Symposium: Blanchot, Literature & Death: NTUT 2010

Introduction to Maurice Blanchot: “Literature and the Right to Death”

Although a prolific writer of 25 or more books of literary, political, and philosophical criticism as well as novels, little is known of Blanchot personally. Excessively private, there exists but two photographs of him. (Raymond Queneau caught sight of Blanchot at a student rally in May ’68 and said that he looked ridiculously out of place.) He was tall, was married, and was buried next to his wife in a grave marked by a tombstone that reads only ‘l’amour’. In his youth he was an extreme right wing monarchist and anti-semite; in his mature years, beginning with “Literature and the Right to Death” he became an extreme left wing thinker (but in a unique way). He had two close lifelong friends: Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Lèvinas. During WWII he helped save the wife of Lèvinas from the Nazis during the occupation of France. A member of the Resistance, he himself was (similarly to Dostoyevsky) put before an aborted SS firing squad. (This incident is recounted in his final work The Instant of My Death). The fullest account of his life and works exist in Leslie Hill’s Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary [Routledge, 1997]. Today I will explicate the first of Blanchot’s mature essays written as a response to the prestige that Alexandre Kojève acquired with his lectures on Hegel.





“Literature and the Right to Death”

(The essay both parallels, parodies, and is a simulacrum of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.)



I

The question of literature is Blanchot’s starting point. Literature reveals itself as literature when and only when it is put into question. That is to say: Is there anything legitimate about literature? Did Homer and Sophocles put literature into question? No. Blanchot is thinking of literature after German Romanticism, after Cartesianism; when everything is placed in question, and when, after Hegel, Art (after marvelously succeeding religion) was no longer Spiritual expression. Blanchot asks the critical question par excellence: What is literature? What is the essence of literature? When this question is asked of literature, literature then and only then becomes its own essence.

Does literature have a right to exist? (Indeed, does anything have a right to exist?) Is literature legitimate? Is it real? These questions immediately depreciate literature. Literature has no right to exist; it is not legitimate, and its existence is always in jeopardy. This is Blanchot’s immediate and quite sensible answer. Literature is a fraud; it is fiction, it is not and hence has no claim on existence whatsoever. Surrealism supremely revealed literature’s illegitimacy, it’s “nullity”. Blanchot is borrowing from Hegel here, from the dialectic of the thing-itself, die sache selbst. This dialectic is the dialectic of Reason and pure intellectualism (Kant) from the Phenomenology. For Hegel, Reason is a synthesis of consciousness and self-consciousness. Consciousness situates Truth in the object, the thing-in-itself: this is theoretical knowing which contemplates something without changing anything. Self-consciousness situates Truth in the subject, the thinker, in desire: in the for-itself. Reason then reconciles this contradiction because Reason knows that the object has already been informed by thought; and the object, which appears as exterior, is actually for-the-Subject. The real has always already been changed, altered, penetrated by thought. Reason informs the real and Reason likewise objectifies the Subject; Reason knows that the Subject passes into the object and objectivity into the Subject: “the real is rational and the rational is real.” But, this is merely abstract Truth—it merely knows; it does not make concrete this power to change the real. The power to change the real requires work, struggle, History. Thus, Reason must give way to Spirit after passing through three essential moments:



1. Observing Reason (Isaac Newton) is content to discover laws of the real without transforming it.

2. Active Reason (as in Kant’s 2nd Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason) asserts the formally universal character of freedom in action.

3. Intellectual Reason says the real is rational and vice versa and is at first content with saying it alone.



The intellectual (or, for Blanchot in this essay, the “writer”) does not feel the need to struggle; he is the Enlightenment Thinker who is at one with the world. He knows that the world is for-him and he contributes to the world with literary and intellectual work. He feels that his work is the perfect identity of Subject and Object; it is Worldly par excellence. At first he is happy with this situation, this perfect expression of his subjectivity. In his works “the work is the passing of the night of possibility into the daylight of presence,” Blanchot says. The writer is himself the manifestation of the negative, the night, death, because prior to the appearance of the work, the writer is sheer negativity (i.e. a writer is not (a writer) until there is a work.)

The writer is at first happy but then becomes uneasy. The happy situation was deceitful because it (the work) does not really, concretely manifest the intimacy of interior negativity, the negativity that was at work before the work was produced. The writer thought it would; but alas, what was produced was only a book (and not a negativity, not a power!) The writer could have imagined a thousand books but he produced only one book. However perfect the book (á la Flaubert) it is only a book, it is lifeless, powerless, a dead thing! The creative negativity has been lost; creation as such has vanished. Hence the writer’s disappointment: the book is not The Book, the Thing-itself, his Truth in the world. The writer is tempted to write the Book, but ends up with a book. (Only one philosopher, Hegel, could write the Book, and he could do so only at the end of History: The Book called Phenomenology of Spirit as the Truth of History.)

So, the writer (the intellectual) is disappointed. He adopts strategies to avoid disappointment. He rejects work and vows to remain silent (like Rimbaud). But, then he is no longer a writer; he is the negative (as power to negate all that is) who has been reduced to nothing. But negativity must manifest itself; it is an ontological imperative. The writer must write in order to be a writer. The second temptation is to think the Work beyond the book: the book is only a book, yes, but it is a step toward the Work, the Thing-itself. This may be impossible, but it is noble; it justifies writing. The writer writes not for this or that specific audience but for Mankind. But then this fails because then he is no longer a manifestation of his own Subjectivity, he is the manifestation of Humanity at work. And, concretely, he after all, is the writer. Mankind is merely an Idea.



Either the writer is silent; or the writer sacrifices his Subjectivity to the benefit of the Work. Either way, the writer loses himself. It comes down to this: the writer cannot withdraw and he cannot not withdraw. Writing is this contradiction.



For Hegel, the contradiction is manifested in unease, boredom, and imminent change via some kind of Aufhebung. At the level of consciousness the writer remains an isolated subjectivity saying ‘the real is rational and the rational is real’ (like Descartes’ isolation). Hegel criticizes this attitude. There must be work. It is not sufficient to be intellectual. It is the slave who is actively changing the world, not the writer. Reason must give way to Spirit (in the form of the slave). The true work is not art nor theory, but the ongoing work of the slave, the proletariat. Writing is always disappointing; its positivity is an arrested positivity and an arrested negativity.

Blanchot asks: is literature nothing? Yes and no. Is literature negligible (a ‘nullity’ as the surrealists presumed)? Yes and no. Contrary to Hegel, literature is a form of work—it changes the writer as well as the reader. The writer, like the slave, does indeed change reality by negating it: The writer transforms language and thus transforms culture thus transforming the slave as well. The world is not the same after Homer, after Shakespeare, after Chaucer, after Descartes, after Newton... The writer thus transforms himself; he becomes his own work by living in the culture that he himself has transformed.



This is merely Blanchot showing that within the Hegelian dialectic there is after all room for art, literature, etc. But this is not his goal in the essay; he seeks to escape the dialectical progress toward Spirit. He is just showing Hegel that, ‘see I can do this too! I understand you!’



II

At the same time literature is nothing. The writer creates nothing. (There are no white whales; Hamlet never existed.) The book is the manifestation of nothing. Literature is the becoming nothing of work; work’s unrealization. However, literature is nothing manifesting itself and thus it is superior to the work of the slave because it does not hide its negativity whereas the work of the slave appears to be a concrete positivity like a building, Taipei 101, e.g.. Literature is not a positivity; it is nothing made manifest. It is sovereign. The writer’s work is not a concrete negativity—it does not maintain what it destroys. The writer’s work is immediate and radical negativity. Imagination can “do” anything. The writer’s negation is global. When the writer writes he negates the whole world immediately. This is the experience of Absolute freedom in the form of the sovereign expenditure of work.

The writer wants to manifest his own Subjectivity in the light of day. But he will be disappointed because the book can never manifest the infinite negativity that creates it. He can withdraw, but then he ceases to be a writer and he doesn’t manifest anything (Rimbaud after his writing career became an unscrupulous, boring, selfish man: read his letters). Or he can sacrifice his creativity to a noble cause, but then he loses his own Subjectivity. This situation cannot be sublated. The writer remains on the level of abstract negativity; literature cannot manifest the writer’s Subjectivity and it cannot manifest concrete negativity. But literature can manifest another nothing: global negativity, which is NOT Hegelian negativity. This is now Blanchot’s departure from Hegelian dialectic.

The writer is absolutely free and absolutely impotent. He can do whatever he wants but cannot change anything concretely (including his own impossible, contradictory situation as a writer within the Hegelian dialectical scheme. This allows Hegel to dispense with writing, and neglect literature as ultimately inessential to Spirit; Spirit is not a writer. But Blanchot at this point in the essay is thinking now of Sade, not Hegel.) Blanchot will say that the nothing that literature is is a radical manifestation of negativity and is superior to Aufhebung. The ontological stakes are high: literature manifests radical finitude, global negation, and death. The writer performs the incomprehensible task: writing—accomplishing—nothing immediately transforms nothing into an otherwise than something or nothing. The writer can neutralize the dialectical contradictions he is faced with.



First. Creation ex-nihilo is for Blanchot also the creation of the nihil, of the nothing. The writer is the creator of (the) nothing. What is imagined is not a product of a writer working, the writer does not work (is not a slave) and does not consume (is not a master). What is imagined is what appears when the world is globally negated. This Blanchot at his most original. What is imagined is what remains when there is nothing. It is what is sub-structed at the cessation of the world. When there is death, what remains is the corpse. When there is death what appears is the cadaver of the departed which persistently resembles the departed (and is not the Spirit of the departed). The imaginary is what remains. An “other” imaginary that does not represent anything. The corpse is not a representation of the departed person. It is a resemblance, an unmade presence, an image of the absence—or of the nothing—of the departed. This presence is not here and now but no longer belongs anywhere or to any time. (The writer accomplishes nothing, yes, but only the better to make nothing appear. Literature, if you like, is what happens when disappearance appears.)

