Zhe, 2010). 64. For instance, Bai Qiu 白萩 carefully traces classical, baroque, and modernist European sources, but does not mention Chinese pattern poetry at all: see Bai Qiu, “You shi de huihuaxing tanqi” 由詩的繪畫性談起 [On poetry’s pictorial character] in Xiandai

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65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

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shi sanlun 現代詩散論 [Essays on modernist poetry], 3rd ed. (Taipei: Sanmin, 1983), 1–25. However, Ulrich Ernst, one of the foremost theorists of pattern poetry and the figured poem (carmen figuratum) in the Western tradition, includes a Chinese example: Su Hui’s 蘇蕙 pattern poem: see Ernst, Intermedialität im europäischen Kulturzusammenhang (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2002), 251. For examples of a marginalization of a Chinese “concrete” tradition, see Yu Guangzhong’s 余光中 “Gudongdian yu weituohang zhi jian” 古董店與委託行之間 [Between antiques store and pawn shop], in Lin Hengtai yanjiu ziliao huibian 林亨泰研究資料彙編 [Materials for the study of Lin Hengtai], ed. Lü Xingchang 呂興昌 (Zhanghua: Zhangxian Wenhua, 1994), 1:32–37; Luo Qing 羅青, Cong Xu Zhimo dao Yu Guangzhong 從徐志摩到余光 中 [From Xu Zhimo to Yu Guangzhong] (Taipei: Erya, 1978), 54ff.; and Wen Renping 溫任平, “Zhongguo zi de shiyi zuoyong yu Zhongguo shi” 中國字的示意作用與中 國詩 [The use of Chinese characters as allusions in Chinese poetry], Chuang shiji shi she 創世紀詩社 [The epoch poetry quarterly] 37 (November 1974): 29–37. Another type of “concrete” Chinese poetry that is not mentioned is the anagrammatic poem, known also as hidden character poems (yinzi shi 隱字詩), a genre that the Taiwanese poet Chen Li has resurrected recently in Light/Slow. For an exhaustive discussion of anagrams in classical Chinese poetry, see John Marney, Chinese Anagrams and Anagram Verse (n.p.: Chinese Materials Center Publication, 1993). Zhan Bing 詹冰, “Tuxiang shi yu wo” 圖像詩與我 [The image poem and I], Li 笠 [Straw hat] 87 (December 1978): 58–62, quotation at 60. Ding Xuhui, Research on the Concrete Techniques, 10. See ibid. Lin Hengtai 林亨泰, “Che huo” 車禍 [Car accident], in Ling Hengtai ji 林亨泰集 [Selected works of Lin Hengtai] (Tainan: Taiwan Wenxueguan, 2008), 35; Wang Runhua 王潤華, “Xiang wai xiang” 象外象 [Resemblance/dissemblance], in Wang Runhua shi: Jing xuanji 王潤華詩：精選集 [A selection of Wang Runhua’s poetry] (Taipei: Xindi, 2010), 43–48. See the discussions of Wang Runhua in Zhang Hanliang 張漢良, “Lun Taiwan de juti shi” 論臺灣的具體詩 [On Taiwanese concrete poetry], Chuang shiji shi she 創世紀詩社 [The epoch poetry quarterly] 36 (July 1974): 12–28; and Xiao Xiao, Aesthetics of New Modernist Poetry, 295–296. Ou Wai’ou 鷗外鷗, “Di er hui shijie fuwen” 第二回世界訃聞 [The second obituary for the world], in Ou Wai’ou zhi shi 鷗外鷗之詩 [Poems by Ou Wai’ou] (Guangzhou: Huacheng, 1985), 23–27. I would like to thank Michelle Yeh for bringing this poem to my attention. Zhan Bing 詹冰, Zhan Bing ji 詹冰集 [Selected work of Zhan Bing] (Tainan: Taiwan Wenxueguan, 2008), 26. Zhan Bing, “The Image Poem and I,” 60. Zhan Bing, “Shui niu tu” 水牛圖 [Water buffalo image], in Selected Work, 78–79. Slight typographic variations occur in different reprints of the poem. Chen Li, “Zhanzheng jiaoxiangqu” 戰爭交響曲 [War symphony], in Daoyu bianyuan 島嶼邊緣 [The edge of the island] (Taipei: Jiuge, 2003), 102–104.

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3. SonographIeS 1. The incident has since triggered much conversation in online forums. For an overview, see Christopher Schrader, “Reklame aus dem Rotlicht,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 10, 2008, http://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/magazin-maxplanckforschung-reklame-aus-dem-rotlicht-1.370288 (accessed July 24, 2012). 2. See the website http://www.hanzismatter.blogspot.com (accessed July 24, 2012). 3. See Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967). 4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1982), 54; translated as Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), 31. 5. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 27; Course in General Linguistics, 48, emphasis added. 6. For thorough analyses that pay attention to both history and language politics, see Christopher Lupke, “The Muted Interstices of Testimony: A City of Sadness and the Predicament of Multiculturalism in Taiwan,” Asian Cinema (Spring/Summer 2004): 5–36; Bérénice Reynaud, City of Sadness (London: British Film Institute, 2002); and Lin Wenqi 林文淇, “ ‘Huigui,’ ‘zuguo,’ ‘er er ba’: Beiqing chengshi zhong de Taiwan lishi yu guojia shuxing” 「回歸」、「祖國」、「二二八」：《悲情城市》中 的台灣歷史與國家屬性 [“Return,” “motherland,” “2-28”: Taiwanese history and national identity in City of Sadness], in Xilian rensheng: Hou Hsiao-hsien dianying yanjiu 戲戀人生：候孝賢電影研究 [Passionate detachment: The films of Hou Hsiao-hsien], ed. Lin Wenqi, Shen Xiaoyin 沈曉茵, and Li Zhenya 李振亞 (Taipei: Maitian, 2000), 157–179. Many such readings reference Fredric Jameson’s widely discussed essay “World Literature in an Age of Multinational Capitalism,” in The Current in Criticism: Essays on the Present and Future of Literary Theory, ed. Clayton Koelb and Virgil Lokke (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1987), 139–158. 7. See Shih Shu-mei, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1–39. 8. See Ye Yueyu 葉月瑜 [Emily Yeh], “Nüren zhende wufa jinru lishi? Zaidu Beiqing chengshi” 女人真的無法進入歷史？再讀《悲情城市》[Are women really unable to enter history? A new reading of City of Sadness], in Lin Wenqi, Shen Xiaoyin, and Li Zhenya, Passionate Detachment, 181–213, quotation at 203. 9. See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 10. Of course, this does not imply that silence or invisibility—in a change of medium from speech to visibility—are themselves acts of resistance either. See the perhaps slightly too optimistic discussion of invisibility in Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). 11. See Barbara Johnson, “Muteness Envy,” in The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 129–153.

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12. For an account of the process of script writing for City of Sadness, see Michael Berry’s interview with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chu T’ien-wen: Berry, “Words and Images: A Conversation with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chu T’ien-wen,” Positions 11, no. 3 (Winter 2003): 675–716. See also Chu T’ien-wen’s original film script for City of Sadness with its important deviations from the finished film in her collection of film scripts and related documents: Chu T’ien-wen, Zui hao de shiguang 最好的時光 [The best of times] (Taipei: INK, 2008), 41–75. 13. The translations used for the film’s intertitles are by Eileen Chow (unpublished material). 14. Ye Yueyu’s feminist reading underlines the role of the female protagonist as producing an alternative account of history: see Ye Yueyu, “Are Women Really Unable to Enter History?,” 199ff. 15. Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema, 2nd ed. with a new introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), x. 16. Michael Berry comments on the politics of releasing films in subtitled versions through Ang Lee’s internationally acclaimed martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by quoting the scriptwriter James Schamus on how Internet culture, with its new combination of images and text, made the subtitled distribution of the film possible. See Berry, “Words and Images,” 696. Abé Mark Nornes analyzes the multiple quandaries of translation in film: see Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 17. The term “transgraphing” is proposed by Dina Al-kassim in the context of Arabic calligraphy as a more medium-specific term for graphic translation: see Al-kassim, “The Faded Bond: Calligraphesis in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano,” Public Culture 13, no. 1 (2001): 113–138. 18. This version first appears in the Huainanzi 淮南子 in 139 bce as follows: “In ancient times, when Cang Jie invented writing, Heaven rained down millet and ghosts wailed at night.” Quoted in Françoise Bottéro, “Cang Jie and the Invention of Writing: Reflections on the Elaboration of a Legend,” in Studies in Chinese Language and Culture: Festschrift in Honor of Christoph Harbsmeier, ed. Christoph Anderl and Halvor Bøyesen Eifring (Oslo: Hermes Academic Publishing, 2006), 135–155, quotation at 140. 19. Bottéro’s essay traces the attribution of the invention of writing to Cang Jie in general, referring also to the different explanations given for the wailing of the ghosts: see ibid., 140ff. 20. Prominent examples are the introduction to Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon—Film— Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986), 7–33; and Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1988). 21. Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” insists on the link between an oral transmission of knowledge and a microdemocratic structure: see Benjamin, “Der Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows,” in Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, bk. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991).

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22. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 160. 23. Adrienne Janus’s essay hinges upon the emergence of an “anti-ocular turn” in theory: see Janus, “Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy and the ‘Anti-Ocular’ Turn in Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory,” Comparative Literature 63, no. 2 (2011): 182–202. 24. Jean-Luc Nancy, A l’écoute (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 14; translated as Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 2. 25. See Nancy, A l’écoute, 67; Listening, 28. 26. Michel de Certeau, “Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias,” Representations 56 (Autumn 1996): 29–47, quotation at 29. 27. David Heller-Roazen opens his essay on Giorgio Agamben with a discussion of the meaning of glossolalia in Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, glossing especially his comparison of speaking in tongues with Barbarian language: see Heller-Roazen, “Speaking in Tongues (Giorgio Agamben),” Paragraph 25, no. 2 (2002): 92–113, quotation at 92. 28. See Walter Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, bk. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 9–21. 29. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 495, emphases added. 30. For a discussion of Lin Shu’s practice of translation, see Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1–20; and Michael Hill, Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 31. Sara Emilie Guyer proposes a rereading of poststructuralist theory through the concept of buccality, especially figures of ingestion: see Guyer, “Buccal Reading,” New Centennial Review 7, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 71–87. 32. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 11 and 35, respectively. 33. Of course, according to Eurocentric critics like Pascale Casanova, Chinese literature can be described as a “small literature,” without being a minor literature in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari. Casanova points to the alleged lack of importance of Chinese literature in global terms, in spite of its large readership: see Casanova, La république mondiale des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 350. 34. Jing Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 13. 35. Of course, the choice of the term “Sinophone” is also conditioned by the reformulations of literatures in English and French outside of their centers as Anglophone and Francophone in the context of postcolonial theory. Shih chooses to gloss over the difference between the Chinese language and the European languages that underwent hybridizations in the colonial and postcolonial context, namely, the difference in writing between phonetic and logographic scripts that also conditions different ways of linguistic hybridity and contestation. After the publication of Visuality and

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36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

