Us and them. - Free Online Library (2024)

With the topic at hand, one can begin almost anywhere and still be inbounds. Let me begin about nine centuries ago, on the evening of the12th of August 1082 (to be precise), one night after the full moon, whenthe great poet Su Shih went boating with friends on the Ch'angKiang outside Huang-chou in eastern Hupei. With a gentle breezefreshening the waves in the moonlight, they chanted verse and sang to amelancholy flute. When one of the friends lamented the too-brief sojournof a man's lifetime, Su Shih responded to him, "You must know,don't you, of the river and the moon? The one streams on like thisbut never goes away, the other waxes and wanes like that but finallyneither wastes nor grows at all. I assume if you look at it from theangle of mutability, then Heaven and Earth do not thereby last aninstant. If you look at it from the angle of immutability, then we andeverything are each of us interminable, and what is there to envy?"What interests me in this passage today (which the sinologists in theaudience will have recognized as being from the poet's "FirstRhapsody on Red Cliff") is Su Shih's insistence on the equaltruth of considering from contrasting perspectives, and also hisstressing of the aspect less usually adopted--in this case, that ofimmutability. Here, without fuss or swagger, is just, inNietzsche's words, "that double vision of the world that allgreat insights share," or an earlier voicing of Blake's pleato be kept from "single vision and Newton's sleep." Weshall return later to this passage, reserving for a while the remainderof Su Shih's comments. I intend now, if you'll allow me, todoff for a few moments my sinological robes and make some remarks of amore general, rather than specialist, nature. I hope I'll beforgiven if some of what follows seems faintly blasphemous. When I wasfirst informed of the topic assigned for this morning's session, Ithought I had some understanding of what it meant. However, afterobserving the thrasonical smirks on the faces of colleagues from Englishand Comparative Literature when I mentioned my task to them and, someweeks later still, when I came up for air after immersion in the essaysof Barthes and Derrida, I was no longer so sure. One thing was certain,though, and that was--all the techniques of philological and verbal, tosay nothing of rational, skill I had learned over the years were asnothing compared to the techne of encratic and acratic sociolects, oftransgressive sememes, hegemonic signifiers, and endoxal deviance. Ieven began to write sentences like the following: "The decenteredego inscribed in the paratactic formal praxis of medieval Chinese poetrybetrays by its pervasive absence of reference to the Feminine-as-Otherthe well-nigh pathological preoccupation of the pre-capitalist oppressor class with the panoptic but monologically repressed guilt encoded in aradically phallocratic regime, the bipolar transformative power of whichthey had on all accounts to disclaim--as a function of bodilycorpus--while simultaneously valorizing it through an overdetermined negative emphasis in the literary corpus."