Second. Literature is superior to action. It is not concerned with reality but with what remains of reality. Literature is not a work but an unworking (idleness made real, des-œuvre-ment). Literature is the manifestation of the absence of work. But writers are not indifferent to politics; they want to realize their empty project in the real political world of struggle. This is Blanchot’s strange new politics. Revolution and Terror interest the writer. In fact, literature is the writing of Terror. In Revolution, the slave liberates himself by confronting death for no reason. This is the reign of Terror which spreads fear of death throughout every fiber of the social just as much as the slave once felt fear in every fiber of his being when he confronted the Master and capitulated to him. These fearless slaves are the true Masters : They desire Absolute—and not just their own recognized—Freedom or Death. Blanchot is thinking of Robespierre and St. Just. The Terrorist negates every social reality in order to make appear what remains of the social. The Terrorist is the concrete social Truth of the writer. It is the god-like power to do away with all reality and begin anew with what remains.

Writers are literary Terrorists. This is one of the temptations for the writer: to wish to become for the Terrorist their Truth. This is what Sade attempted because terrorists like Robespierre and St. Just are doomed to fail; they erase themselves in erasing the whole of the social; they simply disappear pure and simple. They necessarily fail. The writer like Sade however makes appear the remainder of Revolutionary, Terrorists negation in the work of literature. Sade survives the Revolution and the Terror in prison, impotent to do anything, change anything, or destroy anything. Sade survives in order to write in order merely to survive in order to write…

Sade is the writer par excellence. He accomplishes his crimes in the imagination, out of an absence of work. He makes an unworked work. This is the “space of literature” which will preoccupy Blanchot for the remainder of his life. Literature is an image. Only in literature does the reign of terror truly take place, not in the world. Only in literature does the subject have the right to death.

Third. Literature is bound to language. Language is the life of death, not servile labor as in Hegel. In language I abolish the real and retain only a sign. The sign is purely arbitrary, purely gratuitous (and not a postivity (Blanchot is thinking here of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic “revolution”)). I say ‘cat’ and I kill the cat in its specific reality while I retain a gratuitous sign. Also, very importantly for Blanchot, I likewise abolish myself and retain only an empty, gratuitous sign: ‘I’. In this way, in literature, language becomes the gratuitous life of death, not the Spiritual life of death. In literature, language doesn’t say anything, doesn’t represent anything. To say ‘I’ is always to say ‘I am dead’ (just as the cat is assassinated in its particular, specific presence). But this is impossible for anyone to say. No one can say this. Therefore, the writer becomes precisely No One, becomes anonymous. The writer ‘does’ what no one can do, says what no one can say. This is a manifestation of neither potentiality nor actuality. It is outside the philosophical, it is the Outside of metaphysics.



This impossibility does not appear in ordinary life. Ordinary minds assume that the cat survives its being named, that I survive my saying ‘I [am dead]’. Literary language will try to speak the cat’s death, the writer’s death itself. Literature tries to speak nihilation or that which remains when all has been abolished—or, that movement prior to created creation, the nothing that precedes words and makes them necessary. Prior to creation is that resemblance that resembles nothing. In literature language begins to resemble itself and becomes an imaginary language.

Literature is the silent murder. But still, literature does produce words in books. There is still a concrete manifestation. How can words say silence/ say “nothing” without fatally transforming the nothing into a sign of nothing and not the pure presentation of the nothing? For Blanchot it is impossible; but the writer is this impossibility; if not, he is no writer; if he does not betray his project, then he is no writer. Death cannot appear in words because words are the “null”, void, arbitrary, gratuitous life of that death.

That which precedes words is radical negativity and death; and words cannot manifest this, but in attempting (and failing) to do so, words become literary, imaginary, or neuter (another key term in Blanchot). So, in fact, any word will do. Any word is always gratuitous. The writer cannot get beyond this—writing will always neutralize the writer’s ambition (think of Kafka’s lifelong sense that everything he ever wrote was a failure, was flawed, and should be burned after his death).

Symposium: The Problem of Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear: NTUT 2009

Superfluity, Malignancy, and Revulsion:

The Problem of Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear

A clear conscience is the source of evil – Kafka

The problem of Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear has been reacted to and commented on beginning with the first serious producers and editors of the play, Tate and Johnson, the Romantics on both sides of the channel, Sigmund Freud, down to important contemporary philosophically-oriented critics like Sigurd Burckhardt and Stanley Cavell. The problem of Cordelia is in two parts. First: Why does she not humor her father in Act I, spare him humiliation, and gain for herself the most generous third of the kingdom and also his grateful companionship in his old age? Second: Is her death in any way justifiable?

Regarding the first part of the problem, it has been argued (in strikingly similar terms) by Burckhardt and Cavell that Cordelia could not have done otherwise than to confront Lear’s foolishness. I am going to disagree with that point of view and suggest that Cordelia’s intransigence is inherently mysterious, satisfies no dramatic requirement, and thus pushes the action outside dramatic representation toward the sheer superfluity and malignancy of human suffering. (In great part this is A. C. Bradley’s interpretation as well.) Regarding the second part of the problem I want to draw the modern reader back to the play’s original reception. I ask the reader to recall that from Tate’s 1681 stage version (which had Johnson’s approval) until Kean’s 1838 London production, the ending of the play was changed to allow Cordelia to escape death, marry Edgar, and live as it were ‘happily ever after’. Cordelia’s death by hanging was erased because it was considered too terrible to imagine. Her death inspired an experience of which, like the superfluity and malignancy of suffering, the Western reader is in peril of forgetting: revulsion.

It has been noted, most famously by A. C. Bradley, that Cordelia’s refusal of Lear’s royal parlor game in Act I, scene i is merely the author’s ‘let’s pretend’, or ‘once upon a time’ [1]. But if in his version he merely wanted get the story going then why devote more than 250 lines to something as simple as ‘let’s pretend’? No, the scene is tense and dramatic; it contains information vital to our understanding that there is some confusion in the kingdom as to who is or is not “in favor’ [I, i, 3-6] and that the future of the kingdom is at stake. Thus Shakespeare must have wanted to show something and not merely establish a narratological given.

Can we understand Cordelia’s refusal of her father to be a flawed aspect of her character? She has been described—from Lear himself to Coleridge to Granville-Barker to psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland—as, variously, ‘plain’, ‘untender’, ‘proud’, ‘obstinate’, and ‘stiff-necked’. The problem with investigating Cordelia’s actions as a consequence of her psychology is that she has relatively few lines in the play (only 107 by my count), and the lines she does speak declare her various resolutions (not to obey her father and to scold her sisters [I, i.], to “go about [her father’s] business” in battle [IV, iv], and to console the old man after defeat [V, I]) rather than her inner motivations. Even Bradley, the great critic of character, is resigned to define her in other than psychological terms: a “creation” [2].

I think that Shakespeare makes of Cordelia neither a full-blown character nor a pure symbol (a Christ-symbol, for example, to which she has quite often been confined) [3], but instead something (almost annoyingly) unsatisfying in these contexts.

Seeking to find an explanation for Cordelia’s refusal elsewhere than psychology or symbolism, the great Shakespearean critics Burkhardt and Cavell offer the following two analyses. Burckhardt says:

“It is idle to speculate about Cordelia’s pride, her share of responsibility for the consequences of her unbending ‘plainness’. As her asides make clear, she has no choice; the covenant under which she must speak has it’s own logic. Where there can be no lie, there can be no truth; and since the essential function of speech is to transmit truth, for Cordelia no speech is possible. Her ‘nothing’ is simply a statement of this fact, and her following attempt to return discourse to the sphere where it can be true (or false) is condemned from the start to futility” [4].



and Cavell echoes:

“The truth is, [Cordelia] could not flatter; not because she was too proud or too principled, though these might have been reasons, for a different character; but because nothing she could have done would have been flattery—at best it would have been dissembled flattery. There is no convention for what Cordelia was asked to do. It is not that Goneril and Regan have taken the words out of her mouth, but that here she cannot say them because for her they are true […]. She is not disgusted by her sisters’ flattery (it’s nothing new); but heartbroken at hearing the words she wishes she were in a position to say” [5].



I argue that the reasoning of both critics is philosophically sound but it is dramatically and ethically irrelevant. Given the stakes, given that Cordelia is insightful, that she knows her sisters are vile, that her father is given to pompousness and wrath (she grew up in this family, after all), that both the familial and political situation is at this moment dire—given all this and more—why not flatter the old man? Why not resort to non-essential speech? I grant that Lear has trapped Cordelia in a philosophical cleft stick, something like the liar’s paradox, but the circumstances are not philosophical. The circumstances are ethical and political. Faced with a father who has staged something ridiculous but heavily consequential, there is no ethical or political reason not to give in to ‘fake flattery’, to speech which is neither true nor false but simply and magnanimously spoken with the understanding that speech can have a purpose other than truth or falsity. It happens all the time. (When I see an acquaintance on the street and say to him or her ‘good morning’, just how deeply committed am I to the desire that he or she really have a good morning? This is ordinary, everyday speech—a language game—and it is odd that Stanley Cavell, who is otherwise a brilliant student of Wittgenstein, does not even consider this.) Cordelia’s way out of the philosophical cleft stick was to refuse philosophical answers to questions that are not philosophical.