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Identity, Shih started to pay more attention to the question of the Chinese script, calling the Sinophone not only polyphonic, but also polyscriptic: see Shih, “The Concept of the Sinophone,” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 709–718, quotation at 716. Lydia Liu, “The Non-Book, Or the Play of the Sign,” in Tianshu: Passages in the Making of a Book, ed. Katherine Spears (London: Quaritch, 2009), 65–79, quotation at 74–75. Chao’s experiment works so well, because it uses classical Chinese, in which the monosyllabic word structure is still strong—unlike in modern Chinese. Chen Li 陳黎, Daoyu bianyuan 島嶼邊緣 [The edge of the island] (Taipei: Jiuge, 2003), 99. Victor. H. Mair, “Brief Desiderata for an Alphabetically Ordered Mandarin-Chinese Dictionary,” International Journal of Lexicography 4, no. 2 (1991): 79–98, quotation at 79. Note, however, that this is a peculiar cratylism. Here, unlike in Plato’s Cratylus, sound does not carry an essence of meaning. Rather, a similarity in sound comes to connect two signifiers and signifieds. Therefore, the correspondence is horizontal, between signs, rather than vertical, between referent, idea, and sound. The six categories are: indicative (zhishi 指事), pictographic (xiangxing 象形), phonetic compounds (xingsheng 形聲), ideographs (huiyi 會意), mutual explanatories (zhuanzhu 轉注), and phonetic loans (jiajie 假借): see Xu Shen 許慎, Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 [Explanations of simple and compound characters], http://ctext.org/shuowen-jie-zi/zh (accessed July 31, 2012). The novel immediately came under attack as a work of plagiarism, since the dictionary form reminded too many of its readers of another text: Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) by the Serbian author Milorad Pavić. Whereas Pavić’s novel presented the tensions between nation and world, languages, scripts, and cultures in the garb of the dictionary novel, Han Shaogong’s Dictionary of Maqiao has very little in common with such an agenda. It stands in stark contrast to Pavić’s representation of a fragmented multiplicity that ultimately strives for the elevation of national unity. See Han Shaogong 韓少功, “Wenxue de ‘gen’ ” 文學的“根” [The “roots” of literature], in Han Shaogong yanjiu ziliao 韓少功研究資料 [Research materials on Han Shaogong], ed. Wu Yiqin 吳義勤 (Jinan: Shandong Wenyi, 2006), 18–23. Han Shaogong, Maqiao cidian 馬橋詞典 (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi, 1997), 54; translated as A Dictionary of Maqiao, trans. Julia Lovell (New York: Dial Press, 2005), 56, translation slightly altered. Han Shaogong, Maqiao cidian, 33; A Dictionary of Maqiao, 35. Han Shaogong, Maqiao cidian 34; A Dictionary of Maqiao, 35–36; translation slightly altered. I thank Carlos Rojas for pointing out that the seal-script form of “時” consisted of a combination of the characters for “sun” and “foot,” without any phonetic component.

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4. allographIeS 1. Kim-chew Ng 黃錦樹, “Suqiu” 訴求 [Entreaty], in You dao zhi dao: Dari Pulau Ke Pulau: Ke bei 由島至島: Dari Pulau Ke Pulau: 刻背 [From island to island: Carved spines] (Taipei: Maitian, 2001), 111. 2. Kim-chew Ng works with the imaginary of oracle bones, one of the oldest archives of Chinese writing, in two of his short stories: “Ke bei” 刻背 [Carved spines], the title story of From Island to Island, 325–359, and “Yu hai” 魚骸 [Fish bones], in Wu’an ming 烏暗冥 [Dark nights] (Taipei: Jiuge, 1997), 251–278. 3. Though I use the term differently here, Dina Al-kassim coined this suggestive neologism in the context of Arabic calligraphy: see Al-kassim, “The Faded Bond: Calligraphesis in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano,” Public Culture 13, no. 1 (2001): 113–138. 4. My definition of allography differs from that offered by Nelson Goodman, who distinguishes between autographic and allographic art as a way of describing different types of authorship. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1976). 5. Initially, Freud employed metaphors of cryptology, such as “secret code” (Geheimschrift) and “method of encoding” (Chiffriermethode), for his description of earlier, namely, symbolic, readings of dreams, before claiming these images for the work of the unconscious: see Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 8th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998), 111–118. 6. See ibid., 284. 7. See ibid., 64–65. 8. Jean-François Lyotard sets out to contest Freud’s metaphor of the dream work as a translation or transposition into a different type of script in order to frame the unconscious as the realm in which language is radically transformed into its other: “The dream work is not an interpretation of the dream thought, a discourse on another discourse (un discours sur un discours); it is not a transcription either, a discourse on the basis of another discourse (discours à partir d’un discours); it is its transformation.” Lyotard, Discours, figure, 5th ed. (Paris: Klincksieck, 2002), 239. However, Lyotard cannot escape the use of examples from within the realm of representation that would, according to his own requirements, express the alien force of the unconscious only precariously. 9. Sigmund Freud, Das Interesse an der Psychoanalyse, in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), 8:404–405. 10. Ibid. 11. Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, 10th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000), 221. 12. Haun Saussy traces the myth that the Chinese language has no grammar, the nineteenth-century prehistory of Freud’s reflections: see Saussy, “Always Multiple Translations: Or, How the Chinese Language Lost Its Grammar,” in Great Walls of Discourse,

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13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

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and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press/Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 75–90. See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’Homme aux loups (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1976). See Jacques Derrida, “Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,” preface to Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’Homme aux loups, by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1976), 7–62. Puns that link writing and the crypt, such as “écrypture,” also recur in Jacques Derrida, “Scribble: pouvoir/écrire,” in Essai sur les hiéroglypes des Égyptiens, by William Warburton, ed. Patrick Tort, trans. Léonard de Malpeines (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1977), 5–43. Discussions about Chinese diaspora in recent years tend to critique concentric models in which increasing distance from China (as the PRC) implies an increasing lack of Chinese culture. For instance, in her critique of the concept of a perennial Chinese diaspora and its implicit support of China-centrism, Shih insists that Sinophone articulations are place-based, as well as time-sensitive: see Shih, “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production,” in Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, ed. Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 29–48, esp. 45; and Shih, “The Concept of the Sinophone,” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 709–718, esp. 717. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955); see also the famous critique of Lévi-Strauss’s phono- and ethnocentrism in Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967). Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 22. See Chen Li 陳黎, “Fuermosha: yiliuliuyi” 福爾摩沙．一六六一 [Formosa 1661], in Daoyu bianyuan 島嶼邊緣 [The edge of the island] (Taipei: Jiuge, 2003), 178. Li Youcheng’s 李有成 short commentary on “Formosa 1661,” “Yuanzhumin bei zhimin shi” 原住民被殖民史 [A history of the colonization of the indigenous people], included at the end of the collection, focuses on Chen Li’s advocacy for indigenous Taiwanese: ibid., 201–202. Chen Li, “Shi” 氏 [Clan], in Qing/man 輕／慢 [Light/slow] (Taipei: Er Yu, 2009), 59–60. See ibid., 174. Haun Saussy provides a much more exhaustive list of acceptations of wen: “Wen is (to cite several dictionaries at once) ‘markings; patterns; stripes, streaks, lines, veins; whorls; bands; writing, graph, expression, composition; ceremony, culture, refinement, education, ornament, elegance, civility; civil as opposed to military; literature (specifically belletristic prose in its distinction from poetry).’ The coexistence of these various meanings is suggestive; to say ‘wen is wen’ is never just a tautology.” Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse, 36. See James J.  Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 7. Ibid., 142, note 19. Ibid., 7.

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25. Zhang Guixing 張貴興, Hou bei 猴杯 [Monkey cup] (Taipei: Lianhe Wenxue, 2000), 104–105. 26. Ibid., 209. The term “people of Yin” refers to the later part of the Shang Dynasty, also called the Yin Dynasty after 1401 bce. King Wu of the Zhou established his reign in 1122 bce, after defeating the Yin. The taotie is a ferocious mythical animal. 27. For a more complete analysis of Zhang Guixing’s work with Chinese writing, see Andrea Bachner, “Reinventing Chinese Writing: Zhang Guixing’s Sinographic Translations,” in Tsu and Wang, Global Chinese Literature, 177–195. 28. For a discussion of the contradictory alignment of Malaysian-Chinese writers living in Taiwan with Chineseness and the Chinese script, see Kuei-fen Chiu, “Empire of the Chinese Sign: The Question of Chinese Diasporic Imagination in Transnational Literary Production,” Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 2 (May 2008): 593–620. 29. Kim-chew Ng, “Ala de zhiyi” 阿拉的旨意 [Allah’s command], in From Island to Island, 85–109. 30. Ibid., 90. 31. Ibid., 103. 32. Liu Cai, renamed Musi Abdullah in his second life, is thus a cultural postloyalist in the most complex sense of the term. David Wang 王德威 coins this term as a Chinese alternative to “postcolonial” in his book Houyimin xiezuo 後遺民寫作 [Postloyalist writing] (Taipei: Maitian, 2007). In his dissertation, Tsai Chien-hsin explores the complex meanings of the “post-” of postloyalism in compelling ways: see Tsai, “Postloyalist Passages: Migration, Transitions, and Homelands in Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan, 1895–1945” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2009). 33. The South-Seas diaspora is often referred to as the realm in which language is lost: see Kim-chew Ng’s discussion of the stereotype in the chapter “Huawen/zhongwen: ‘shi yu de Nanfang’ yu yuyan zaizao” 華文／中文：「失語的南方」與語言再造 [Sinophone/Chinese: “The south where language is lost” and the recrafting of language], in Mahua wenxue yu Zhongguoxing 馬華文學與中國性 [Malaysian-Chinese literature and Chineseness] (Taipei: Yuanzun Wenhua, 1998). 34. Ng, From Island to Island, 85. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 103. 37. The reform and systematization of Chinese punctuation took place in 1919, when a committee of scholars under the direction of Hu Shi 胡適 discussed the issue and published their conclusions in “Qing banxing xinshi biaodian fuhao yi’an” 請頒行新 式標點符號議案 [Request to implement new punctuation marks]. For a “prehistory” of Chinese punctuation systems, see Derk Bodde, “Punctuation: Its Use in China and Elsewhere,” Rocznik Orientalistyczny 47, no. 2 (1991): 15–23; Stan Mickel, “Modern Chinese Punctuation and CSL Reading Pedagogy,” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 23, no. 1 (1988): 21–40; and Guan Xihua 管錫華, Gudian biaodian fuhao 古典標點符號 [Punctuation marks in classical Chinese] (Chengdu: Bashu Shushe, 2000). In the reflections on Chinese punctuation by Western critics

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38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

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(for example, Derk Bodde), punctuation systems are often framed in terms of language development: the more “developed” a language, the more it is ruled by punctuation. According to this logic, Chinese is often unfavorably compared with alphabetic languages, since it systematized punctuation relatively late. The hallmark of such scriptural Darwinism is always communicational transparency. In this respect, the dismissal of traditional Chinese punctuation systems—in their multiple shapes—as protopunctuation reads like echoes of theories that fault the Chinese script in general for its alleged lack of pragmatic viability. See Jacques Derrida, La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 349–445, esp. 433; translated as Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 356–357. Ibid., emphasis Derrida’s. Ibid., emphasis Derrida’s. Ibid., emphasis Derrida’s. See Derrida, De la grammatologie. The section of Dissemination that precedes the one under analysis here is tellingly called “Le Carrefour de l’ ‘Est’ ” [“The crossroads of the ‘est’ ”]. See Martin Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage, 4th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977). At the very beginning of his short text, Heidegger defines Durchkreuzung as the crossing-out of, as the crossing beyond, a line, namely, Ernst Jünger’s nihilistic zero-line (Nullinie). Heidegger’s text, originally published under the title “Über ‘Die Linie,’ ” initially formed part of a volume dedicated to Jünger. The “X” in Derrida’s text also references mathematical symbols. Of course, these function nonphonetically, akin to ideographs. As mathematical symbol, “X” is not a sign of erasure but of multiplication. Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Beings (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 28. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Satzzeichen,” in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1:106–13, quotation at 106. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 106. See Michel Serres, Le parasite (Paris: Hachette, 1980). Wuhe’s experiments with punctuation marks are exceptional in Chinese, though not without precedent. We might think, for instance, of the Taiwanese author Wang Wenxing’s 王文興 experiments with typography and mixed graphic systems in his novel Bei hai de ren 背海的人 [Man backed against the sea], 2 vols. (Taipei: Hongfan, 1981–1999). See Wuhe 舞鶴, Luanmi 亂迷 [Chaos and confusion] (Taipei: Maitian, 2007). In a personal conversation, Wuhe indeed claimed—half ironically, I think—that his novel has to be read like a poem (Santa Barbara, May 2008). In his Deleuzian reading of Chaos and Confusion, Yang Kailin 楊凱麟 sees the absence of punctuation marks as just one more feature of textual deterritorialization, where

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54.