Just as I was feeling comfortable as Satan cleaving my way throughthe surging smokes of this nethermost abyss, I came upon a book calledThe Mirror of Herodotus by Francois Hartog, subtitled (and this was whatcaught my eye) The Representation of the Other in the Writing ofHistory. Eagerly I read. And this, believe it or not, is what Idiscovered about midway through: "To speak of the 'other'is to postulate it as different, to postulate that there are two terms,a and b, and that a is not b. For example, there are Greeks and thereare non-Greeks. But the difference only becomes interesting when a and bbecome part of a single system." The sheer vapidity of this wasstunning: a (which is not b) and b (which is different from a); Greeksand non-Greeks; self and other. A host of such minimal systemic pairssuggested themselves, as I'm sure they're already doing toyou: body and spirit, I and Thou, ancient and modern, AOS and AAS, textand critic, philology and theory, text of pleasure and text of bliss,pencil and computer, Macintosh and IBM, natural grass and artificialturf. The game was up: "I am Lazarus come from the dead. . .." Afterward how could I read again with a straight face thebizarre manifestos on "New Philology" in the January 1990number of Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America (published just down the street), or some of the pronouncements in thepublished papers of the conference on "What is Philology?"sponsored by Harvard's Center for Literary and Cultural Studies inMarch 1988? In a couple of the sillier essays from the latter collectionwe can learn, for instance, that our correct aim, as scholars, is"to encounter the Other" in the text (this phrase reminds mequaintly of Star Trek's introductory slogan--"to seek out newlife . . .") and that our proper activity is to "study theestrangement of the text"--a fatuous tautology if ever there wasone. Of course, every text, indeed every thing, to each of us, is--inthe manner of Prof. Hartog--something other. But where, we may ask, doesthis get us, apart from manufacturing obfuscation out of the obvious andfostering the juvenile illusion that, merely because we have learned tosay we've "engaged in discourse with a circular disk arrangedso as to revolve on an axis," we have ourselves invented the wheeland for that merit kudos and a chaired professorship (probably at Duke,no doubt!--a university whose press markets without shame a series ofvolumes under the impossible rubric "Post-ContemporaryInterventions"). Of course there is another cardinal principle ofthe Hunters of Other: the text cannot be trusted to mean either what itsays or what it implies, or often even anything at all, except what thereader wants it to mean. Yet if the deconstructors are right in sayingthat language is fundamentally and thoroughly a cheat, how are we to putany credence in that very claim itself, when it is undeniablytransmitted by the same medium, linguistically? We seem to findourselves here in the old paradox about the man who always lies but whoat this moment states he now is lying. To which we may wish to exclaim,as Augustine did of Jacob's lie: non est mendacium sed mysterium.Or, later, in the words of Paul Simon: "A man hears what he wantsto hear, and disregards the rest." But we may take some reassurancefrom our own common sense, and also from W. H. Auden who knew a thing ortwo about language and who observed, "A poem might be called apseudo-person. Like a person, it is unique and addresses the readerpersonally. On the other hand, like a natural being and unlike ahistorical person, it cannot lie. We may be and frequently are mistakenas to the meaning or the value of a poem, but the cause of our mistakelies in our own ignorance or self-deception, not in the poemitself." All the frippery and brummagem of Disintegrationism is notsufficient to refute what our human minds and hearts reveal to us. I amcheered in this view also by an opinion from an unlikely quarter: Irecently came across an aside from no less an authority than MichelFoucault, characterizing the work of his fellow hierophant, JacquesDerrida. He said of Derrida: "He is the kind of philosopher whogives bullsh*t a bad name." But let's be honest. Do you nothave the feeling that much contemporary theory of the sort I'vebeen referring to is but a highly camouflaged avoidance of hard work?Especially the hard work of learning languages (remarkable, isn'tit, how many "theorists" do not command any language otherthan English?--not even French!) and particularly the even harder workof teaching languages, teaching them, that is, to classes ofincreasingly illiterate youths who mistake Rimbaud for Rambo and havemaximum attention spans of forty-five seconds. Yet upon the hard work ofteaching languages--as well as the tools of critical respect--to such asthese depends our legacy, if legacy we are to have in the brave new,post-contemporary world. How much easier to profess the catechism of"politics" and "power," for isn't that what allliterature, all texts, all human behavior are reducible to? This strikesone as a queer inversion of the comical reductio ad absurdum of the'60s, with regard to heroin addiction: you recall, since 90% ofheroin addicts smoked marijuana previously, marijuana must be the causeof heroin addiction--but, it was pointed out, since 100% of heroinaddicts drank milk in their formative years, shouldn't we outlawmilk first? The logic behind that was a conscious, if feeble, joke; butwhat we see on campuses today--the declaration from many of ourcolleagues that, since some spineless worm of politics may be unearthed(even if squashed beyond recognition) from under every literary rock,then politics and power are the cause and sole focus of literature--thisjoke is equally ridiculous, except that its proponents neitheracknowledge nor apprehend its reductive absurdity. Lack of wit (often inboth senses) is probably the sorriest failing of the NewPhilo-Theorists. I can't help feeling it's a sad misuse oftalent. As William Arabin (1773-1841), Judge of the Sheriff's Courtin the 1820s is said to have exclaimed once, while pronouncing sentence:"Prisoner, God has given you good abilities, instead of which yougo about the country stealing ducks."