There is a famous story of Mademoiselle de Sommery told by Stendhal: a man returns home and surprises his lover en flagrante. The man demands an explanation. Mademoiselle, calmly dressing herself, denies that she has been unfaithful. The man exclaims: But I see everything with my own eyes! His lover replies: Ah! Now I understand! You don’t love me anymore! You would rather believe your own eyes than believe me! [6] I grant that there is something of this going on in the play; but Lear is over eighty years old and will soon die, Cordelia could care for him, could have Kent as an advisor, could have a husband, (and, incidentally, could quite possibly be able to intercede in the difficulties Gloucester would shortly have as a result of Edmund’s villainy and his own tragic folly). Somehow, this solution never even occurs to her as an option. Let me add, at no point in the play does it ever occur to her that she might have done this and thus to have prevented a lot of misery. Why? Is she meant to be (philosophically uncompromising) goodness incarnate? There is some reason to think so.

This is sacrilege, but let’s imagine for a moment that Cordelia is not goodness incarnate but evil incarnate. Let’s assume that she does not want even to be comparable to her sisters and cares less about her father than both her sisters combined. Let’s assume she wants the entire kingdom for herself (not just a portion “more opulent” [I, i, 86]). How might she accomplish this? If she accepts the terms laid down by her father, she will be hemmed in by her two sisters’ portions of the kingdom and have to fight a war on two fronts. But, if she provokes her father to wrath, has herself banished and pitied, allies with France, waits for her sisters to (quite predictably) begin a rivalry that will weaken each; and then, in the name of her father, invades the kingdom, she would have a real chance of success. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what happens. Cordelia very nearly takes over all of Britain. She does not succeed only because of the moral and military resolve of Albany, which I don’t think anybody could have predicted.

Now, there is no textual evidence whatsoever to support the thesis that Cordelia is a villain and there is ample textual evidence that she is goodness incarnate. Everything she says and does is in some way good, just and right. My point is this: it makes no difference. Not because it is “idle to speculate,” but because Shakespeare has managed to depict a universe where good and evil resemble each other in terms of practical consequences. Good and evil do not cease to exist but the practical distinction between them becomes superfluous. This allows Shakespeare to expose his audience to what I will call malignance, and it is this malignance, I am arguing, that inspired the revulsion I have noted. I don’t deny that in a certain way the audience may feel that Cordelia is right to refuse her father’s marginally contractual generosity [7]; I only say that it would have been better not to refuse. (And not just better in hindsight (unless we suppose that Cordelia is simply blind to the dangers inherent in Lear’s division of the kingdom between herself and her two vile sisters).) But, ‘better’ and worse’ are superfluous to Western philosophical thinking which concerns itself with the good, the just in absolutist term. (Because philosophers, quite reasonably, seek clarity [8].) From Cordelia’s adherence to that absolutist position the tragedies of Lear and Gloucester (and Cordelia herself) ensue.

Following the great and strange opening scene Lear finds himself, in short order, stripped of his power, his knights, all three of his daughters, all his possessions, and all that was left of his right mind. He finds himself to be superfluous and must then undergo the suffering of which the play is an unflinching exposition. In the play the audience witnesses suffering to such an extent that, although moved, we have little sympathy left for Gloucester nor enthusiasm for Edgar’s heroics [9].

Ultimately, I don’t think the play is tragic. I don’t think it is about good and evil, truth and lies, appearance and reality, or justice and injustice. By the time Cordelia—goodness incarnate—is murdered, and by the time the audience has come to accept that Lear and Gloucester have been more than justly repaid for their viciousness, foolishness, and rashness, terrible things have become ordinary, even routine, banal, and worse, forgettable. Here I cite Bradley (regarding Cordelia’s death) at length since his description encapsulates the point I’m trying to get to:

The matter stands thus. Edmund, after the defeat of the opposing army, sends Lear and Cordelia off to prison. Then, in accordance with a plan agreed on between himself and Goneril, he dispatches a captain with secret orders to put them both to death instantly (V, iii 26-37, 244, 252). He then has to fight with the disguised Edgar. He is mortally wounded, and, as he lies dying, he says to Edgar (at line 162, more than a hundred lines after he gave that commission to the captain):

What thou have charged me with, that I have done;
And more, much more; the time will bring it out;

‘Tis past, and so am I.

In ‘more, much more’ he seems to be thinking of the order for the deaths of Lear and Cordelia (what else remains undisclosed?); yet he says nothing about it. A few lines later he recognizes the justice of his fate, yet still says nothing. Then he hears the story of his father’s death, says it has moved him and ‘shall perchance do good’ (what good except saving his victims?); yet he still says nothing. Even when he hears that Goneril is dead and Regan poisoned, he still says nothing. It is only when he is directly questioned about Lear and Cordelia that he tries to save his victims who were to be killed ‘instantly’ (242). How can we explain this delay? […] The real cause lies outside the dramatic nexus. It is Shakespeare’s wish to deliver a sudden and crushing blow to the hopes he has excited [10].



Let me emphasize with Bradley that the reason for Cordelia’s death lies outside the drama. Shakespeare here crushes hope and this, I would claim, is the origin of the revulsion felt by Tate and Johnson [11]. Cordelia’s death and the sufferings of Lear and Gloucester have, by Act V, become gratuitous. Cordelia’s goodness is gratuitous. For over a century, her death could not be endured. I am arguing that the dramatic nexus itself becomes superfluous in King Lear. What could not be endured at all for a century today can be endured—but only in bad conscience. For (and this is my thesis), King Lear is a play not about tragic suffering but gratuitous suffering; it is an exposition of inexpiable woe. Where, classically, suffering should be judged apocalyptically or theodicially (it has been often noted how many of the characters in the play try to sum up and hopefully end the downward spiral of events) [12]; in Lear suffering acquires its own autonomy. Suffering ceases to operate within a larger dimension of justice and hope and instead escapes into a vestigial dimension of ceaseless malignancy. It is interminable. It is comparative and not superlative. At the end of the play, Albany asks Kent and Edgar only to “sustain” the “gored state” [V, iii, 321]. If I could possibly conceive of Cordelia as proud (and it is possible), then I could possibly conceive of her death as, in an Aristotelian way, just and tragically satisfying (like the suicide of Iocasta) except for the way in which Shakespeare puts her to death (as Bradley so clearly describes). Cordelia’s death is decidedly and interminably unsatisfying (from either a dramatic of theo-judicial point of view), as is her refusal to humor her father’s foolishness for his sake and for the sake of her love for him. That the play is so unsatisfying is what, I am trying to indicate, creates a weird complicity (between audience and what they witness) which Tate, Johnson, and their generation found intolerable but which we today can experience with a clear conscience. I do not say that we do not experience a certain tragic dimension; it is not a question of being or not being moved. I only say that we are able to experience King Lear with the same profound equanimity as a performance of Oedipus the King and this equanimity is a disturbing sign.

At stake then is revulsion and guilt as the extra literary effects certain literary works make possible. At stake is both the philosopher’s “I think”, and the aesthete’s “I read” (or, “I watch”, or “I contemplate”). To watch (or to try to think) the representation of suffering outside any moral or theodicial context—to view it in its sheer malignancy, supported only by the phantom, vestigial generosity of life itself (or, nature)—is to feel guilt, to suffer a malaise of conscience [13]. To be sure, the 20th was the century that saw Hitler and Stalin, Hiroshima, the Gulag, Auschwitz and Cambodia; and so the 20th was a century that could “take” Lear in the original and that elevated the play above Hamlet as Shakespeare’s “greatest work” [14]. It was the century that saw (and still witnesses in the 21st) in suffering suffering’s essential disproportion, or comparitivity, which exasperates reason and theology. But perhaps, perhaps gratuitous suffering restores the ego to resources other than reason, reciprocity, familial generosity, social contract, or aesthetic satisfaction. The witnessing of gratuitous suffering restores the ego to its own guilty superfluity which alone makes possible the interminable responsibility in the sense so admirably expressed in the writings of Emmanuel Lévinas, Primo Levi, Zhang Xian-liang, Robert Antelme, others (who knows how many?) who testify to the unforgettable of which there is no knowing and for which there is no justification.

Succinctly, in Lear Shakespeare displays a category—revulsion—which cannot be reduced to either ethics or aesthetics [15].

NOTES:

1 Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: Palgrave. 1992 (213-15). Moreover, the story of King Lear and his three daughters was as well known to 17th c. Britons as the story of Goldilocks and the three bears is known to American school schoolchildren today. [Here, I wish to thank my student Tzu, Jie-li who suggested I research the sources of the story.] The tale of an aged king who foolishly surrenders his power to flatterer-daughters is at least four centuries older than Shakespeare. The figure of Cordelia—the daughter whose love is unspeakably sincere—is present in the folklore of any number of cultures [Alfred Harbage, “Introduction to King Lear: William Shakespeare The Complete Works. New York: Viking Press. 1977 (1062-63)] Sigmund Freud compares her to Cinderella and makes both of them figures of the death wish: lovely, soothing, silent, inevitable, and true [“The Three Caskets” in Writings On Art and Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1977 (109-21)]. In 1136 Geoffrey of Monmouth included the story in his Historia Regnum Britanniae, but by the time of David Hume’s History of Great Britain (1762) it had been confined to literature. Spenser includes the tale in his Faerie Queen [II, X, 27-32]. Shakespeare himself may have acted in a version of the story entitled The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which had been staged as early as 1594. His own version of the story was first staged at the Globe Theater in 1605.)


2 Bradley, op. Cit. (275-89). For example, he states:” The character of Cordelia is not a masterpiece of invention or subtlety like that of Cleopatra; yet in its own way it is a creation as wonderful” (275).