55.

56.

57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

the text becomes a body without organs, since the flow of characters is no longer cut into phrases and sentences: see Yang Kailin, “Yingrui shuxie yu Guoyu yituobang: Taiwan xiao wenxue de Wuhe nanti” 硬蕊書寫與國語異托邦—臺灣小文學的舞鶴 難題 [Hardcore writing and the heterotopia of “Guoyu”: Taiwanese minor literature and the problem of Wuhe], unpublished manuscript. But a celebration of a textual body without organs, freed from the straitjacket of syntax, from its shackles forged with periods, commas, and brackets, I would claim, falls short of Deleuze and Guattari’s own logic, in which flows and interruptions are interdependent. See Kim-chew Ng 黃錦樹, “Wuyan luanyu: Guanyu liangbu changpian xiaoshuo de pingzhu” 巫言亂語—關於兩部長篇小說的評注 [Witchtalk and language chaos: A critique of two novels], unpublished manuscript. This is more accurate for classical Chinese, which has sentence particles in the form of sinographs that fulfill syntactical functions, for instance, signaling that a sentence is a question, an exclamation, or an assertion. In modern Chinese only some of these particles remain operative. Even though the publishing industry in the PRC has adopted the “Western” page setup (with some exceptions, for instance, for classical texts), most texts published in Taiwan, especially literary texts, run from back to front, right to left, top to bottom. Wuhe’s Chaos and Confusion, unlike his other published works, thus marks an exception. In his essay on Wuhe, Yang Kailin comments in suggestive ways on a similar overdetermination of punctuation marks in the context of Wuhe’s Sisuo Abang Kalusi 思索 阿邦 •卡露斯 [Meditating on Ah Bang and Carlos] (Taipei: Maitian, 2002). He reads the obsessive use of brackets and quotation marks—the ones used in Chinese text that is arranged from top to bottom, namely, small right angles—as “Chinese boxes.” See Kailin, “Hardcore Writing.” Wuhe 舞鶴, Yusheng 餘生 [The remains of life] (Taipei: Maitian, 1999), 187. The comma’s effect of spacing is much more visible in a Chinese text, and can only be rendered in a relatively weak form in the English translation, since Chinese does not mark word limits through blank spaces. In other words, the comma, surrounded by space, interrupts a continuous column of sinographs. See Derrida, De la grammatologie, 96. For a thorough discussion of the text’s reworking of temporality and trauma, see Andrea Bachner, “The Remains of History: Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain and Wuhe’s The Remains of Life,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37, no. 1 (March 2011): 99–122. See Wuhe, “Yiwei tongxing lianzhe de mimi shouji” 一位同性戀者的秘密手記 [Secret notes of a homosexual], in Shiqisui zhi hai 十七嵗之海 [The sea at seventeen] (Taipei: Maitian, 2002). Though published in 2002, this collection reunites earlier experimental work by Wuhe that had been unpublished. Many texts display experiments with punctuation marks. Most of these divest prose texts of punctuation and use spacing reminiscent of strategies of concrete poetry.

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63. See Li Shunxing 李順興, “ ‘Weixie’ de celüe yunyong: Du ‘Yiwei tongxinglianzhe de mimi shouji’ ”「猥褻」的策略運用：讀〈一位同性戀著的祕密手記〉[The strategic use of abjection in Wuhe’s “Secret Notes of a Homosexual”], Zhongwai Wenxue 298 (March 1997): 134–137, quotation at 136–137. 64. Wuhe, The Sea at Seventeen, 246. Citations hereafter given parenthetically in the text. 65. Some of Wuhe’s texts, for instance, Chaos and Confusion, similarly invest numbers with meaning. 101, Taiwan’s megalandmark, comes into play in a reflection on penetration—the difference between 101 and 110 is 9 (jiu 九), an echo of “尻” (kao, “ass”): see Wuhe, Chaos and Confusion, 163. 66. The insistence on “O” and “Q” is obliquely reminiscent of Lu Xun’s 魯迅 play with different sign systems as he crafts a name for his unlikely Chinese character 阿Q (Ah Q) in “Ah Q zhengzhuan” 阿Q正傳 [True story of Ah Q]. There, another play with an “O” appears, namely, when Ah Q signs his confession, not with a cross (X) as is customary for analphabets in the West, but with a circle whose vacuity is underlined by Ah Q’s inability to produce a perfectly round shape: see Lu Xun, Lu Xun xiaoshuo quanji 魯迅小說全集 [The complete fiction of Lu Xun] (Taipei: Zhihui Daxue, 2011), 101–148. The title of Wuhe’s text, “Secret Notes of a Homosexual,” might underline the reference to Lu Xun via an echo of the genre of one of his other famous texts, namely, “Kuangren riji” 狂人日記 [Diary of a madman]. The title also echoes another important text with homosexual content, Chu T’ien-wen’s 朱天文, Huangren shouji 荒人手 記 [Notes of a desolate man], 2nd ed. (Taipei: Shibao Wenhua, 1997). 67. In Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, Jing Tsu describes the interaction between sinographs and the alphabetic script in the context of Lin Yutang’s invention of a Chinese typewriter as one of mutual inscription: “Each language tries to play host to the other in an escalation of universal access. In the way that the Chinese ideogram was recreated in Western discourse as an ideal and primitive alterity, the alphabet was reabsorbed into Chinese as an invisible component of the ideograph.” Jing Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 65.

5. technographIeS 1. In contrast to the celebratory comments on Burroughs’s alleged comparison of language to a “virus from outer space” in the context of posthuman theory—for instance, in Steven Shapiro, “Two Lessons from Burroughs,” in Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith Halberstamm and Ira Livingston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 38–54—Burroughs does not hold a very high opinion of the virus: it is a little, adaptable, stupid organism whose infestation is usually malignant. See William S. Burroughs, “Electronic Revolution,” in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 294–313, quotation at 303. 2. Burroughs, “Electronic Revolution,” 312.

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3. Ibid., 311. 4. The famous Taiwanese writer Zhang Dachun’s 張大春 recent collection of essays responds to this anxiety about sinographic survival. He sets out the premise that even cultured native speakers of Chinese have more and more difficulties writing less common characters correctly; hence, as a response, each of his essays glosses, and thus potentially reactivates, a character or a group of characters. Zhang, Ren de ji ge zi 認 得幾個字 [Knowing your Chinese characters] (Taipei: INK, 2007). 5. Prominent examples are designs such as Jiang Hua 蔣華, “Xiandai songti” 現代宋 體 [Modern song-type], in Wei shu zhi ti: Zhongwen wenzi sheji chuangxin zhi yuan: Fangzheng jiang Zhongwen ziti sheji da sai jinghua ji 為書之體：中文文字設計創 新之源：方正奬中文字體設計大賽精華集 [The body of writing: New inspirations for Chinese typographical design: Selections from the Fangzheng Prize in Chinese typographical design], ed. The Center for the Research and Design of Chinese Typography and The Committee for the Fangzheng Prize in Chinese Typographical Design (Beijing: China Youth, 2009), 206–207; or Shi Liang 史亮, “Wenhua liushi” 文化流 失 [The Loss of culture], in Zhongguo yuansu guoji chuangyi dasai huojiang zuopinji 中國元素國際創意大賽獲獎作品集 [Winning work from the third international design award The Chinese Element], ed. China Advertising Association (Xiamen: Zoyosun, [2009]), 75. Many typographical designs also show a marked tendency to make Chinese characters look like other scripts or sign systems. 6. Hajime Nakatani introduces the term “graphic regime” in the essay “Imperious Griffonage: Xu Bing and the Graphic Regime,” Artjournal (Fall 2009): 7–29. 7. For images of Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky, see the artist’s website at: http://www. xubing.com/index.php/site/projects/year/1991/book_from_the_sky1 (accessed September 3, 2012). 8. See Jeffrey Keough, “Introduction,” in Xu Bing: Language Lost, ed. Massachusetts College of Art (Boston: Massachusetts College of Art, 1995), 3–6, quotation at 4. 9. See Stanley K. Abe, “No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 169–192. 10. Some of these reflections are inspired by discussions in the context of the Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory VI, “Designing China,” held in Shanghai, convened by the University at California, Irvine, August 2009. 11. I am referring here to Western tradition in the modern age in a broad sense, after the symbiosis of art and writing in medieval manuscript art had disappeared and before the advent of modernist and avant-garde experiments. For a study of Western interactions of text and image, see Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure, 5th ed. (Paris: Klincksieck, 2002). 12. For a discussion of Qiu Zhenzhong’s work, see Yin Jinan 尹吉男, “Shufa xingtai de nei xin dubai” 書法形態的內心獨白 [Interior monologues of calligraphic form], in Duzi kou men: jinguan Zhongguo dangdai wenhua yu meishu 獨自叩門：近觀中國 當代文化與美術 [Knocking at the door alone: A close look at contemporary Chinese culture and art] (Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 2002), 130–141.

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13. Gu Wenda, “Mythos of Lost Dynasties,” http://www.wendagu.com/home.html (accessed September 2, 2012). 14. See the discussion of pseudocalligraphy in Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 15. For a detailed discussion of the print and book-making traditions Xu Bing draws on for his work, see John Cayley, “His Books,” in Tianshu: Passages in the Making of a Book, ed. Katherine Spears (London: Quaritch, 2009), 1–37. 16. Lydia Liu, “The Non-Book, Or the Play of the Sign,” in Spears, Tianshu, 65–79, quotation at 73. 17. From a similar vantage point, we could also split alphabetic letters into their smallest units, such as horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines and differently oriented curves, but to what end? 18. Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1998 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15. 19. Since the pronunciation of Chinese has changed over the centuries, the indication of sound through radicals is now more a guideline than a precise notation. In any case, this is only the case for one group of Chinese characters. 20. Cao Zhilian 曹志漣, “Guan lan fu” 觀瀾賦 [Rhapsody on contemplating the waves], in Mou dai fengliu 某代風流 [Fashions of an age], http://www.chinenoire.com/persimmon/modai2/1.html (accessed April 16, 2011). I will not attempt a translation here, since the “point” of the text for my analysis lies in its graphic feature, the recurring three dots of the Chinese radical that indicates water or liquidity. 21. The poem “Gudu kunchong xuejia de zaocan zhuojin” 孤獨昆蟲學家的早餐桌巾 [Breakfast tablecloth of the lonely entomologist] composed by the Taiwanese poet Chen Li 陳黎 in 2000 provides another example of radical design. The poem displays a series of columns featuring just characters with the radical for “bug” (虫), arranged from the lowest stroke number to the highest, as they would in the radical index of a Chinese dictionary: see Chen Li, Chen Li shi xuan, 1974–2000 陳黎詩選：1974–2000 [Selected poems, 1974–2000] (Taipei: Jiuge, 2001), 326–327. 22. See Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), 350–377. 23. Whereas for Jakobson formal questions thus play a more or less conscious role in the production of literary meaning, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, toward the end of his life, began an analysis of Western poetry that discovered hidden, encrypted meaning under the poetic text as such. De Saussure formulated a theory based on anagrams that describes processes of an unconscious combinatorics in the whole tradition of Western poetry. In his notes, reconstructed and edited by Jean Starobinski as Words Under Words (Les mots sous les mots), de Saussure explored the notion that Western poetry was permeated by palimpsestic subtexts of recurring sounds and eventually words (mostly names) that, much like a riddle, were hidden in any given poem: see