I must say, though, as a student of medieval China, I feel at homewith the topic, "Self and Other." For what could be more"other" to me, a live white male, as most--but I'm happyto say, not all--of us in this room seem to be (although we shall, toosoon, be dead white males whose writings, under the coming reign ofOtherness, will be condemned to molder unread, unless they bescrutinized for their core of supposed political, economic, or sexualrepression and guilt)--what could be more "other" to me thanthe world of medieval China, to the study, yes, even love, of which Ihave chosen to devote most of my life? But perhaps, as I am not already"other," this should not be allowed. And yet, it'sstrange that the encounter with what is Other, with those areas ofexperience that have purportedly been marginalized in our society andscholarship, are now very often the only fast requirements inundergraduate curricula. Marginality, it seems, has captured the middle;the Other is become the center; "diversity" has aced thefield. But then in the utopia (or is it "dystopia"?) of theUniversity of Marginal States, I would expect to see permanent seats--ifnot endowed chairs--given to East Asia, South Asia, the Near East, bothmodern and ancient. But this we do not find, as all of us know. It isonly the proximate Other that is marginal enough to be central: that is,Asian-American studies, African-American studies (what we mightliterally call "self-indulgent studies"). To study China,India, the Near East in their own historical and cultural settings istoo diverse even for politically-correct diversity. It's also, aswe noted before, hard work. Here is the ultimate contradiction in thereformers' creed. Professor Said and his eager disciples will haveit that anyone who is "other" to the culture he is studyingcan only distort or misread it; and yet we are told simultaneously thatthe right motive of our study is to seek out the Other in the text, toestrange the text. The truth seems to be that the only acceptable Othersare the Others that are already Us. If we choose to talk in suchsimplicities, we must die by them too. Unless we can say with Rimbaud(i.e., Antonin, not John), "Je est un autre." (My Frenchteacher would have insisted on his saying, "Je suis . . . ";Rimbaud, however, was aiming at something else and knew what he wasdoing.) But there, of course, he is emphasizing in his famous letter toPaul Demeny the psychological estrangement that must be felt by anycareful writer when he watches and listens to the unfolding of his ownthoughts. Here I put on again my sinological garb and invoke Li Po,"China's greatest poet" (to steal a phrase from Tu Fupartisans), writing of a different rift of consciousness, but one bornof a disordering of the senses that would have pleased the youngRimbaud. This is the first of Li Po's four poems on "DrinkingAlone Beneath the Moon": Amidst the flowers--with a whole pot ofwine; I pour it off alone, with none to share affections. So, raisingthe cup, I invite the luminous moon, Then face my shadow--and that makesus three! Still, the moon does not know how to drink, And shadow canonly follow after me. But I'm pals for now with moon and my shadowtoo, Running riot, and sure to keep up with spring! Let me sing--themoon wavers and wanders; Let me dance--shadow shakes and staggers. WhenI'm drinking, we are joined close in gladness; Once I'm drunk,each scatters away on his own. But we are pledged forever to jauntsbeyond desire, Promising to meet again in the far-off Milky Way!

I can't bear to think what a lethal deconstructive analysiswould do to this lively piece of Li Po's genius--although aFreudian analysis, on the other hand, might prove very enlightening.

Let us, for a few moments, give Otherness the stage fairly. CertainlyChina's green and pleasant land (at least it was so in ancient andmedieval times, the books say) provides a likely spot to build theJerusalem of Self-and-Other. We would, for instance, begin with thefamiliar notion of China as the Middle Kingdom, to which all otherpeoples are seen as peripheral and uncouth. We might consider thepowerful role played by the written language in the maintenance acrossseveral millennia of the unique, high culture of the learned elite--aculture founded on and perpetuated through knowledge of ClassicalChinese, the written language of authoritative texts manipulated by ameager but self-consciously conspicuous minority. In more specificlinguistic and social terms, we could fruitfully examine the differencebetween the basic Confucian virtues of jen and i: i, the sense ofallegiance and duty owed to the "we-group" of family, clan, orstate (i.e., Self), as set off against jen, the more abstract, inclusiveideal of a shared humanity relating to all men (i.e, Other). We couldlook again at Chinese relations with their Central Asian, Korean, andJapanese neighbors, or at the image of the Feminine as created anddepicted by the males who effectively monopolized the written language,or at the medieval Taoist poetry of outer space and inner consciousness.Or, taking a different tack, we might observe the development andapplication of the term "medieval" itself--a radicalrecognition of Otherness, since only a past that can be regarded ashaving a character distinct from the present and also from a remoterpast can be so designated. (I wish I had time to pursue this today. Notto be sly, however, it may be of interest to know that, according to thefirst such periodization made in China, the medieval period was seen asthat of King Wen and the Duke of Chou--that is, the very beginning ofthe Chou dynasty, around 1000 B.C. But details of this, and the shiftingnature of the term, must await a separate communication, to be entitled"How the Chinese Invented the Middle Ages.")