3 See, for example, J.C. Maxwell’s elegant Christian reading of Lear in his “The Technique of Invocation in ‘King Lear’”, MLR 45 [1950].


4 “The Quality of Nothing,” in Shakespearean Meanings. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1968 (240).

5 “The Avoidance of Love”, in Disowning Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987 (65).

6 Love. Trans. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale. New York: Penguin, 1980 (117).

7 However distasteful his demands, he is quite marginally contractual: Lear offers Cordelia a chance to recant saying, “Mend your speech a little” I, i, 94 [italics mine]. Lear is not asking for great oratory promising eternal adoration.


8 Cavell, citing Kiergegaard, will go so far as to say that even her death is justifiable in absolutist terms; op cit. 80 and 112. If I may say so, only a true philosopher could fathom such a reading.

9 Find citation


10 “King Lear”, Shakespearean Tragedy, Palgrave 1992, p. 216. [emphasis in original]

11 Commenting, in his own editions of the Works of William Shakespeare (1765 and 1773), Johnson writes: “In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general sufferage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.” I ask the reader to keep in mind that Johnson and Tate were not squeamish about the tragic or about violence per se. Each was a reader of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Seneca, not to mention Shakespeare’s own bloody early plays Titus and Coriolanus. No, there was something specifically terrible in about Cordelia’s death in Lear that neither could come to grips with.


12 Find citation; essay on use of the word “worst” in Lear—somewhere???

13 I could mention here Sade and Lautreamont (who exposed an interminably ‘thrilling’ aspect to evil), Emily Dickinson’s painful, lifelong, reclusive privacy (which the entire world has now invaded), or Franz Kafka’s endless letters to Felice (which was his version of marriage). [ –rethink this note much more rigorously or drop it altogether]


14 See Holland, The Shakespearean Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press:1964 (233); but there are others (Jan Kott, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, e.g.)

15 Were I to continue I would explore the role of the fool in Lear as a proto-modern exemplar of ‘witnessing’.

Symposium: Walter Benjamin On Language: NTUT 2008

Notes on Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on the Languages of Man” [“Über Sprache Überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menchen”]

[I will quote from Benjamin’s essay in italic and then try to explicate.]



Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language[…] It is possible to talk about a language of music and of sculpture, about a language of justice that has nothing directly to do with those in which German or English legal documents are couched, about a language of technology that is not the specialized language of technicians. […] There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of all to communicate their mental meanings [Es gibt kein Geschehen oder Ding werder in der belebten noch in der unbelebten noch Natur, das nicht in gewisser Weise an der Sprache teilhätte, denn es ist jedem wesentlich, seinem geistegen Inhalt mitzuteilen.] […]we cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything.



I make two initial observations: 1) Benjamin is being Kantian. He is establishing an inescapable horizon. For Kant, time and space are transcendental; we cannot think or experience anything at all outside time and space. Benjamin is establishing language as another transcendental coordinating ground. 2) That which is communicated is geistege Inhalt :‘mental meaning’ ‘or ‘spiritual content’.



All that is asserted here is that all expression, insofar as it is a communication of mental meaning [geistege Inhalt], is to be classed as language. […]the German language, for example, is by no means the expression of everything that we could—theoretically—express through it, but is the direct expression of that which communicates itself in it. This “itself” is a mental entity



OK. We have ‘language’, ‘expression’, and ‘mental entity’. Language expresses the mental entity; the mental entity is expressed in not through language. This is important. The ‘mental entity’ is not information and not a thing. Language does not communicate the thing itself but only that which of the thing is communicable. For example, when I say ‘stinky tofu’ the stink, the odor, is not present. The word ‘stink’ does not stink. Language only communicates what is linguistic, only what is communicable. What is true of ‘stinky tofu’ is true of ‘mental entity’.



For in language the situation is this: the linguistic being of all things is their language. The understanding of linguistic theory depends on giving this proposition a clarity that annihilates even the appearance of tautology […] for it means: that which in a mental entity is communicable is its language. On this “is” (equivalent to “is immediately”) everything depends. […] Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic.



So, when language communicates the communicable (of a thing or a mental entity), it communicates linguistic being. Language is a medium and when it communicates linguistic being it communicates mediated being. The trick is: mediation is thus immediately communicated. The magic is this: the medium communicates the immediacy of mediation; or, mediation is what is immediately communicated in any communication. It simply means that media—any media—communicates itself as media prior to any other content. Or, when there is content there is always already medium. It is no different from Kant; whenever I experience something the thing is already in some space and at some time. Like magic space and time are transcendentally intuited. Space already “is” there; time already “is” there. The “is” here is not the “is” of predicative judgment but the “is” of im-mediacy. The “is” of immediacy is not falsifiable. I may say “that person is my student” and be wrong because my senses may have deceived me. She may have only looked like my student. But mediation itself cannot be mediated, cannot be put at a distance, cannot be delayed. Mediation is proximity: a transcendental horizon. It cannot be falsified.



For example, sometimes I go to the movies to see a movie everybody’s talking about, sometimes to see my favorite star, sometimes to see a good story. But sometimes I go to the movies just to see a movie—just for that specific experience. Sometimes I feel like reading a novel. What I really want is not a specific plot, characters, etc. but just—I don’t know what to call it—‘novelness’. I want to read what has never been written. It is the medium itself I want to experience. I want to read what all novels have in common; I want to see what all movies have in common. I want to experience the ‘likeness’ of each particular representation of the medium itself. In a real sense I want to experience that of which any particular novel or movie is a translation: pure novel-ness or pure cinema.



For another example, my neighbor here in Shi-zhi told me that after she had been in America for a year or so and saw on TV a story from Taiwan, she wept because she could hear Mandarin being spoken in the background. It had nothing to do with what was being said. The informational content or the particular speakers didn’t matter; what mattered to her was the medium of Mandarin itself, her native language, her home, her native being-in-Mandarin, her linguistic being.



If I’m not mistaken, in 1916 Benjamin is anticipating Marshall MacLuhan’s “the medium is the message” and all of contemporary media theory. What is expressed in language (not through it) is the communicability of the ‘mental (spiritual) entity’.



Now, putting aside local manifestations of language (the language of sculpture, music, film, etc.) is it possible to experience or to think the pure mediality of any language at all, or language as such: the linguistic being or the being-linguistic of language itself? That’s the direction Benjamin is pointing towards.



With regard to this Benjamin’s essay then moves to a way in which this is possible: Human being experiences its linguistic being in the giving of names to things. Giving names to things that are moreover already “in” language because we cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything (this is the Kantian horizon I have already mentioned). Human language is made of words (unlike the language of sculpture, etc.). The mental being of man is communicated in naming things with words. The mental being of sculpture does not name things with words.



Naming, in the realm of language, has as its sole purpose and its incomparably high meaning that it is the innermost nature of language itself. Naming is that by which nothing beyond is communicated, and in which language itself communicates itself absolutely. […] Name as the heritage of human language therefore vouches for the fact that language as such is the mental being of man, alone among all mental entities, communicable without residue.



The language of things does leave a residue: the word ‘stinky’ does not stink, but the name ‘John’ leaves no residue. All of nature communicates itself. Stinky tofu stinks for man, the lamp communicates lamp-ness to man. In man (who names things) communicability—language as such—exhausts itself absolutely, applies itself absolutely, is utterly practical. “This is called ‘stinky tofu’” is an utterly practical statement. The whole mental (geistege) structure of human being is linguistic, and only when man names does the whole structure of language become absolute (i.e. without residue); hence, after Adam names things, all the meaning of language is exhausted, and there is thus no meaning of language (and no meaning of meaning). Linguistic being exhausts itself in being-called.



God gave each creature He had created a sign and then they stepped before man to be named. In naming, man conveys the image of a sign of God. In falleness, man wishes to capture for himself the creative Word and then wishes that the name convey something (--something other than itself). By doing so, the word is separated from what it names, separated from itself, and thence man is destined to live among the many languages. Language becomes a mere means to some end. A tool to mean something. The magical immediacy of mediality is shattered and the mental entity—language as such—is scattered among the languages of man.

Only in translation does man return to the paradise of naming. In translation the original naming is approached again. In translation, language becomes once again (in principle) an undivided whole. It becomes a mute sign. It is like the muteness of things and the muteness of God’s Word (God’s creation) which calls for the language of man to name things in order that their very presence may then arrive. The language of naming is the translation of mute signs into the language of man. In translation the relation between word and sign is once again original and fundamental. Thus language is both communication of the communicable and symbolic of the incommunicable (the Word of God). In Fallenness it is only in proper names (‘John’) that this survives. (Think of Marcel’s ecstasy when, in Remembrance of Things Past, he first heard Albertine “hold [his] name naked in her mouth”).





How is it that mute things (the rock, the stream, the mountain) speak to man? Easily, because man cannot imagine anything outside the transcendental horizon of language. Muteness is always already a kind of speech. Muteness is in fact already a manifestation of that always ‘other’ language that is language as such which is symbolic of, or is a sign of, God’s Word. It is magical speech. This is not so hard to understand. The name ‘John’ is untranslatable because it is a name—there is no residue outside it to translate. ‘John’ is not a concept.



How does language occur, how does it happen? It happens as translation. ‘Translation’ is the name of language.



God creates things. Man names them. In naming things, man communicates his spiritual content. His spiritual content is symbolic of God’s mute Word. Things give themselves to be understood: they mutely communicate themselves to man. Mute things were (mutely) communicated (arche-written perhaps, but I’m not sure of the connection to Derrida), and they came to be called ‘words’ (by man). This was symbolic of divinity.



