Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture by Andrea Bachner

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

11

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

13

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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

15

Copyrighted Material

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

Copyrighted Material

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.

Script Politics

17