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24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

Jean Starobinski, Les mots sous les mots: Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). For instance, the novel La Disparition (Paris: Denoël, 1969) by the French writer Georges Perec does entirely without the letter “e.” Rather than a merely phonetic constraint, this plays itself out in graphic terms, as well—particularly in the French language in which the graphic presence of an “e” does not always indicate a difference in pronunciation, but might mark an unpronounced difference in grammatical gender. Or at least, such procedures count on fewer variables. For instance, one could select letters in one word or in contiguous words for their graphic components (such as the straight vertical lines of “t” and “l” or the round shapes of “o,” “d,” “p,” and so on), but the Chinese writing system, with its multiple components, offers a greater variety of experimentation, normally not on the level of single strokes, but on that of the radicals, or conventionalized recurring groups of strokes. Phonetic and graphic repetition can coincide if the character elements chosen are also the phonetic components of a character. See Tsai Chien-hsin 蔡建鑫, “Xiaoshuo (tu) wenzixue: Yi Wuhe wei zhongxin de taolun” 小說（圖）文字學：以舞鶴為中心的討論 [Fictional (dia)grammatology: On Wuhe and others modernist writers from Taiwan] (unpublished manuscript). I owe the example by Cao to his essay that discusses graphic experiments with Chinese as a way of crafting text to be “seen,” not read. Yang Lian 楊煉, “Tianshu zhi bian” 天書之辯 [Analyzing A Book from the Sky], in Yang Lian zuopin, 1982–1997: Guihua, zhili de kongjian: Sanwen wenlun juan 楊煉 作品 1982–1997：鬼話、智力的空間：散文文論卷 [Collected works by Yang Lian, 1982–1997: Ghost voices, intellectual spaces: prose and criticism] (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi, 1998): 227–229, quotation at 228. See Yang Lian, “Yi,” in Yang Lian zuopin, 1982–1997: Da hai tingzhi zhi chu: Shige juan 楊煉作品 1982–1997：大海停止之處：詩歌卷 [Collected works by Yang Lian, 1982–1997: Where the ocean stops: poems] (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi, 1999): 70–226, quotation at 70. See Ming Dong Gu, Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing: A Route to Hermeneutics and Open Poetics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 113–150. Yang Lian’s neographic process intentionally anchors itself in tradition: one of the poems thematizes the legendary empress Wu Zetian 則天武后 (627?–705), who deigned to rename herself by crafting new Chinese characters. For information on Empress Wu Zetian’s new Chinese characters, mainly constructed on the basis of ideographic compounds, see Matuda Yukimasa, Ling: Shijie jihao daquan 零—世界 記號大全 [Zero: A compendium of the world’s sign systems], trans. Huang Bijun 黃 碧君 (Taipei: Manyouzhe Wenhua, 2007), 248–249. Chen Li, “Qing shi” 情詩 [Love poem], in Kunao yu ziyou de pingjunlü 苦惱與自由 的平均律 [Worries and freedom well-tempered] (Taipei: Jiuge, 2005), 125–126. Chen Li, Qing/man 輕／慢 [Light/slow] (Taipei: Er Yu, 2009), 9–10.

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34. Some of the sinographs glossed by Chen Li, though not all of them, could be parsed, such as a reduplication of the character for mountain, “山” (shan), that could be easily derived from the equivalence of the character for woods, “林” (lin), a compound of two signs for “tree” (mu 木). 35. Hsia Yu 夏宇, Moca—Wu yi ming zhuang 摩擦．無以名狀 [Rubbings: Ineffable], 2nd ed. (Taipei: Xiandai Shi, 2005), n.p. 36. The connection of artistic labor and a technique of printing enters the paradoxical logic of the imprint, as Georges Didi-Huberman traces it for a whole tradition of Occidental art, in an implicit critique of the contrast of reproduction and artistic aura as formulated in Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Abhandlungen: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, bk. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 431–508: between auratic contact and disdained copy, between seriality and a captured moment of eternity, between anachronistic primitivism and cutting-edge technique: see Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Minuit, 2008). 37. For images of Xu Bing’s “Square Calligraphy,” see http://www.xubing.com/index.php/ site/projects/year/1994/square_calligraphy_classroom (accessed, September 3, 2012). 38. From Xu Bing’s talk at the seminar “Designing China,” organized by University of California, Irvine, and held at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in August 2009. 39. Jiang Xun 蔣勳, Hanzi shufa zhi mei 漢字書法之美 [The beauty of Chinese calligraphy] (Taipei: Yuanliu, 2009), 8–10. 40. Jiang Xun also reiterates the claim that the beginning of writing was linked to pictures, a theory contested by, among others, André Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964–1965). 41. As an example of the postphonetic turn at the basis of computer technology, Liu discusses Claude Shannon’s Printed English as an important step toward computerization: by acknowledging that the space sign had to count as the twenty-seventh “letter,” Shannon effectively reinvented the alphabet as ideographic: see Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); as well as Liu, “The Non-Book, Or the Play of the Sign,” 65–79; and Liu, “iSpace: Printed English after Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006): 516–550. 42. The layout of the second issue of the Taiwanese poetry journal Xianzai shi 現在詩 [Ontime poetry] (Taipei, 2003) evokes the realities of the digital age in a different way: Its rose-colored pages are completely covered with columns of number sequences. The poetic texts replace and bleed into (or out of) the number sequences. This works visually, since the characters as “digits” occupy the same page space as numbers. 43. Indeed, this might be a unique example of a creolization of script rather than speech. For definitions of creolization, see Shu-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet, eds., The Creolization of Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 44. The definitional boundaries of Martian Script are still vague, and will probably remain so, as the script evolves and changes. Here, I use the term to designate all

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45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

computer scripts based on the Chinese writing system, specifying, where important, which “dialect” I am referring to. Variants, tied to region, demographics, or gender, such as “Hong Kong Girl Speak” (Gang nü wen 港女文), a web lingo of Hong Kong, have begun to emerge. Examples are culled from the following websites: http://evchk.wikia.com/wiki/火星文, http://evchk.wikia.com/wiki/網絡語言, www.tpml.edu.tw/TaipeiPublicLibrary/ download/hotnews/9502a.pdf, http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t= 24100, http://www.hxwgj.com/, http://www.pts.org.tw/~seehear/news/451–500/news495.htm, http://eteacher.edu.tw/FocusDetail.asp?id=617 (accessed July 20, 2009). Many websites, such as http://www.huoxingyu.com/ and http://www.huoxingwen. com/ (accessed July 22, 2009), even offer conversion tools. Since my research, many of these websites have disappeared or, in some cases, merged. The type of Martian depends on the computer input tools for Chinese characters. Most users in Taiwan use a phonetic input method based on the Zhuyin transcription; in the PRC, those based on the alphabetic Pinyin transcription are most frequent. The conversion tools of standard Chinese to Martian offered on various specialized websites (see note 45) seem to feature graphical “Martianization” more than many of the examples that can be found online. In the creation of these examples of Martian signs, two principles are at work: On the one hand, the substitutions are graphically motivated, that is, “8” stands in for “B” because of their similarity in shape, which is somewhat similar to the substitution of “E” with “3” in l33t. On the other, the standard Chinese voicing for “8” is “ba,” and thus coincides in sound with “B.” This practice is present in Japanese texts, even at an adult level, as less common Kanji, the sinographic part of Japanese writing, are glossed with the help of Hiragana, one of the syllabic scripts of Japanese. This obeys the necessities of a phonetic diglossia proper to Japanese: depending on context, Kanji are either voiced in a Chinese-influenced way (on) or read with a Japanese pronunciation (kun). Lu Boru 盧柏儒, “Huoxingwen ruqin lanxingwen” 火星文入侵藍星文 [Martian encroaches upon Earthese], Xianzai shi 現在詩 [On-time poetry] (Taipei, 2006), 58–61. These scripts contributed to the pictographic vision Western philosophy had of the Chinese script in the sixteenth century, for example, in Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata. Haun Saussy traces them to calligraphy manuals and to a multiscript edition of the Diamond Sutra. See Saussy, “China Illustrata: The Universe in a Cup of Tea,” in The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, ed. Daniel Stolzenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Libraries, 2001), 105–114, esp. 111. Elsewhere, Saussy gives another example from the same multiscript edition of the Diamond Sutra (a “bird-track script”), as well as the actual model for Kircher’s primitive characters, a page from a calligraphy manual incorporated in a late Ming almanac: see Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center/Harvard University Press, 2001), 53.

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51. When a sinograph is used for iconic purposes, as in “囧rz,” this is, in most cases, a rare Chinese character, for which users might not activate its actual lexical meaning. 52. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 227. 53. Hsia Yu 夏宇, Hsia Yu shiji: Fuyushu 夏宇詩集：腹語術 [A collection of Hsia Yu’s poetry: Ventriloquism], 2nd ed. (Taipei: Xiandai Shi, 1997), 54–55. 54. I adopt this term from Jan Assmann, who uses it to describe the tracing of an etymology by looking at the graphics, not the morphology, of a sign: see Assmann, “Etymographie: Zeichen im Jenseits der Sprache,” in Hieroglyphen: Altägyptische Ursprünge abendländischer Grammatologie, ed. Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann (Munich: Fink, 2003), 37–63. 55. Wang Bi, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, trans. Richard John Lynn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 31–32. 56. See Ming Dong Gu, Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing: (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 113–150. 57. Wang Bi’s erasure of the image has to be read in the context of a revolution in the exegesis of the Book of Changes. Whereas most previous commentators focus on the images, that is, the hexagrams, through either iconic or numerical readings, but grant a less central position to the text, which is often marked by a Daoist distrust of the communicative powers of language, Wang Bi rereads the three signifying levels as a theory of signification. 58. Even though the basic system of the hexagrams is digital, consisting in a binary of broken and unbroken lines, the hexagrams do not constitute a purely digital system. For divination, in every hexagram so-called mutating lines, that is, ones that can change from one state to another, are of particular interest, since they point to a hexagram with the opposite line in the same constellation. A perfect digital system does not admit a bridge between its two symbols, since their real (and only) value lies in opposition: 1 signifies only as not 0 and vice versa. The moment 0 and 1 are no longer incommensurable, the moment there is a third term possible between 0 and 1, spells the erasure of digital sense. 59. Another example of innovations with the material background in Taiwanese poetry (apart from experiments with electronic media such as those by Cao Zhilian or Yao Dajuin) is Hong Hong 鴻鴻, Yu wo wuguan de dongxi: Hong Hong shiji, 1996–2001 與我無關的東西： 鴻鴻詩集 1996–2001 [Things that do not regard me: Collected poetry, 1996–2001] (Taipei: Tangshan Faxing, 2001). It features transparent and mirroring sheets of different colors and materials. 60. In the second edition of Pink Noise Hsia Yu chose to print the Chinese text in a lighter tone of pink than in the original, as she explains in the afterword to that edition. This indicates a very intentional manipulation of and play with notions of transitoriness, where pink would turn to white noise in a virtual future edition: see Fenhongse zaoyin 粉紅色噪音 [Pink noise], 2nd ed. (Taipei: Hsia Yu, 2008), n.p.