(Do you remember the AIDS quilt, or the NAMES PROJECT? It was felt or hoped that by merely naming those who had died from AIDS a ‘magic’ might have occurred. But, sadly, the names were transformed into concepts, because it was a project, a means to an end (to end AIDS). The quilt of names became a concept and the project failed. But the inspiration for it was divine, magical.)

Symposium: The Life of Rules In Language Instruction: NTUT 2007

The Life of Rules in Language Instruction

Abstract

Drawing on a Wittgensteinian framework, this admittedly broad article discusses the nature of grammar and the advantages of teaching grammatically inspired writing as a practice of rule following. The article is critical of the ‘picture’ of language as a tool or a device with which the speaker expresses meaning, and instead argues that rules, practices, and meanings are co-extensive. What is more, the essay argues that there is nothing interior, intrinsic, or occult about language learning. The learning of language is a social practice that permits paths into various language regimes if certain rules are chosen to be followed. Moreover, what holds for written language is exponentially intensified in conversation where there are no formal rules but instead rigorous orders of language involving grammar rules and also social practices, cultural taboos, etc. Finally, the article discusses the domain of literature as an arena where language itself, and not the speaker or writer, is displayed and available for analysis. In literature, the consequences of language practices are magnified. Hence, it is argued, literature is invaluable and essential to language acquisition.



Key words: Grammar, Conversational English, Literary Language

Language-games

I am in broad agreement with Shih-Chuan Chang’s argument in her paper “Integrating Cultural Education into FL Class for Intercultural Communication” about the need for some conflation of cultural and language instruction, but I disagree with the ‘picture’ of language she implies when she says in her abstract, “[w]e do not communicate with language; we communicate with the people who use that language.” (Chang, 203) The ‘picture’ that language is something we use in order to communicate implies that language is a tool we can pick up and put down again. But I think, on the contrary, we never speak to each other directly; not even two native speakers can speak to each other directly. We go into language and hope to meet each other there. We communicate with language prior to anything else. How could it be otherwise?

My general orientation with regard to language instruction is drawn from Ludwig Wittgenstein who pictures language as language-games, as autonomous regimes, as “an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses,” or, more famously, as “a form of life” (Philosophical Investigations § 18).

In the early sections of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a language game consisting only of commands and reports created by builders at work in construction. In this game someone calls out: “Slab!” as part of a work routine. Hearing the call “Slab!” and watching the consequences, a language teacher might wonder: Does the speaker mean, “bring me the slab”, “hand me the slab”, “I need a slab”, “put the slab here”, etc.? Or does he mean, “here is a slab”, “this is a slab” “there is one slab”, etc.? Is “slab” a word or a sentence?

Wittgenstein’s point is that the speaking of language is already part of a regime, a way of life, a language game within which the call: “Slab!” is a function. Someone who wants to enter that game (someone who wants to keep his job) will have to obey its rules. It may be painful, but it is necessary. A foreigner may at first have to go through various mental calculations: Wenn er sagt: “Slab!” Ich muss ihm das ding bringen, e.g. Worse, there may be no one-to-one call-to-activity correlation. At another time within the same language-game, the call: “Slab!” (uttered with the very same intonation) may require someone to make a check mark on a piece of paper. A slight variation of intonation may produce something that can be punctuated: “?!” which may mean, “Is there a slab left or isn’t there?!” or may mean, “Why did you bring me this slab? I only want Jones to mark it on your inventory! When I want you to bring me a slab, I’ll say so!”

The deeper point is therefore this: there are innumerable kinds of classifications of utterances corresponding to what we call “words”, “sentences”, “commands”, “questions”, etc. Wittgenstein says: “And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once and for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from changes in mathematics.)” (PI §23).

All I might say by way of clarification to the foreigner is something like: “Look. When he calls: ‘Slab!’ he means ‘You bring me the slab and put it here!’ and when he calls ‘Slab!’ it means ‘that guy over there will record it in his ledger’, but when he calls ‘Slab?!’ it means ‘you’ve made a mistake. Put the slab back.’ Got it?” (In reality, this is not so much either a clarification or explanation as consolation.)

The language-games Wittgenstein describes are kinds of autonomous (or semi-autonomous) living microcosms that do not exactly evolve—if by this we can hope to anticipate their development—as mutate. But they do not mutate according to rules; the rules also mutate. If a foreigner observed someone giving the order: “Bring me a slab!” as part of a slightly different language game (at a different construction site nearby, say), he or she might think that the entire sentence is a single word and may therefore pronounce the sentence oddly. The call: “Bring me a slab”, if misconceived as a single word and badly mispronounced or pronounced with the wrong intonation, may result in incomprehension (PI §20). But if the foreigner is the new foreperson of the project, the intonation and mispronunciation may well be absorbed into a new regime.

Following Rules

At §143 of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein discusses the language-game of arithmetic instruction. The goal of the game is to get the pupil to be able to apply the rules of arithmetic correctly and thus to understand how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. A pupil is asked to continue the series ‘0,1,2,3,4,5, …’ in the same way. It seems straightforward enough to want to see that the pupil can grasp and apply the rule n+1. If the pupil does so correctly all the way up to 1000 we may feel justified is saying that the pupil has grasped the rule. At §185, however, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine that the pupil is now asked to continue the series from 1000 according to the rule ‘add 2’. Here, the pupil responds, ‘1004, 1006, 1016, …’. We say now that the pupil has not understood the rule n+2. But if that is possible then how can we ever be sure that the pupil grasped the rule n+1 and did not apply a different rule that achieved the same result? That vexing problem is this: how do we, or how can we, mean a rule? Wittgenstein is asking: What does it mean to grasp a rule? How do I know that I myself have grasped a rule? Of what does ‘grasping a rule’ consist? Is it a feeling?

In the Lectures On the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein asks us to consider the case of the student who continues the series ‘2,2,2,2, …’ with ‘3,3,3,3,4,4,4,4, …’ (LFM, VI §17). Wittgenstein writes:



‘I have a particular concept of the rule. If in this sense one follows it, then from that number one can only arrive at this one.’ That is a spontaneous decision.

But why do I say ‘I must’, if it my decision? Well, may it not be that I decide?

Doesn’t its being a spontaneous decision merely mean: that’s how I act; ask for no reason!

You say you must, but you cannot say what compels you (LFM VI §24).



The point here is that Wittgenstein is getting away from a certain picture of rule following that is causal, necessary. According to that picture, if I have grasped a rule, I must apply it in a certain way; the rule compels me. But this is only a feeling that is a consequence of a prior decision. It is not that the rule compels me, rather, I compel myself to use the rule in a certain way: “I can choose to follow it” (LFM VII §66). (If I am to play chess I decide to apply the rule that the bishop only moves diagonally and this rule guides my next move.) I continue the above series ‘1002, 1004, 1006, …’ because that series is grammatically related to the rule n+2. (It is, for example, a commonplace for Ph.D. candidates in mathematics to be asked the question: Why does one plus one equal two? The answer is: Per definition.) The rule is not a necessity that compels adherence. My following the rule is a behavior. I apply it blindly as I blindly adhere to the rule that in chess the bishop moves diagonally. This line of thinking led Wittgenstein to the contentious §201 and §202 of the Philosophical Investigations:



§201. This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with a rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with a rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.

It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us for at least a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases.

Hence there is an inclination to say: every action according to a rule is an interpretation. But we ought to restrict the term ‘interpretation’ to the substitution of one expression of the rule for another.

§202. And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.



Obviously, Wittgenstein is not attempting to subvert the concept of rule following, only a certain picture of it. The larger context has to do, not with arithmetic, but meaning. He is attempting to deliver us from the picture that ‘meanings’ are abstract entities that language attempts to say, and that the rules of language, like railway tracks, compel us to move only in a certain way. Rules and meanings are language dependent practices. They can only exist within the context of instruction, explanation, correction, justification, discussion, and the rule that rules must be followed, not understood. Rules are not thought about; they are applied—practiced.

Mistakes and Errors

I can train a chimpanzee to calculate with pebbles. I can see that she can produce a series with the pebbles that seems to indicate that she understands how to add. But if I substitute candies for the pebbles, she eats them. If I substitute marbles for pebbles she becomes confused, etc. Does she know how to add or not? Does the chimp know what it means to add? Did she understand me when I asked her to add using the pebbles? Is she in error when she eats the candies? Has she mistaken what I meant? Does she know what it means to follow my instructions?



A pupil who is asked to continue the series ‘1,2,3,4, …’ in the same way does so successfully up to 57 and then goes wrong. How do we teachers respond? Do we say that the pupil knows how to add but only up to 57? Do we say that he doesn’t really grasp the rule, that he doesn’t know how to add at all, that he did not understand what we meant by “continue the series in the same way”, etc.? But, what did we mean? Did we actually mean that he would eventually write 1111106, 1111107, etc. And also then, how do I know that, should I be given the task, I will not fail to add correctly after some certain number? This is not skepticism. It is merely to show that there is no epistemology of rules. There are only grammatical practices that make possible certain language-games.



In his paper, “Do They Know It’s Wrong? A Study of Errors and Self-Correction in Oral Interaction,” Giles Witton-Davies conducted a study of students’ grammatical inaccuracies which, following Corder, he categorizes as either errors or mistakes. An error, in Corder, is “caused by a lack of knowledge or incorrect knowledge, whereas ‘mistakes’ [are] caused by other factors, such as time pressure or tiredness, and [can] easily be corrected if the opportunity were provided for” (153). Hence, errors are a “window on to a learner’s competence” (153); whereas, “it is central to the idea of a ‘mistake’ that the learner somehow ‘knows’ that it is wrong, and would be able to correct him or herself if given the opportunity” (156). Witton-Davies’ study found that an overwhelming number of inaccuracies were not errors but mistakes (169). For example, “in the course of a long narrative students seem to slip back into the simplest form of the verb rather than using the inflected past tense form. Tense inaccuracies thus appear to be predominantly ‘mistakes’ rather than ‘errors’” (170).

