folding, as if no outside and no autonomous object were possible.32 In fact, from buildings to urban form, one of the key characteristics of the Chinese tradition is this field of relations and internalizations against the logic of the object and the universal outside.
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Common Frameworks, Part 1
A New Modernity Developed from general metaphysics to specific political ethics, Chinese Confucian thinking has contributed to the formation of a cultural tradition with three key characteristics. First, an emphasis on inclusiveness or internalization indicates that all is related and embedded, with no outside and no split, no dualism or opposition possible. Second, a COLM is established in various aspects of this tradition, from the systems of signs to the arts of the state, from the ways of seeing and knowing to the arts of leading and governing. Finally, a moral and comprehensive statehood, with an all-inclusive approach, assumes a pervasive leadership, absorbing outside and opposition, in a hybrid oneness with society or social life-worlds. This cultural tradition, as a construct on its own, is not specifically political—it is multifaceted; it is political but also ethical, epistemological, formal, and cultural-symbolic, with a range of manifestations in various spheres including the arts and technologies of the everyday. The framework outlined above is beyond the issue of ethics and the question of whether Confucian ethics is constructive or not for capitalist modernization, which is Tu Wei-ming’s area of concern, in relation to Max Weber’s thesis on ethics. This framework concerns political ethics, but also a broad spectrum of issues concerning metaphysics, epistemology, systems of signs, and various practices and technologies. As such, the ideas are embedded in a rich tradition with many facets. The framework provides an alternative to the polemical theories on magnitude and multiplicity in the work of Koolhaas, Hardt, Negri, and Deleuze and Guattari; the framework is based on long and practiced tradition, with a consequence that it is not necessarily more articulate or polemical but may be more effective and transformative, with a different concept of logic, ethics, and aesthetics developed over millenniums. It may point to nothing less than a different form of modernity. At the core of this framework is the idea of a construct of largeness and multiplicity. The COLM argues for inclusiveness, internalization,
connectedness, and tolerance of difference and hybridity, for a universe of ten thousand things. It can be employed to forge a new modernity that is critical of the existing model developed from the European tradition; this model is one of externalization and the contract, which emphasizes autonomy, dualist split, antagonism, opposition, and a logic of the object, as discerned in Aristotle and Locke and in the architectural treatises of Alberti and other humanists. The Chinese approach, along with globalization and digital networking, may lead instead to a modernity of internalization, relatedness, and hybridity. For the idea of criticality, for instance, it may refashion the practice to be relational and socially constructive. For the division between state and society, it might suggest a connected approach assuming a hybrid. For the role of the state itself, it could offer a moral and comprehensive leadership beyond a contractual or functionalist approach. For international relations, it would argue for tolerance and understanding of diverse cultures and worldviews, and a broader participation with more nations involved. And for the design of human habitat, it might conceptualize an ecological oneness, or the whole environment as an endless inside, with cities and nature intertwined as a sea of courtyards and gardens, with ten thousand centers and viewpoints across the landscape.