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61. The interview in Pink Noise comes with an English translation, though I chose to slightly change the translation of the title: see Hsia Yu, Pink Noise, n.p. 62. See ibid. The English translation used here is the one provided in the volume itself, with slight alterations. 63. See ibid. 64. Ibid. I have amended the English translation provided in the book itself, since it ascribes an ideographic fascination to Hsia Yu that is not there in the original text.

concluSIon: Beyond SInology 1. Cited from BIG’s slideshow “Found in Translation.” I thank Daria Pahhota at BIG for granting me access to press communiqués, images, and other material, as well as for permission to use these here. 2. See, for example, http://www.designbuild-network.com/projects/ren-people/ (accessed September 22, 2009). Since blogs on the subject of the REN-building seem to recycle freely from each other, I have no way of giving due credit to the original blog. 3. Quoted from BIG’s slideshow “Found in Translation.” 4. Ibid. 5. See Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building: The Power of Enigma (London: Frances Lincoln, 2005); and Deyan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and the Powerful— and Their Architects—Shape the World (London: Penguin, 2005). 6. Prevalent examples are Shanghai’s Jin Mao Tower (which is likened to a pagoda design), the square palace architecture of the Expo Pavilion, and, in a different Chinese context, the highest building in the world to date, the bamboo-shaped spear of Taipei’s 101 Building. 7. Other examples of ideographic architecture, such as BIG’s own Water Towers in Prague, in the shape of a “W,” or the plans for the island complex Palm Jebel Ali in Dubai, planned by the Dutch firm Waterplant in the shape of an Arabic poem, are equally spectacular, though without the same claim to national symbolism. Michiel van Raaij’s architecture blog “Eikongraphia” features an inspiring series of four reflections on ideographic buildings. See http://www.eikongraphia.com/ (accessed September 22, 2009). 8. The following are examples of blogs that dwell on the meaning of ren, especially in relation to communism: http://www.designbuild-network.com/projects/ren-people/, http:// www.sceneadvisor.com/style/bjarke-ingels-groups-ren-building-shanghai-11460.html, http://www.fh2o.kuchingkayak.com/2008/06/27/the-ren-building-in-shanghai/ (accessed September 22, 2009). 9. This connection is suggested by the Chinese-language blogger at http://johnblog.phychembio.com in the post “Ren de dasha, you ren jianzao: The Ren Building” 人的大廈， 由人建造 [The people’s building, made by the people] (accessed September 22, 2009). 10. Video presentation of the REN-Building by BIG, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Qcyfp869MxU (accessed September 30, 2012).

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Index

ABC of Reading (Pound), 65–66 Abraham, Nicolas, 133 Adorno, Theodor W., 66, 72–73, 154–155, 157, 233n41 “Affair” (Zhan Bing), 86–87 After Babel (Steiner), 115–116 Agamben, Giorgio, 239n27 agency, human, 20, 24, 102, 103, 217 Aguilar, Gonzalo, 77 “Ah Q zhengzhuan” [“True story of Ah Q”] (Lu Xun), 246n66 Ah Weng 阿翁, 200 Ai Weiwei 艾未未, 39 Al-kassim, Dina, 108, 238n17 “Allah’s Command” [“Ala de zhiyi”] (Ng), 140–148, 152–153, 156 allographies, 15, 130, 134, 146, 241n4; dissemination as parasitism, 150; punctuation and, 148 alphabetic scripts, 3–4, 7, 10, 58, 117; alphabetic letters included in sinographic text, 162–163; arbitrary order of letters in, 174; body alphabets and, 43; concrete poetry and, 78, 79; digital media and, 11; false coincidence of speech and writing, 115; global

pressure on Chinese characters, 48; hieroglyphs compared with, 64; Martian Script and, 186, 187; sinograph contrasted with, 13; sound represented by, 95; speech and, 114; transcriptions of Chinese, 122; unknown words in, 169. See also phonetic scripts alterity, 16, 30, 79, 94, 130, 146; Chinese as cipher for, 207, 209; conflation of speech and writing and, 117; identity and, 205, 217; intercultural stress and, 206. See also other/otherness “Analytical Language of John Wilkins, The” [“El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”] (Borges), 29 Anderson, Benedict, 4–6 “Another Kind of Ethics” [“Lingwai yizhong daode”] (Hsia Yu), 178–179 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 75, 83, 87 Apter, Emily, 47, 192–93, 202 architecture, 209–10, 211, 212–214, 253nn6–7 Aristotle, 19 Art of the Moving Picture, The (Lindsay), 63, 65, 231nn14–15 Artaud, Antonin, 230n13

“Aspects of Concrete Poetry” [“Aspectos da poesia concreta”] (H. de Campos), 77 Atayal people (Taiwan), 158 aurality, 153 Bahasa Malaysia (Malay) language, 146, 153 Bai Qiu 白萩, 83 Barthes, Roland, 224n10 Bataille, Georges, 34, 224n10, 226n32 Beauty of Chinese Calligraphy, The [Hanzi shufa zhi mei] (Jiang Xun), 184 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, xiv, 1–3, 9–10, 219n2; Chinese script and national character, 12–13; Chinese writing showcased by, 13; hybridity of Chinese script and, 207; “living” script emphasized in, 19; print technology and, 11, 44, 49 Benjamin, Walter, 59, 232n22, 233n42, 238n21; on artistic aura and reproduction, 250n36; on translation, 115, 116 Berry, Michael, 238n16 Bhabha, Homi, 47–48 Bi Sheng 畢昇, 10 Bible, 101, 113, 116, 239n27 BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), 209, 210, 211, 213, 214 Billeter, Jean-François, 52 biopolitics, 20, 44 bird-and-insect script (Niao chong shu), 189, 191, 251n50 Bird’s Nest (Beijing), 212 bodies, human: language produced by, 20; nation’s deadly power over, 38; performance art and, 38–40, 41, 42–46; sexuality and punctuation, 160–162; signification and body in pain, 35–38 Body in Pain, The (Scarry), 35 Bolz, Norbert, 234n43 Book from the Ground (Xu Bing), 182–183

270

index

Book from the Sky [Tianshu] (Xu Bing), 168–169, 172, 172, 177, 179–183 Book of Changes. See Yijing Borges, Jorge Luis, 29, 30 Bory, Jean-François, 75, 76–77, 81 Bouvet, Joachim, 219n4 Boxer Rebellion, 4 “Branding” [“Luo”] (Yang Zhichao), 39 Brazil, 15, 134 bricolage, authorial, 201 “brisure” (Derrida), 159 Brod, Max, 117 “Bronzing” [“Shai”] (Yang Zhichao), 39 Brunette, Peter, 72 Burroughs, William S., 165–166, 167, 203, 246n1 Bush, Christopher, 71 Cai Zong-Qi, 229n1 Calligrammes (Apollinaire), 87 calligraphy, 2, 15, 25, 109, 179; manuals for, 251n50; national calligraphies, 38–55, 41, 54; pseudographs and, 170–171; REN Building (Shanghai) and, 209, 213; swordsmanship conjugated with, 51–54, 54 Campion, Jane, 103 Campos, Augusto de, 75, 77 Campos, Haroldo de, 75, 77, 78–79, 82–83, 235n56 Cang Jie (Ts’ang Chieh) 倉頡, 67, 110, 238nn18–19 Cantonese: City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi) and, 100, 102, 104, 107; Martian Script and, 186, 187 Cantos (Pound), 74 Cao Zhilian 曹志漣, 174–176, 249n27, 252n59 “Car Accident” [“Che huo”] (Lin Hengtai), 85 Carter, Thomas Francis, 10 Casanova, Pascale, 239n33

Certeau, Michel de, 111, 113 Champollion, Jean-François, 66 Chao, Y. R., 120, 240n36 Chaos and Confusion [Luanmi] (Wuhe), 156, 157, 159, 244n53, 245n56, 246n65 Chartier, Roger, 46, 228n56 Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀, 7 Chen Kaige 陳凱歌, 228n63 Chen Li 陳黎, 16, 89–90, 120, 121, 248n21; and hidden character poem (yinzi shi), 135–136, 236n64; on readability of pseudographs, 177–178, 249–250n34; on writing and tattoo, 135–137 Chen Yi 陳儀, 100 Cheng, François, 224n12 Cheung, Maggie, 50 China: in French theory, 24; Greater China, 51; idea of Chinese nation, 5; multiethnic and multilingual, 47; print technology in, 10–11; reading and scripting of “China,” 215–217; as “sick man of Asia,” 4; stagnant history in Hegel’s view, 60 China, People’s Republic of (PRC), 5, 13, 38, 82, 126; avant-garde art in, 168–169; fears for future of Chinese writing system in globalized age, 167; Hong Kong handed over to, 188; ideographic architecture in, 212; nation body of, 44; Pinyin used in, 8, 12, 122, 163, 185; simplified characters used in, 188, 221n22; Western page setup in publishing industry, 245n56 China Illustrata (Kircher), 251n50 Chinese Art of Writing, The (Billeter), 52 Chinese characters. See sinographs (Chinese characters/script) “Chinese Characters” [“Wenzi”] (Beijing Olympics opening ceremony), xiv, 1–3, 19, 43–46, 207 Chinese Committee on Writing Reform, 221n22

Chinese Element Awards, 45, 227– 228nn51–52, 247n5 Chinese language, 24, 51, 53, 80; advertising aimed at American consumers and, 93, 99; bilingual dictionaries of, 122; concrete poetry and, 89; dead body of, 20–21, 23; digital mutation of, 202; grammar of, 132, 241n12; graphic regime of, 168, 247n6; ideal status as “total language,” 165–166; Martian Script and, 187; materiality of, 33; as “other” language, 95; punctuation in, 147–148, 243n37; reform of, 7, 15, 21, 23; syntax of, 61; tonal structure of, 120. See also Sinophones (Sinophone/Sinitic languages) Chinese writing, 91, 118; as allography, 146; combinatorial nature of, 173; “corruption” of, 185–186; cultural unity and, 5; diasporic writers and, 134; digital media and, 11–12, 48; disconnection from everyday speech, 21–22, 24; film theory and, 68, 70, 208; glossolalic sound and, 114; imagistic mimesis and, 15; language reform and, 7–9; as marker of cultural alterity, 209; Martian Script and, 189; as Marxian fetish, 22; modernity and, 3–4; as moving images, 61; national calligraphies and, 44, 45, 49; performed during Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, 1–3, 9; pictorial quality attributed to, 57; pseudographs in, 169–170; punctuation and, 156; symbolic reinvention of, 13; tattooing and, 16; Western poetry and, 74–87; Western reflections on, 24–26, 224nn11–12. See also classical Chinese (wenyan wen) “Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, The” (Fenollosa), 28, 229n3; on link between new media and Chinese writing, 57–58; on visual medialities and signification, 59–63; Western poetry influenced by, 74

index

271

Chineseness, 48, 94, 143, 146, 215, 216; architecture and, 211, 212, 213; identity politics and, 205–206, 208; as monolithic imaginary, 16; Sinocentrism and marginalized others, 136–137, 138, 140; written characters as marker/ essence of, 50, 55, 205–206 Chow, Eileen, 238n13 Chow, Rey, 224n18 Christianity, 8, 111, 113 Chu T’ien-wen 朱天文, 104, 238n12, 246n66 City of Sadness [Beiqing chengshi] (Hou Hsiao-hsien film, 1989), 15–16, 99–108, 119, 238nn12–14 classical Chinese (wenyan wen), 7, 24, 220n9; equation of Latin with, 221n13; New Culture aim to abolish, 8; as standardized written form, 5 commas, 158–159, 245n59 “common tongue” (putonghua), 7 Communism, 7–8, 9, 24, 82, 169, 212 computers/computer era, 10, 11, 182; as apocalyptic science fiction scenario, 19–20; computer as salvation of Chinese script, 183. See also digital media/digital code; icons, computer concrete poetry, 15, 58, 208; in Chinese languages, 82–91, 235nn62–63, 236n64; in European languages, 75–81, 234n50 Configurations of Comparative Poetics (Cai Zong-Qi), 229n1 Confucianism, 2, 50, 52, 124, 185 Conley, Tom, 106, 233n40 Contemporary Cinema [Xiandai dianying] (journal), 69 corpographies, 14, 15, 33, 39, 40, 55, 57 corporeality, 39, 42, 111, 129 Cortázar, Julio, 226n32 Course in General Linguistics [Cours de linguistique générale] (Saussure), 95–97, 114 Cratylus (Plato), 28, 240n39