He interprets his results to mean that “students did not lack the necessary knowledge for producing correct language, but were somehow unable to draw on that knowledge at the moment of speaking” (175) and that, therefore, “[t]eaching or re-teaching of the relevant language point, or providing more controlled practice in the form of drills or grammar exercises, are [sic] unlikely to be helpful” (176). He cites Krashen to say, “‘mistakes’ reflect learning without acquision” (176). Further, he feels that his study supports theories “claiming that there are two kinds of linguistic knowledge, and that the presence or absence of one does not necessarily imply presence or absence of the other” (178). These two types of linguistic knowledge are called variously, “explicit/implicit, controlled/automatic, declarative/procedural or acquisition/learning” (178). He feels, with Johnson, that “teachers need to focus rather more on cultivating the second kind of (implicit) knowledge” (178), but he does not say how.



Getting right to the point: my worry about this paper and this pedagogy is the author’s amazing confidence in thinking that pupils know the relevant rules but “somehow” do apply them. With regard to the students who slipped back into the simple form of the verb in the course of the narrative, what are we entitled to say? That the pupils know the grammar of tense but only up to 20 or so sentences? That the students don’t know the grammar at all? That they applied rules unknown to English? That they mistakenly thought—or were in error to think—that tense accuracy was not required throughout the narrative? One of the benefits of adopting a Wittgensteinian approach is to compress knowing and doing into one dimension consequent to a prior decision. There is nothing about a grammar rule that compels me to use it. I choose to use it. I prefer to use it rather than be insubordinate. I allow it to guide me. There is nothing implicit about this choice. I am choosing to use proper grammar now and, what is more, the grammar I have chosen to follow guides me in various sentence choices and thought patterns. I am, in the course of writing this symposium paper, consulting my grammar book to double check various constructions and punctuation. I am doing this even though I am tired and even though I have already written some number of grammatically correct sentences. There is nothing mysterious about this. I use it because it allows me to enter a language-game or form of life that in fact is my life. My decision to follow certain rules has given me a world that I am very pleased with. (Likewise, as I learn Mandarin, I hope not so much to master that language as to enter a world that Mandarin defines.) Nevertheless, there remain a number of inaccuracies (and, if I am not mistaken, there is at least one inaccuracy in a Witton-Davies quotation above). Shall we say that Dr. Wall knows grammar but only up to a certain point? (Was Witton-Davies mistaken not to scrupulously re-check his own grammar for inaccuracies (since, as we all know, re-checking one’s grammar—correcting one’s mistakes—is a part of the language game of publishing symposium papers)).



What worries me is that metaphysical conclusions that hinge on binary oppositions between explicit/implicit etc. unnecessarily occult what is in fact a social practice. “Knowledge” of grammar is an illusion. No grammar exists outside of and or prior to a decision to follow the formal practices of a language. Wittgenstein’s most plangent lesson is that teaching language is as social as it is technical. The teaching and re-teaching of rules is not a technical refresher but a constraint placed upon us, and our students, by language-games themselves.

Grammar, Writing, and Pedagogy

There is a very high statistical probability that every English sentence published everywhere in the world contains at least one independent clause. There is a very high statistical probability that these same sentences contain subject-verb agreement. There is a very high probability that they begin with a capital letter. And so on. Language is constraint and obligation. Language, quite simply, is fascist. We are its prisoners. In Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes writes that “every man is a prisoner of his language: outside his class, the first word he speaks is a sign which places him as a whole and proclaims his whole personal history. The man is put on show and delivered up by his language, betrayed by a formal reality which is beyond the reach of his lies, whether they are inspired by self-interest or generosity. The diversity of languages therefore works like Necessity, and it is because of this that it gives rise to a form of the tragic” (81). The way in which we use language, whether our own or an adopted language, is always immediately a sign to the other person of who we are. Language is our Teiresias. This is why I wish to echo and amplify Professor Hwang’s concern with “fossilization of pidginization” that occurs when grammatical inaccuracies are left uncorrected (4), and this is why I do not believe that we “communicate with other people who use” a language. Language uses us; it reveals us. The pedagogical stakes are thus very high. That is why I don’t really care what the other person “knows” about the rules of this or that language. They practice those rules, or are insubordinate, in ways that immediately communicate much of who they are. Precisely, the way in which the other person communicates with language itself is their first message to me.



The advantages of instruction in grammar are these:



1. There is no community of native English speakers on Taiwan as there are both French and English speakers in Canada, and French, German, and Italian speakers in Switzerland. Consequently, “real life English” is only to be found in the form of spectacle: on radio station ICRT, in movies, and on TV. However, every day, everywhere in the world, English is in print. There, in print, pupils can experience “real life English.” In conversation class, the “real life situations” will always have to be somewhat contrived, artificial, involve role-playing, etc. On the other hand, artificiality is the very “life” of writing (see below).

2. The rules of grammar are global and durable. The grammar of writing exists in books that are consulted by every writer of English everywhere in the world. And, grammar does not change very quickly. In requiring our students to use basic grammar, therefore, we give our students something enduring and ubiquitous: not just the grammar, but the social requirement that it be employed.

3. Both student and teacher are subordinate to the same rules. I have no trouble telling my students that I consult grammar books and dictionaries; I have no trouble admitting to students that I make mistakes; I have no trouble making mistakes in class and being corrected by alert students; and, importantly, I have no trouble showing bewilderment about an uncertain construction and then, with the student, consulting the grammar book, reading the explanation of the rule, studying the examples, making a determination about correctness, or abandoning the attempt altogether and trying a different construction. The last point is important because that is how real life writers produce, abandon, and re-write various sentences.

4. There is no need to explain or justify the rules. You can try, but the point is to follow them. Either Chomsky is right and the brain is wired in such a way that the grammar rules are bio-genetically primordial, or Saussure is right and they are unmotivated. Either way, there is something about grammar that is radically inaccessible to explanation. This is another reason that I do not like the idea that anybody “knows” rules—the rules are, at bottom, radically unknowable, just as the reason why the bishop moves diagonally in chess has nothing to do with knowledge. There can only be knowledge where there is the possibility of doubt. Is it possible to doubt that English grammar rules that a sentence will have at least one independent clause? What would such a doubt mean? Should I consult not one but several grammar books to assure myself of the rule? (That would be like buying several copies of the morning newspaper to assure myself the headline was correct.)

5. The constraints of grammar are also options. The way out of the prison of language, to borrow from Maurice Blanchot, is the absence of any way out. The grammar rules are a indices of functions, or a range of possibilities each choice of which is a new thought. That is to say, language does not represent thought but is co-extensive with it. There are no pre-existing concepts in the mind waiting to be translated into language. There are no pre-existing concepts in the native Mandarin-speaking mind that need to be translated into Mandarin and then into English. For this reason, I am dismayed at the emphasis Witton-Davies places on the inaccuracy/correctness binary opposition. The rules of grammar are not merely an opportunity to make a mistake.

6. Emphasis on the rules of grammar introduces the concept that one certainly does and must communicate with language. In my own current learning of a foreign language it will not be a question of “how do I say this or that in Mandarin,” nor of how does my landlady say this or that, but rather “how does Mandarin say this or that?” It’s like a game one plays against language and one wins when one produces a phrase, sentence, or paragraph that elicits a certain response from the teacher, reader, or listener. Language is autonomous and artificial. It can surprise writer and reader, speaker and listener. When Noam Chomsky attempted to show that certain semantic rules are primordial he wrote a sentence that, he said, was obviously meaningless. The sentence was: Green dream sleeps furiously. His French critics immediately responded: But no! That sentence is a beautiful surrealist thought! (The point is: Grammar uncontrollably generates meanings. Hence the need for scrupulous vigilance.)

7. Writing, and the grammar rules that both constrain and beautify it, can be labored over in private. There is no pressure of performance.

8. In any case, “[b]roadly speaking, grammar and vocabulary are language” (Barthes 1968: 16).

Insubordination

Speech is unforgiving. (Writing is discrete.) I cannot unsay anything I say. (I can delete, re-write, re-fashion writing before anybody reads it). I can only pile on more words—correct myself, ask you to ignore my previous remarks, offer apologies, etc.—all the while knowing that you have caught every word, every slip, every inaccuracy, and are continually evaluating me. In speech it is always too late to begin—because as soon as I appear on the scene I am already a speaker—and too soon to stop—because there is always more to say and never enough time to say it. (In writing there is never any time—writing is all about the time when somebody will read the writing. The writing time itself is thus always a meantime, a postponement of a time to come.)



Speech, to be fluent, requires a certain speed of delivery. Silence is not permitted unless it is itself part of the speech performance: a performance that is pure rection.



Speech always mise-en-scène. There is an ineliminable aspect of performance that will always undermine the prejudice that in speech language is present “in the flesh”. Professor Hwang writes, “effective L2 learning is comparable to an actor’s melding into his character” (3). Speech is a drama and has all the appeal of what seems like real life, real situations, and spontaneous language.



Conversational speech, like writing, must also be duration dependent. (If it were not, we could not understand each other from one minute to the next. Speech would be like Heraclitus’ river which, because it is always flowing, always changing, cannot in all rigor even be considered a discrete entity and therefore, philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas says, cannot be stepped into even once!) I would have no way of knowing that what is taking place is what is called communication were there nothing internal to it that endures from performance to performance.