Obviously the fields of Otherness lie wide in Sinology. Virtuallyanything--as far as I can tell--can somehow be interpreted as a study ofSelf and Other. Indeed there is even, thanks to Chuang Tzu, an earlydiscussion of the concept itself. And I think it is handled better byhim than it has been by anyone since--as is often so with Chuang Tzu.Writing in the late fourth or early third century B.C. (this is found inthe "Ch'i-wu lun" chapter of the text that was given hisname), he conned the subject from all angles. This is what he says:There is no thing that is not "other"; there is no thing thatis not "this." Regard yourself as "other," and youdon't see it; know of yourself, and you're aware of it. Hence"other" and "this" are born in parallel.

However, being born in parallel, they die in parallel; dying inparallel, they are born in parallel. Both being admitted, both areinadmissible; both unadmitted, both are admissible. Following from whatis "so," it follows from what is "not so"; followingfrom "not so," it follows from "so." This is why theSage does not go by this course, but shines forth the light from Heaven,this being likewise a "following from what is 'so.'"

"This" is likewise "other"; "other" islikewise "this." If the "other," for its part, is inits wholeness "so" and "not so," and the"this" is likewise in its wholeness "so" and"not so," then is there actually "this" and"other," or is there actually no "this" and"other"? Where neither "other" nor "this"finds its opposite partner--that we refer to as "the axis of the Tao." When this axis finds itself centered in a ring, it therebyresponds without limits. What is "so," in its wholeness, isinexhaustible, as likewise what is "not so," in its wholeness,is without limits.

This, I think, is not only the very first word on the subject; itmight also be pretty well the last. If only our troops had knownClassical Chinese, how much paper could have been saved!

I might as well lay all my cards on the table now, if they'venot been revealed plainly enough. I do not see, I am not persuaded, thatany valuable or even new subject of study or critical method has beenadded to scholarship through the current shibboleth of "Self andOther." In fact, all of the topics I mentioned a few minutes agohave been or can be studied, exhaustively and insightfully, with norecourse to the term. "Self and Other" seems nothing more thana calling of familiar things by a new label. If it be this season'scatchphrase, so be it: "a rose by any other name would smell assweet." But the term may have already--in the space of just a fewyears--decayed to the point that only its falsely glittering huskremains. At least, so says Professor Said, one of the saints of the Cultof Otherness, who writes in an article published last month: "Theword |Other~ has acquired a sheen of modishness that has becomeextremely objectionable." But this is to be expected of all suchfads that give the illusion of enhanced reality or excitement butwithout substance--similar to the periodic shifts in mass-mediaentertainment or advertising strategies, or presidential campaigns. Ifthis is the "triumph of theory" that J. Hillis Miller wasvaunting a few years back, it has proven a hollow and effete victory.

I would suggest in conclusion that one of the chief reasons for thelack of staying power of such fads is their fundamental disregard forhumane values and their extreme reductionism, their inability to hold insuspension the vital complexities--even seeming opposites--of thoughtand expression that inform and quicken our own lives, as they do everyliterary text potent enough to outlive the mortal breath of its creator.

Let us return, then, to Su Shih whom we left speaking of theconsolation that comes from a combining or larger vision of ourselvesand of the world we have been given. "If you look at it from theangle of immutability |he said~, then we and everything are each of usinterminable, and what is there to envy? Now then |he concludes~,between Heaven and Earth each thing has a master and whatever leastthing there be that is not mine, even a single downy hair, cannot besecured by me. Yet the clear breeze upon the Kiang and the luminous moonamid the mountains is made into sound when caught by the ear or formedinto beauty when discovered by the eye--one secures them without let,uses them inexhaustibly. This is the interminable storehouse of theShaper of Things, which I and you are able to enjoy together."There is a notion of Self and Other that I cordially applaud, whether itbe on a moonlit autumn evening on the Yangtze or an overcast springmorning in Cambridge. There is the difference and the differance that Itoo would wish for us all.