272

index

creolization, 250n43 “Crisis of Script Reform, The” [“Xin wenzi yundong de weiji”] (Hu Yuzhi), 8 critical theory, 64, 72, 73, 218; “anti-ocular turn” in, 112, 239n23; erasure of cultural specificity, 132–133 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [Wo hu cang long] (Ang Lee film, 2000), 51, 100, 102, 238n16 Cryptonomy [Cryptonomie] (Abraham and Torok), 133 Cultural Revolution, 38, 82, 124, 224n11 Cummings, E. E., 75, 83 Damas, Georges, 66 Damrosch, David, 5 Dayak culture, 138, 139–140, 146 Debrix, Jean-R., 66 deconstruction, 73 Deleuze, Gilles, 117–118, 239n33 Derrida, Jacques, 15, 25, 26, 30, 224n12; “brisure” concept of, 159; on Chinese writing as avatar of writing as such, 95; on écriture, 72, 151; Fenollosa and, 229n4; on phonocentrism, 111, 112, 115, 151; Pound criticized by, 148; on theater of cruelty, 230n13 Des chinoises [On Chinese Women] (Kristeva), 224n11 “Des Tours de Babel” (Derrida), 116 Di ethnicity, 135–136, 137 Dialectic of Enlightenment [Dialektik der Aufklärung] (Adorno and Horkheimer), 73 dialects, 5, 123, 127, 142, 188 diaspora, Chinese, 118, 134, 242n15 dictionaries, 122–125, 191 Dictionary of Maqiao, A [Maqiao cidian] (Han Shaogong novel), 16, 124–127, 240n42 Dictionary of the Khazars (Pavic novel), 240n42 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 250n36

difference, linguistic, 97, 99, 113, 149 “Difficult Poem That Is Easy to Read, A” [“Yi shou rongyi du de nan shi”] (Chen Li), 177, 178 digital media/digital code, 11–12, 16, 19–20, 48, 206; anxiety of lost language, 199; binary code, 173; icons and, 183; Martian Script and, 184–189, 190, 191–193; phonetic input systems, 183; reliance on paradigms of analog media, 229n4; sinographs as medium of choice, 167; translation and, 193, 201, 205; universal language and, 182; white noise and, 180. See also computers/computer era; icons, computer digital turn, 166–167, 185 diglossia, 6, 108, 188, 251n48 Ding Xuhui 丁旭輝, 83–84, 235n62 Dingli Advertising Company, 45 “Disappeared Image, The” [“Shi zong de xiang”] (Hsia Yu), 193–200 Discourse, Figure [Discours, figure] (Lyotard), 26, 231n18, 241n8 Disparition, La (Perec), 249n24 Dissemination [La dissémination] (Derrida), 148, 150, 152, 153 Divided Text, The [Le texte divisé] (RoparsWuilleumier), 72 Do She-sun 杜十三, 83 “Ecranesque” (Liu Na’ou), 69 écriture, 72, 112, 115, 149 Edge of the Island, The [Daoyu bianyuan] (Chen Li), 135 Edison, Thomas, 59 Eisenstein, Sergei, 66–71, 77, 232n29 “Electronic Revolution” (Burroughs), 165–166 Elizondo, Salvador, 15, 34–37, 225n30 English language, 63, 166, 167, 199, 239n35; Chinese written to resemble, 202; Martian Script and, 187; Sherlock translation program and, 200

Eoyang, Eugene, 82 Epoch Poetry Quarterly, The (Chuang shiji shi she), 82 Erya [Correct Diction] (dictionary), 123 Escrito sobre un cuerpo [Written on a Body] (Sarduy), 226n32 Esperanto/Esperantists, 7–8, 21, 23, 64, 182 Esposito, Roberto, 225n29 essentialism, 81, 102, 213, 214, 218 “Eternal” [“Yong”] design (Dingli Advertising Company), 45–46 Eurocentrism, 215 exoticism, 44, 81, 97, 149, 230n5 Explanations of Simple and Complex Characters [Shuowen jiezi] (Xu Shen), 32, 123–124, 137, 191, 229n1 “Family Tree” (Zhang Huan), 40, 41 Farabeuf, Louis Hubert, 34 Farabeuf: Chronicle of an Instant [Farabeuf: Crónica de un instante] (Elizondo), 34–37, 226n32 Fashions of an Age [Mou dai fengliu] (Cao Zhilian), 174 Febvre, Lucien, 10 feminism, 238n14 Fenollosa, Ernest, 28, 57–63, 225n30, 229n3; concrete poetry and, 76, 77, 78, 83; Eisenstein’s film theory and, 67–68, 69, 70; Western poetry and, 74 film: Fifth Generation filmmakers, 107; as hieroglyphics, 63–66, 231n14; “ideographic” film theory, 66–74, 208; New Wave Cinema (Taiwan, Hong Kong), 107; perception of reality and, 59; visuality of, 107. See also intertitles, film Film Hieroglyphs (Conley), 106 Film Weekly (Dianying zhoubao), 69 “Five Savages” [“Wu hu”] (Chen Li), 135–136 “Formosa 1661” [“Fuermosha: yiliuliuyi”] (Chen Li), 135

index

273

Foucault, Michel, 15, 102–103, 228n56; biopolitics concept, 20; nostalgia for prehistory of signification, 27–30, 224n18 Four Treasures of the Study, 1 France, 15, 26 Franco-Japanese Poems [Poèmes FrancoJaponais] (Garnier and Niikuni), 81 Frankfurt School, 72 French language, 74, 149, 199, 202, 239n35, 249n24 French theory, 24–38 Freud, Sigmund, 27, 103, 104, 241n5; Lyotard’s critique of, 241n8; on sinographs and the unconscious, 130–131 Freudian Robot, The (Liu), 185 From Island to Island [You dao zhi dao: Dari Pulau Ke Pulau] (Ng), 129–131, 241n2 Gance, Abel, 66 Garnier, Pierre, 75, 80–81 General Remarks on the Book of Changes [Zhouyi lüeli] (Wang Bi), 196 Genette, Gérard, 28 German language, 94, 97, 118 Gernet, Jacques, 25, 224n12 globalization, 17, 47, 167, 206, 209, 216 glossolalia, 16, 110–127, 170, 239n27 Gomringer, Eugen, 75, 83, 234n50 gramophone, 59 graphe, 15, 117, 170, 176 graphocentrism, 115, 151 graphology, secondary, 10, 222n24 Great Wall, 2, 49 Gu, Ming Dong, 196–97 Gu Wenda 谷文達, 170, 171, 179 Guattari, Félix, 117–118, 239n33 Gutenberg, Johannes, 10, 13 Guyer, Sara Emilie, 239n31

274

index

Hakka, 101, 118, 187 Hakuin, 75 Han dynasty, 123, 229n1 Han Shaogong 韓少功, 16, 125 Hangul (Korean script), 220n11 Hannas, William C., 11 Hansen, Miriam, 72, 230n8, 232n22, 233n41 “Hanzi Smatter” (website), 94–95 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3–4, 24, 25, 60, 95 Heidegger, Martin, 152, 244n44 Heller-Roazen, David, 239n27 Herbert, George, 83 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4, 220n6 Hero [Yingxiong] (Zhang Yimou film, 2002), 15, 49–54, 54 Herzog and de Meuron (architects), 212 hexagrams, 38, 194, 198–199, 226n38, 252nn57–58 hieroglyphs, 15, 58, 63–66, 165, 230n13, 231n21; critical theory and, 72–73; Egyptian, 63, 65, 71, 131, 167; film theory and, 67–68; unconscious and, 130, 131 History of Sexuality [Histoire de la sexualité] (Foucault), 102 homophones, 120–121, 135, 138, 142, 186, 187 homosexuality, 159–163 Hong Kong, 107, 126, 185, 188, 212 Horkheimer, Max, 72–73 Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, 15, 99, 102, 105–106, 107, 119 Hsia Yu 夏宇, 178–179, 185, 193–194, 197–203 Hu Shi 胡適, 7, 220n13 Hu Yuzhi 胡愈之, 7–8, 15, 21–23, 33 Huang, Yunte, 69 Huangren shouji [Notes of a desolate man] (Chu T’ien-wen), 246n66

icons, computer, 184–185, 189, 192, 194, 207 identity, 16, 97, 103, 210; ethnic, 101; national, 13, 17, 48, 100 identity, cultural, 55, 101–102, 110, 214, 217; in “Allah’s Command,” 143, 144; media technologies and, 207; otherness and, 216; script and, 164, 180, 205, 207, 214; writing systems and, 217 identity politics, 13, 17, 51, 143, 208; alterity and, 209; bodies and, 15; calligraphic, 43, 48, 51; Chineseness and, 205–206, 208 ideogram, 77–78, 80 “Ideogram, Anagram, Diagram” [“Ideograma, anagrama, diagrama”] (H. de Campos), 77, 78 ideographs, 58, 61, 184, 231n14 image, text and, 72–74, 196–197 “Image Poem and I, The” [“Tuxiang shi yu wo”] (Zhan Bing), 83 imagined community, 5 imperialism, 3, 220n11 “Imperious Griffonage” (Nakatani), 247n6 intellectuals, Chinese, 4, 57, 228n65 interculturality, 13, 181, 205, 207, 209, 216 Internet, 94, 183, 189, 238n16; blog commentary on REN Building, 212; Chinese Internet language, 16; Martian Script and, 185 intertitles, film, 65, 70–71, 104–107, 109, 232n30, 238n13 Islam, 141 Jakobson, Roman, 78, 113, 175–176, 235n56, 248n23 Janus, Adrienne, 239n23 Japan, 4, 68, 86, 220n11, 221n21, 224n10 Japanese Cinema (Kaufman), 66 Japanese language, 7, 81, 101, 107, 225n27; Chinese written to resemble, 202; Hiragana script, 251n48; media politics