In professor Hwang’s paper we see the words and phrases: “models”, “idioms or conventional expressions that need to be learned as a chunk”, “protocols”, “unique rhetorical conventions”, “plethora of commonly used formulaic expressions”, “linguistic norms”, “ a stock of skills for acting in different social situations”, “internalization of L2 concepts and acquisition of cultural knowledge so as to make inferences” and so on and so on. Moreover, she points out native speakers are generally unaware of their own pragmatic language (3). This would vividly support Wittgenstein’s view that rule-following is a practice, not a knowledge. In short, what seems to be living, real, and spontaneous is in fact a vast array of codes, norms, and conventions to which native speakers are obedient.

What is this but proto-grammar? But one vastly complex. There are no grammar books for conversational English. There are simply books with models and examples, many of which, I dare say, that go out of date within a few years. In conversation one finds spectacular confirmation of Wittgenstein’s notion of language as an “ancient city”. Conversational speech is a kind of permanent grammatical insubordination: a perpetual creation of local rules and an abandonment of prior rules all at a rate impossible to plan for. Insubordination followed by re-subordination. (In that sense it is hardly surprising that local quasi-English language-games, like ChinEnglish, spring up, for that is where and how our pupils practice what they learn. This is not in principle a bad thing. Insubordination is the “life” of everyday speech.)

The question is how to teach it? If there are no formal rules for conversation, then one is left only with myriad models and exemplars and lexicons of idiomatic expressions that would all have to be memorized. The spontaneous life of conversational English becomes as routine, dry, and rehearsed as any grammar. (I should note that the study conducted by Witton-Davies concerned only those corrections that violate the rules of grammatically correct English. Sociolinguistic appropriateness was not considered.)

On the other hand, we are trapped. Insofar as teaching is the teaching of something enduring and not merely tutorial correction, “the only thing we can do is to tabulate rules” (Wittgenstein: WWK 184) and require their practice. What I suggest is that written English and conversational English be treated as wholly different (but co-dependent) regimes, tracks, disciplines. And I agree with Dr. Hwang that native speakers are probably the least equipped to teach conversational English. (If I myself have difficulty teaching conversation it is not because I have trouble getting students to talk. It’s because I don’t know what I am teaching. All I do is to have students memorize expressions, idioms, filler words, etc. for the purpose of getting them to be able to make a hotel reservation over the telephone and such.) But there is nothing we native-speaker teachers can do except face up to the task and try to articulate rules that can endure as both constraints and options.

Insurrection

Grammar books are written after the editors have surveyed published writing. At the same time, published writers, their editors, and their proofreaders refer to grammar books. There is nothing scandalous about this. It is simply that language (written or spoken) cannot exist without the possibility of iteration, and iterations, formalized, are called grammar rules. That is why, Wittgenstein says, somewhere, “there are no gaps in grammar.” (That is also why Jacques Derrida invented the term “grammatology”.)

There is a place, however, where language itself—and not the speaker or writer—is on display, and that is literature. It is here that pupils can view speakers speaking English. Maurice Blanchot has pointed out that, in literature, language undergoes a strange transformation: It becomes its own image; it becomes an imaginary language, spoken by no one; it becomes anonymous. It manages this transformation because literature never says anything—it speaks about things and principally, Roland Barthes says, about what happens to men and women when they speak (Barthes 1993: 463).

Literature is the representation of various language-games from the junky-talk of William Burroughs to the interior monologues of Virginia Woolf’s tormented characters to the drunken prose of Malcolm Lowry’s Consul and to the grammatically breathtaking 298-page paragraph that constitutes W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Does not the force of Professor Hwang’s enthusiasm for Connect with English stem from the fact that it is simultaneously “realistic” and also a fiction, a spectacle: an image of reality, a representation? Fiction can represent any number of idiolects, dialects, sociolects (both appropriate and inappropriate) and also represent the consequences of speech. Literature magnifies what happens when people speak.

What is more, Barthes writes, once staged, once represented—no longer at the service of instrumentality—words acquire flavor, intensity, emotional timbre, interest. Words become “festive” (Barthes 1993: 464). Literature is the art of the practice of language. I do not claim by this that literature is something like a final step in the learning process, nor that is it something added on to socioliguistically and grammatically correct English. Language itself is already literary in the sense discovered by Roman Jakobson when he studied the effects of aphasia in his widely influential essay, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” (He found that language operates on two axes: the substitution of one word for a similar word (metaphor, the arena of poetry) and the contiguity of relations in a chain of words (metonymy, the arena of prose)). In short, poetry and prose are inherent to language. They are the internal axes of language. As literary language is a representation of real language, as literature is about people using language and the consequences of their use, and as poetics are internal to language itself, the teaching of literature is a necessary in-sur-rection in language instruction.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “Inaugural Lecture.” From A Roland Barthes Reader. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 1993. 457-78.

---. Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.



Blanchot, Maurice. The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1981.



Chang, Shi-Chuan. “Integrating Cultural Education into FL Class for Intercultural Communication.” Soochow Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 19 (March, 2004). 203-222.



Hwang, Caroline. “Learning Sociolinguistically Appropriate Language Through the Video Drama Connect With English (Rebecca’s Dream). Symposium paper: National Taipei University of Technology, 2004.



Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” From On Language. Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 115-33.



McGuinness, B. F., ed. Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann. Trans. J. Schulte and B. F. McGuinness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. [WWK intra.]



Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Malden: Basil Blackwell, 1997. [PI intra.]

---. Lectures On the Foundations of Mathematics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. [LFM intra.]



Witton-Davies, Giles. “Do They Know It’s Wrong? A Study of Errors and Self-Correction in Oral Interaction.” Soochow Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 19 (March, 2004). 151-186.

Colloquium: Hegel's China and Fenollosa's 'Fusion' of East and West: NTUT 2010a

Hegel’s “China” and Fenollosa’s “Fusion”

Hegel’s interest in the Orient in general and China in particular is limited because he is concerned with the Greco-Judeo-Christian World. He has some dozen or so scattered remarks about China in his 1830 Lectures On the Philosophy of World History [Cambridge, 2002]. In his Philosophy of History lectures from the 1840s [Dover 1956 reprint of an 1899 translation (hence the archaic punctuation); all citations below from this edition] he devotes just about one hundred pages to the Orient which constitutes the three distinct and necessary stages that predate the beginning of World History proper in the ancient Greek polis. The stages are: China, India, and Persia. Hegel devotes about 30 pages to China, the first stage. History—in the sense of Universal History—begins in China and then leaves it behind altogether. China becomes an eternal and abstract Empire of Space devoid of any universal development. India, the second phase of History, likewise calmly and serenely closes in on itself but as abstract Time. The Persian Empire contains in itself a concrete Unity of Nations (one of which is Judea) and cannot close in on itself (since Judea is antithetically at odds with all other nations because of its singular and jealous God). Persia thus contains an “Antithesis in lively and active form” [114] which is the paradigm of History proper.

Getting to China, I begin with Hegel’s conclusion to the China discussion since it gets concisely to the point and captures the no-nonsense tone of Hegel’s brief treatise:



This [the preceding pages] is the character of the Chinese people in its various aspects. Its [China’s] distinguishing feature is that everything which belongs to Spirit—unconstrained morality in practice and theory, Heart, inward Religion, Science and Art properly so-called—is alien to it. The Emperor always speaks with majesty and paternal kindness and tenderness to the people who however cherish the meanest opinion of themselves and believe that they are born only to drag the car of Imperial Power. The burden which presses them to the ground seems to be their inevitable destiny; and it appears nothing terrible to them to sell themselves as slaves and to eat the bitter bread of slavery. Suicide, the result of revenge, and the exposure of children, as a common, even daily occurrence, show the little respect in which they hold themselves individually or humanity in general. And though there is no distinction conferred by birth, and everyone can attain the highest dignity, this very equality testifies to no triumphant assertion of the worth of the inner man, but a servile consciousness—one which has not yet matured itself so far as to recognize distinctions [138].



What or Who is Spirit? There is no one simple definition. In one place we read: “Spirit came into being as the truth of nature which has translated and suspended itself” [Encyclopedia, #308]. In another section we read that Spirit is “the unity of the soul and consciousness” [Encyclopedia, #363], and in another place [Encyclopedia #453] we learn that “the concept of Spirit has its reality in Spirit”. At no point does Hegel say that Spirit is man, human being. At no point in the Encyclopedia or Phenomenology of Spirit does Hegel unambiguously define Spirit. All we can say definitively is: Spirit is Spirit, the Absolutely In-itself For-itself, the Identity of Substance (exteriority, difference) and Subject (interiority, identity). Absolute Spirit is the Aristotelian/Christian Soul at the end of History. It is not unlike Wealth in Adam Smith. Jean Hyppolite will say that Spirit is History and History is Spirit. In any case, Hegelian philosophy is not humanism and not a religion and it is not simply a philosophy. It is the last idealistically systematic philosophy. Hegelian philosophy is a system that accounts for everything of significance: Everything of significance constitutes ‘moments’ within the History of Spirit. This History begins in the East, in China, like the rising sun; it ends in the West with Napoleon in Germany. A Hegelian may read Fenollosa’s “Coming Fusion” with curiosity but he would find it devoid of any historical significance. The fusion would merely be an insignificant episode in the era of the “last men”. Truly Historical men do not “fuse”. They fight, die, or surrender and work for their leaders.

How does History begin? It begins with the Chinese modification of Mongolianism: “Both [China and Mongolia] have the patriarchal constitution for their principle [but] so modified in China, as to admit the development of an organized system of secular polity; while among the Mongols it [the principle] limits itself to the simple form of a spiritual, religious sovereignty. In China the Monarch is Chief as Patriarch” [112]; whereas in Mongolia, the Lama “is honored as a God” [113]. The modification was capital for, in China, we witness the birth of the civil-ization of an essentially religious structure. In China, the civil absorbs the divine and the terrestrial into One. China became and remained the one and only thoroughly civilized people (to the point that Japan, their imitators, had no option but to become a thoroughly “snob culture”, Kojève could remark (though we do not know how seriously he meant this)). The Aufhebung of God (absolute sovereign) and Man (men and women, human beings) is the (or a) Emperor-Patriarch, and the basis of civilization is the family: “This family is also the basis of the [Chinese] Constitution, if we can speak of such. For, although the Emperor has the right of a Monarch, standing at the summit of the political edifice, he exercises it paternally. He is the Patriarch, and everything in the State that can make claim to reverence is attached to him. For the Emperor is chief both in religious affairs and in science […] This paternal care on the part of the Emperor, and the spirit of his subjects—who like children do not advance beyond the ethical principle of the family circle, and can gain for themselves no independent and civil freedom—makes the whole an empire” [122]. As the sublation of God and human the Emperor is an “all-encompassing personality” [123, my emphasis].

This was a colossal achievement, for the religious, the moral, the civil, and the natural are now One Substance and this One Substance is the State and it is entirely external to any one individual (or to any group or class, for who is not in a group that was not previously born into a family? Even an Emperor was born into a family). In the pages that follow Hegel shows that the Chinese State henceforth mirrors the Family and the Family (any family) mirrors the State (any state, any dynasty). There is no antithesis possible, and so Chinese History had ended as immediately as it began. Emperors will grow old and die as ordinary fathers will grow old and die, but others will replace them; the mirror-structure will remain in tact. What remains for the Chinese is simply to conform to this structure century after century; there is no antithetical negation possible that could significantly interrupt it.

The important point for Hegel is that this structure is entirely exterior—exterior to any Chinese person, to any Chinese family, or to any Chinese Emperor—and thus the Chinese people tend to become imitative, slavish, and devious. The essence of the State is outside itself in the Family and the essence of the Family is outside itself in the State. Spirit here is entirely Substantial, that is, exterior to itself, different from itself. It admits of no Subjectivity or Interiority. Spirit is arrested as for-itself without any way to return to itself in-itself. This can be contrasted to the Jews who experience themselves as a people, as individuals, and as human because their Jehovah can negate the individual, the people as a race, and humanity as a whole. Jews acquire a Spiritual experience of all three (in the form of negation only, however). This is completely outside the Chinese experience.

The characteristics of the Chinese people can be deduced from their mirror-structure. For example: “The Chinese have as a general characteristic a remarkable skill in imitation, which is exercised not merely in daily life but also in art. They have not yet succeeded in representing the beautiful, as beautiful […] although a Chinese painter copies European pictures (as the Chinese do everything else) correctly; although he observes accurately how many scales a carp has; how many indentations there are on the leaves of a tree; what is the form of various trees; and how the branches bend—the Exalted, the Ideal and the Beautiful is not the domain of his art and skill” [137; emphasis Hegel’s]. With regard to science the Chinese are capable of invention but not advanced application (the Jesuits built them their first cannon; the moveable printing press was never developed); in mathematics there is skill in calculation but no advances to higher aspects of mathematical theory; and their well known astronomical observations had yet to yield a scientific cosmology [136 ff]. Instead, the Chinese people confine themselves to astrology. With regard to religion, the Emperor embodies all power and thanksgiving for blessings; “above” the Emperor is thus nothing more than tien, “sky” or perhaps “heavenly sky”. Hence religious sentiments, thoughts, proscriptions are not spiritually internalized. What matters are the decrees of the Emperor before whom all Chinese are equal and “all are alike degraded. As no honor exists, no one has an individual right in respect of others, the consciousness of debasement predominates and this easily passes into utter abandonment. With this abandonment is connected the great immorality of the Chinese. They are notorious for deceiving wherever they can. Friend deceives friend, and no one resents the attempt at deception on the part of another if the deceit has not succeeded in its object or comes to the knowledge of the person sought to be defrauded. Their frauds are most astutely performed, so that Europeans have to be painfully cautious in dealing with them” [131]. Europeans themselves are, quite naturally, considered by the Chinese to be “beggars” since they abandon their families and seek wealth outside their own country [137-38]. There is no fundamental distinction between murder and accidental homicide since such would require a legal-moral notion of subjectivity and conscience, and anyways the civil result is the same [129]. Somebody died; somebody caused it; somebody has to pay. The nature of the cause is insignificant, undifferentiated; the death penalty is applied in either case. Consequently, in the case of insult “a Chinese prefers killing himself rather than his opponent since in either case he must die.” In killing himself he is given an honored burial and may hope that his family will be rewarded the property of his opponent by the Emperor’s court [130].



I could go on but it is clear that Hegel’s interest in China was limited to a pre-properly-Historical role, and he wanted to move hurriedly to India and then Persia in order to get to Athens. Fenollosa was also a man in a hurry—not to leave the Orient, but to “fuse” it to “us” and to “lead it” in the “final crusade” [164, all citations hereafter from The Chinese Character As a Medium for Poetry (Fordham 2008)]. Not a philosopher of history, Fenollosa (writing this piece in 1898) was a prophet [164] who saw a “crisis” that “the future historian will look back upon as […] unique, the most breathless in human annals” and as “man’s final experiment” [155]. There is no time for patient unfolding of reason and argument. In my opinion, Hegel may have flirted with madness; Fenollosa with being a crackpot. His essay is difficult to follow since it is peppered with slogans, partial thoughts, undefined terms, and anachronistic key words that connote an archaic affect. He is writing at around the time when Japan is massively modernizing and industrializing. Fenollosa predicts that China will follow suit if it can avoid being partitioned by Russia, France, and Germany. With the rise of the East on the horizon the time was ripe (and I choose that term deliberately) for the West to respond with leadership. But not France, Russia, nor Germany whom “[w]e cannot trust” [165]. Neither will China be able to lead since “[t]heir chief defect is that their practice needs to be led by ours” [164]. The responsibility falls to “the Anglo-Saxon race […] because it alone can conceive of a fine balance between society and the individual, of a universal federation and arbitration” [165]. If “we” are successful we shall enter “literally into his [Christopher Columbus’s] dream, and carry the Aryan banner of his caravels where he aimed to plant it—on the heights of an awakened East” [165].

Fenollosa is hard to understand, his intellectual filiations are obscure, but I’ll give it a try. The “fusion” Fenollosa has in mind is the archaic sexuality of Eros: the upsurge of life from out of undifferentiated matter and its search for an other life to bond with. I don’t know how many times Fenollosa refers to “awakening”, and the essay is filled with references to fruit and planting, to nerves, to soil and blood, fusion and infusion, seeds and sowing, and so on and so on. He goes so far as to imagine East and West as “bride and groom” preparing for a “world-marriage” [I kid you not, 156]. Although “[w]ealth is the key to world control” [162] wealth and control are not the issue since they cannot be ends but only means [162, 164]. The purpose is a “final crusade” [164]. But a crusade for what? To reclaim what? It is not clear, but he does proclaim that, with the fusion “the races that shall realize the ideal and idealize the real shall be the culmination of humanity” [164]. Which means what? Certainly if East and West fuse then it will mean the culmination of humanity with the death of East as East and West as West since, by elementary logic, the two will have become One—something new and final. There is thus the underlying affect of the death drive: Thanatos to accompany Eros.



Say what you like about Hegel’s judgments on China, India, and Persia, he is a true philosopher, and he leaves his footprints everywhere. Anyone who reads Hegel, even a little bit, sees that his method involves taking even superficial observations, then enhancing and sharpening them into essential distinctions which negate each other and create the condition for the next step in the History of Spirit. If Hegel does have anything worthwhile to say about the Chinese it is a by-product of a broader ambition and anybody who reads Hegel on China must filter his text accordingly. Hegel’s China exists within his philosophy. Fenollosa however belongs to another tradition that may include Maimonedesian prophetic esotericism of the 12th century which was resuscitated in the 20th beginning with Franz Rosenzweig’s rebellion against Hegel. I mention this since it is revelation and culmination (not method and origins) that interests this branch of thought. Fenollosa falls a generation after Hegel and a generation before Rosenzweig (and Barth, Strauss, Guttmann, Benjamin, and others each of whom sought to re-interpret knowledge tout court). These thinkers originated a profoundly anti-modern sentiment which still exists. However, Fenollosa is not interested in a new way of knowing per se nor is he religious in the latter thinkers’ sense. Thus he presents us with revelation without religion (or is there an implicit religion?) and urges a sort of society of religious affect unburdened by Law and Scripture. He appeals to Aryans who feel that modernity has been the death of primordial affect where by affect I mean feeling (including the feeling of life and the enthusiastic assenting to life up to the point of death) prior to its domestication and codification as the sweetness and sadness of emotions. And also by affect I mean mythic affect—not the affect that can be detected by biologists. That is to say, Fenollosa and those who are his other untimely companions (in their own ways Nietzsche, Bataille, D. H. Lawrence, Charlotte Bronte, Ayn Rand, others—I’m still working on this) were on a sort of crusade to awaken an affective dimension whose existence is mythical, not actual, and not directly experiential (as Bataille lucidly understood). Like Hegel’s, Fenollosa’s China is a key to a broader agenda and his remarks must be filtered accordingly. To Fenollosa, China was to be the catalytic partner that would allow the West (i.e. that would allow Aryans) to ecstatically experience its own demise. He cites no evidence that the East shares “our” enthusiasm about the coming fusion/suicide pact.