of City of Sadness and, 108–109; pressures on Sinophone languages, 189. See also Kanji Jesuits, 219n4 Jiang Xun 蔣勳, 184 Jingke ci Qin Wang [The Emperor and the Assassin] (Chen Kaige film, 1998), 228n63 Johnson, Barbara, 103, 104 Joyce, James, 75, 117 Jünger, Ernst, 35 kabuki theater, 67 Kafka, Franz, 117–118 Kafka: For a Minor Literature [Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure] (Deleuze and Guattari), 117 Kangxi emperor, 219n4 Kanji, 66, 76, 81, 94, 109, 251n48. See also Japanese language Kaufman, N., 66 Kenner, Hugh, 68, 230n11 Kinematograph, 59 Kinetoscope, 59, 62 Kircher, Athanasius, 251n50 Kitasono, Katue, 82 Kittler, Friedrich, 19–20, 44 Koolhaas, Rem, 212 Korea, 220n11 Kracauer, Siegfried, 72, 233n42 Kristeva, Julia, 15, 24–25, 224nn11–12 Kuhn, Franz, 29 Kurosawa, Akira, 50 Lacan, Jacques, 15, 31–33, 162, 225nn26–27 language, 31, 80, 103, 124; bodies and, 20; Burroughs on “virus from outer space,” 165, 246n1; dream of universal language, 182; European vernacular languages, 5, 7, 220n13; as instrument

index

275

of state power, 39; intercultural stress and, 206; language reform, 7–9, 20–21; materiality of, 175; as medium of communication, 2; national community/identity and, 4–5, 220n6; nationalism and, 13; national language politics, 6, 7, 9, 221n13; phonetic, 63; prison house of, 19; socialization and, 111–112; survival of languages, 166, 193, 203; translation theory and, 115; visual movement and, 59, 60; written, 5 Language and Cinema [Langage et cinéma] (Metz), 66 Latin language, 5, 220n11 Ledderose, Lothar, 173–174 Lee, Ang 李安, 51, 100, 102, 238n16 Legalism, 50 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 28, 32, 166, 219n4 Leiris, Michel, 224n10 Leung Chiu-wai, Tony, 50, 101, 102 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 134, 229n67 Li, Jet, 50 Li Mingliang 李明亮, 227n51 Li-Po and Other Poems [Li-Po y otros poemas] (Tablada), 74–75 Li Shunxing 李順興, 160 Light/Slow [Qing/man] (Chen Li), 135–136, 177–178 Lin Hengtai 林亨泰, 83, 85 Lin Shu 林紓, 116 Lindsay, Nicholas Vachel, 63–66, 67, 71, 231n16, 231nn14–15 lingchi (“Death by a Thousand Cuts”), 34, 226n32 “Linguistics and Poetics” (Jakobson), 78 Listening [A l’écoute] (Nancy), 112 Liu, James J. Y., 137 Liu, Lydia, 120, 185, 250n41 Liu Na’ou 劉吶鷗, 69–71, 232nn29–30, 233n35 Liu Xie 劉勰, 229n1 Location of Culture, The (Bhabha), 47–48 logocentrism, 150

276

index

logographs, 97, 99 “Love Poem, A” [“Qingshi”] (Chen Li), 177–178 Lu Boru 盧柏儒, 189 Lu, Sheldon, 40, 51 Lu Xun 魯迅, 7, 21, 246n66 Lumière Brothers, 59 Lyotard, Jean-François, 26, 231n18, 233n40, 241n8 Mair, Victor H., 122–123, 126 Malaysia, 118, 138, 141–146 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 75, 77, 83, 234n50 Mandarin, 118, 123, 186; films in, 107–108; intonations of, 120; literature in, 124; phonetic transcriptions of, 122; pronunciations of, 9, 51, 102; roots in “official language” (guanhua), 7; switched between other languages, 188; in Taiwan, 100 manga, Japanese, 187 Maoism, 24, 224n11 “Martian Encroaches Upon Earthese” [“Huoxingwen ruqin lanxingwen”] (Lu Boru), 189, 190, 191 Martian Script, 184–189, 190, 191–193, 251nn46–47 Martin, Marcel, 66 Marxism, 73 “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing” (Hansen), 72 mass media, 72–73, 234n43 materiality, 20, 23–24, 27, 157; concrete poetry and, 75, 77, 79; of film intertitles, 106; writing in opposition to, 42 Max Planck Foundation, 94 May Fourth Movement (1919), 7, 8 McLuhan, Marshall, 2, 10, 214 mediality, 2–3, 17, 62, 68, 74, 108; Chinese as metaphor for, 166; digital turn and, 178; écriture and, 72; iconic, 73; identity and, 215; materiality and, 20; opposing

desires and, 205; Sinophone versus sinograph, 110; Western concepts of, 57 media studies, 10, 110 Meditating on Ah Bang Carlos [Sisuo Abang Kalusi] (Wuhe), 245n57 Mencius (Mengzi) 孟子, 32 Metz, Christian, 66, 233n40 Miller, Constance R., 222n29 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 225n26 mimesis, 88, 112 Mimologics [Mimologiques] (Genette), 28 Ming Dynasty, 171 minor literature, 117–119 Mirror for Analyzing the World, A: The Millenarian Scroll [Xin shi jian— Shijimo juan] (Xu Bing), 168. See also Book from the Sky, A Mitchell, W. J. T., 71, 72 Modernist Poetry [Xiandai shi] (journal), 82 modernity, 3, 11, 43, 111, 210, 221n21 modernization, 20, 147 Monkey Cup [Hou bei] (Zhang Guixing), 138–140 montage, 67–71 Murnau, F. W., 69 music, 71, 107; concrete poetry and, 75, 79, 86; écriture and, 112; glossolalia and, 113, 119; punctuation marks and, 154 muteness, 15, 102–105 “Muteness Envy” (Johnson), 103 Muybridge, Eadweard, 59, 62 Mythos of Lost Dynasties (Gu Wenda), 170 Nakatani, Hajime, 247n6 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 112 national allegory: films as, 51, 53, 54, 100; ideographic architecture and, 213 “national language” (Guoyu), 7 nationalism, 3, 4, 20; Japanese, 68; national calligraphies and, 47, 48; print language and invention of, 5 Nativists, Taiwanese, 101

neographs, 176–177, 249n31 New Culture movement, 8 newspapers, concrete poetry and, 85 Ng, Kim-chew 黃錦樹, 16, 129, 152, 221n23, 241n2; Chinese script traditions and, 140–141; identity politics and, 148, 163; on lack of punctuation marks, 156, 157 Niikuni, Seiichi, 76, 79, 80–81, 82 Noigandres poets, 75, 77–78, 81–82, 234n48 noise, 113, 130; translation and, 200, 201; white noise, 174, 180, 201, 202, 252n60 Numbers [Nombres] (Sollers), 148–149 Of Grammatology [De la grammatologie] (Derrida), 22, 95, 151, 224n12, 229n4 “official language” (guanhua), 7 “On Fetishism” [“Fetischismus”] (Freud), 27 “On Pain” [“Über den Schmerz”] (Jünger), 35 “On Poisonous Discourse” [“You du wen tan”] (Hu Yuzhi), 21, 23 “On the Art of Film” [“Yingpian yishu lun”] (Liu Na’ou), 69, 70 On-Time Poetry [Xianzai shi] (journal), 189, 250n42 “On Violence” [“De la violencia”] (Elizondo), 35 Opium Wars, 4 oracle bones, 140, 147, 241n2 oral principle, 11 orality, 110–111, 117, 118, 154 Order of Things, The [Les mots et les choses] (Foucault), 27–28 Orientalism, 25, 43, 163, 213, 215, 217 other/otherness, 17, 34, 38, 146, 208; Chinese as “other” language, 95; fetishism and, 32–33; nation bodies and, 46; punctuation marks and, 164; of unreadable pseudographs, 181; Western fascination with Chinese script and, 13, 25–26; writing as otherness, 149. See also alterity Ou Wai’ou 鷗外鷗, 85, 91

index

277

Parasite, The [Le parasite] (Serres), 155 Paul, Saint, epistle to the Corinthians, 113, 239n27 Pavic, Milorad, 240n42 Perec, Georges, 249n24 performance artists, 15, 38–40, 41, 42–46 Perrot, Victor, 66 Pfister, Oskar, 113 phone, 15, 117 phonetic scripts, 6, 8, 96, 208; desinicization and, 220n11; in digital devices, 183; Japanese kana, 109; living voice and, 154; poetic function of language and, 175; as proposed replacement for sinographs, 4, 7; relation of writing and speech in, 97; reproduction of sound and, 114. See also Pinyin system; Zhuyin system phonocentrism, 30, 112, 151; punctuation and, 154; Western metaphysics and, 25, 111, 115 photography, 76 Piano, The (Campion film), 103 pictographs, 44, 161–162, 176; Martian Script and, 188, 191, 192; pictographic myth, 57–58, 66, 75, 88, 184, 194, 198, 207 Pignatari, Décio, 75, 234n54 Pindar, 177 Pink Noise [Fenhongse zaoyin] (Hsia Yu), 194, 199–201, 252n60, 253n61 Pinyin system, 8, 12, 122, 127, 163, 185 Plato, 28, 240n39 “Poem, Ideogram” [“Poema, ideograma”] (A. de Campos), 77 poetry, 58, 61, 68; experimental, 16; glossolalic, 16; hidden character poem (yinzi shi), 135–136; pattern poems, 83, 236n64; poetic function of language, 175–76; pseudographs in, 177–79; textual spacing and, 157. See also concrete poetry

278

index

Portuguese language, 77–78 postcolonial theory, 239n35 posthuman theory, 246n1 postloyalist writing, 243n32 poststructuralism, 24, 26, 30, 113, 199, 239n31 Pound, Ezra, 28, 58, 63, 64, 166, 225n30; Derrida’s critique of, 148, 150–151; ideographic method of, 75, 83; on sinographs and hieroglyphs, 65–66; sinographs in Cantos, 74 printing, 110–111, 179; Chinese invention of, 10, 13; print capitalism, 5; print with movable type (huo zi yinshua), 3, 10; Song font (Songti), 171, 227n51; woodblock printing, 10–11, 222n29. See also typography; xylography “Printing on Water” [“Chongya shui”] (Song Dong), 42 pronunciation, 8, 98, 114, 221n13; changes in, 248n19; Chinese dictionaries and, 124, 126; language reform and, 21; linguistic difference and, 99; literacy in Sinophone languages and, 188; of Mandarin (standard Chinese), 9, 51, 102, 121, 142–143; Martian Script and, 186 pseudographs, 169–171, 176, 177–181 psychoanalysis, 130–131, 133 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 69, 232n29 punctuation, 147–148, 151, 152–164, 243n37; “Chinese boxes,” 245n57; Martian Script and, 191 “Punctuation Marks” [“Satzzeichen”] (Adorno), 154 Qian Cunxun 錢存訓, 222n27 Qin Shi Huangdi 秦始皇帝 (first emperor of China), 49–51, 228n63 Qing dynasty, 220n5, 221n23 Qiu Zhenzhong 秋振中, 170, 171, 179 Qiu Zhijie 邱志傑, 40

Rashomon (Kurosawa film, 1950), 50 Remains of Life, The [Yusheng] (Wuhe), 157–159 “Remarks on the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’” [“Remarques sur le ‘mode de production asiatique’”] (Kristeva), 24–25 REN Building (Shanghai), 209–210, 211, 212–214 representation, 20, 26, 37, 55, 202; crises in, 57; ideographic film theory and, 67; moving images and, 63 “Resemblance/Dissemblance” [“Xiang wai xiang”] (Wang Runhua), 85 “Rhapsody on Contemplating the Waves” [“Guan lan fu”] (Cao Zhilian), 174–176, 248n20 Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), 124 “River or Sandbank” [kawa/sasu] (Niikuni), 76–77, 89 Rodowick, D. N., 233n40 romanticism, German, 4 “Roots of Literature, The” [“Wenxue de ‘gen’”] (Han Shaogong), 124 Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, 72 Rotman, Brian, 153, 154 Rubbings: Ineffable [Moca: Wu yi ming zhuang] (Hsia Yu), 178 Sarduy, Severo, 226n32 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 59, 78, 95–97, 235n56; anagram studied by 78, 248n23; glossolalia studied by, 113; representation of sound and, 114 Saussy, Haun, 20, 230n11, 241n12; on pictographic scripts, 251n50; on wen, 242n21 Sayings of Confucius (Lunyu), 1, 219n2 Scarry, Elaine, 35, 226n35 Schamus, James, 238n16 scream (cry), 111–112, 114, 119 Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Wills and Brunette), 72

scripts, 14, 203, 221n13; ancient Egyptian, 64, 65; pedagogy of, 43; production and reproduction of, 46; totalitarian, 44–45, 46 scriptural economy [“l’économie scriptuaire”] (Certeau), 111 Sea at Seventeen, The [Shiqisui zhi hai] (Wuhe), 159, 245n62 seal script, 2, 13, 85, 143, 176, 207; Chineseness and, 140, 141; in pseudographic calligraphy, 170–171; punctuation and, 147; as script of first Chinese empire, 44, 49; small seal script, 49 “Second Obituary for the World, The” [“Di er hui shijie fuwen”] (Ou Wai’ou), 85 “Secret Notes of a Homosexual” [“Yiwei tongxing lianzhe de mimi shouji”] (Wuhe), 159–163, 245n62, 246nn65–66 Segalen, Victor, 74 Seminar XVIII (Lacan), 31–32 semiotics, 2, 14, 85, 197, 213 Serres, Michel, 155 sexuality, 32, 102–103, 160 Shanghai Neo-Sensationism, 69 Shanghainese, 100, 107 Shannon, Claude, 250n41 Sharaku, 67 Sherlock (translation program), 200–201, 202 “Shi’er pingfangmi” [“Twelve Square Meters”] (Zhang Huan), 38 Shih, Shu-mei, 51, 100, 102, 119 Short Operating Manual, A [Précis de manuel opératoire] (Farabeuf), 34 signification, 24–25, 26, 43, 197; allography and, 146; body in pain and, 35–38; calligraphy and, 171; fetishism and, 32–33; film theory and, 71; hieroglyphs and, 64; logographic silence and, 98–99; nationalist pedagogy and, 47–48; performance art and, 40; punctuation

index

279

and, 154; scream (cry) breaking loose from, 112; stability of, 55 signs, 6, 33, 55, 203, 218; arbitrary connection to meaning, 195; disappearance of, 198; images equated with, 57; “reading” possibilities of, 2; vanishing of, 42 “Simple Discussion of Filmic Rhythm, A” [“Dianying jiezou jianlun”] (Liu Na’ou), 69–70 Sinocentrism, 140, 213, 215; savage other and, 135, 136, 137; similarity to Orientalism, 217 “Sinograph and Latinization, The” [“Hanzi he ladinghua”] (Lu Xun), 21 sinographs (Chinese characters/script), 2, 6, 16, 102, 218, 219n1; alphabetic pressure and, 144; in body performance art, 40, 41; calligraphic script politics and, 43–45; Chinese identity or Chineseness and, 50, 142; concrete poetry and, 77–81, 84–91; as cultural other, 25–26; death and, 19–38; digital media and, 11, 16, 48, 183–185; erroneous tattoos of, 94–95; in film subtitles, 108; film theory and, 66–71; formation of, 223n6; French theorists on, 24–38, 225nn26–27; glossolalia and, 120; hieroglyphs compared with, 65–66; as icons, 57; identity politics and, 48; “ideogram” and, 77; imagined in culture, 14; inclusion in alphabetic writing, 148–151, 163; Japanese Kanji, 66, 76, 81, 94, 109, 251n48; Korean Hanja, 220n11; liu shu (six principles of character formation), 124, 125, 142, 153, 176, 191; Martian Script and, 191, 192; materiality of, 15, 20, 60–61, 131, 157; meaning of signs and, 196; mediality and, 199; mimicry and, 209–210, 211, 212–214; mythical inventor of, 67, 110, 238nn18–19 (see also Cang Jie);

280

index

nationhood and nationalism in relation to, 5–6, 13, 55; orality and, 12; outside borders of China, 5, 220n11; phonetic features of, 95, 97–99; phonetic scripts proposed to replace, 4, 7; pictographic idea of, 32, 62; poetry and, 62; pronunciation of, 9; pseudographs, 169–171; rare, 178; script reform, 8, 220n5; sound and, 114; strokes and radicals in, 173–174, 178, 188, 248n21; survival in age of globalized English, 167, 247n4; transliteration into alphabetic letters, 122; visual movement and, 60–63; Western model and, 3–5, 9–10. See also Chinese writing; seal script Sinographs in Need of Verification [Daikao wenzi xilie] (Qiu Zhenzhong), 170 Sinologists, Western, 58 sinology, 215–216 Sinophones (Sinophone/Sinitic languages), 15, 51, 101, 103, 110, 123, 188; Chinese vernacular (baihua), 7, 220n13; full literacy in, 188–189; Hakka, 101, 118, 187; marginal position of writing and, 119; Martian script and, 193; phonetic scripts and, 8, 9; Shanghainese, 100, 107; Taiwanese (Minnan, Fokkienese), 100, 101, 107, 187; writing and standard Chinese, 108. See also Cantonese; Mandarin Smith, Hélène (Catherine-Élise Müller), 113 Sollers, Philippe, 148–149, 150, 151 “Some Modest Proposals for Literary Reform” [“Wenxue gailiang chuyi”] (Hu Shi), 220n13 Song Dong 宋東, 42 Song font (Songti), 171, 227n51 sound, 63, 119, 155, 231n16; as master medium, 112; radicals and expression of, 174; Saussure’s linguistics and, 59 Spanish language, 75

spatialism, 81 speech, 6, 21–22, 96, 102, 110; broken link with writing, 105; connection to writing theorized, 115; corporeal presence and, 22; elevated over writing, 23; as foundation of nationalism, 5; glossolalia and, 114, 170; materiality and, 24; presence and, 151; scream as resistance to, 111–112; supremacy over writing in Western metaphysics, 111; translation and, 115–16 Square Calligraphy (Xu Bing), 181 Starobinski, Jean, 248n23 Steiner, George, 115–116 Stèles (Segalen), 74 “Storyteller, The” [“Der Erzähler”] (Benjamin), 238n21 Straw Hat [Li] (journal), 82 Sudjic, Deyan, 212 Tablada, José Juan, 74–75 Taiwan, 15, 107, 126, 135; concrete poetry in, 82–91, 235nn62–63; Martian Script used in, 185–186; Musha Incident, 158; Nationalist (Guomindang KMT) government, 99–101; publishing page setup in, 245n56; Sinophone languages in, 101; Taiwan New Cinema, 99. See also Zhuyin system Taiwanese (Minnan, Fokkienese), 100, 101, 107, 187 Tang dynasty, 10 Taoism, 52 “Task of the Translator, The” [“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”] (Benjamin), 115, 116 “Tattoo Series” [“Wen shen xilie”] (Qiu Zhijie), 40 tattooing, 16, 136, 146, 227n42, 227n45; by avant-garde artists, 39–40, 41; culture and savagery in relation to, 134–135; erroneous tattoos, 94–95; wen and, 137, 139

Tears of Eros [Larmes d’Eros] (Bataille), 34–37, 226n32 telephone, 59 textuality, 30, 33, 42, 72, 148 “Third Spatialist Manifesto” [“3ème manifeste du spatialisme”] (Garnier and Niikuni), 81 Three Times [Zui hao de shiguang] (Hou Hsiao-hsien film, 2005), 107 Tian’anmen Incident (1989), 38, 169 Torok, Maria, 133 transgraphing, 108, 178, 193, 238n17 translation, 149–150, 177, 183, 199, 203, 218; digital code and, 200–201, 202; intercultural stress and, 206; translation theory, 115 Translation Zone (Apter), 192–193 Tristes tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 134, 229n67 Ts’ang Chieh (Cang Jie) 倉頡, 67, 110, 238nn18–19 Tsingtao Beer advertising poster, 92, 93–94, 97–99 Tsu, Jing, 118 Turkey, 95, 221n21 tuxiang shi (image poem, pattern poem), 83, 235n63 2–28 Incident (1947), 99, 100–101, 102 typography, 70, 167–169, 227n51, 244n50, 247n5 Ventriloquism [Fuyushu] (Hsia Yu), 194 “Ventriloquy Lesson” [“Fuyu ke”] (Chen Li), 120, 121 “vernacular language” (baihua), 7, 220n13 visual media, 59, 62, 63, 68 visual poetry, 75–76, 83 visuality, 90, 107, 112, 154 Visuality and Identity (Shu-mei Shih), 100, 102, 239–240n35 Volk (people), 4

index

281

Wang Bi 王弻, 196, 197, 252n57 Wang Runhua 王潤華, 85 Wang Wenxing 王文興, 244n50 “War Symphony” [“Zhanzheng jiaoxiangqu”] (Chen Li), 89–90 “Water Buffalo Image” [“Shui niu tu”] (Zhan Bing), 87–89 Westernization, 20 Wilkins, John, 28 Wills, David, 72 “Woman” [“Femme”] (Bory), 76 woodblock printing. See xylography Words Under Words [Les mots sous les mots] (Saussure), 248n23 “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” [“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”] (Benjamin), 59, 250n36 World Exposition (Shanghai, 2010), 213, 227n48 Worries and Freedom Well-Tempered [Kunao yu ziyou de pingjunlü] (Chen Li), 177 writing, 14, 112, 199; boundary with nonwriting, 134; difference and, 149; dissolution of, 40; empire and, 53; as foundation of nationalism, 5; gap between image and, 71–72; heterogeneity in, 148, 151; loss of, 16; as master medium, 72; materiality and, 23–24, 42; as medium of communication, 2; pedagogy of, 15; polymediality and, 207; poststructuralist notions of, 113; relation to speech in phonetic scripts, 97, 115; scream (cry) and, 112, 114; as second language, 96; state administration and, 51, 229n67; tattooing as other of, 135; visuality and, 15

282

index

Wu Nien-jen 吳念真, 104 Wu of Zhou, King, 139, 243n26 Wu Zetian, Empress, 249n31 Wuhe 舞鶴, 16, 153, 156, 157–164, 244n50, 244n52 Wuttke, Heinrich, 227n45 Xiao Xiao 蕭蕭, 235nn62–63 Xisto, Pedro, 78 Xu Bing 徐冰, 168–169, 171, 176, 177, 180, 181–183 Xu Shen (Hsü Shen) 許慎, 32, 123–124, 137, 191, 229n1 xylography (woodblock printing), 10–11, 180, 222n29 Yang Kailin 楊凱麟, 244n53, 245n57 Yang Lian 楊煉, 176–177, 249n31 Yang Zhichao 楊志超, 39 Yellow Emperor, 110 Ye Yueyu 葉月瑜, 238n14 Yen, Donnie, 50 Yi (Yang Lian), 176–177 Yijing [Zhouyi] (Book of Changes), 37, 176, 194, 196, 197–198, 252n57 yin-yang, 32 “Zen” (Xisto), 78 Zhan Bing 詹冰, 83, 86–89, 91 Zhang Dachun 張大春, 247n4 Zhang Guixing 張貴興, 16, 118, 138 Zhang Huan 張洹, 38, 40, 41 Zhang Yimou 張藝謀, 1, 14, 15, 49–50, 52, 54 Zheng Min 鄭敏, 11, 220n13 Zhouyi. See Yijing [Zhouyi] (Book of Changes) Zhuyin system, 12, 122, 185, 186, 187, 191 Zoopraxiscope, 59