Can Xi Jinping Save the Humanities? Part 2: Cultivations

To continue from last time, I want to think about some prospects and histories of the humanities in considering the phenomenon of a state-sponsored social tradition, specifically Confucianism in contemporary China.

Like the Confucian revival, Western liberal arts can also be seen as form of learning imposed from a top upon those below. The 20th-century humanities, especially since the 1980s, are of course of a different sort than the putative Confucian revival in China. I want to keep that comparison and contrast in mind in thinking of a alternate possibilities for our beloved useless arts.

"Belles-lettres: what are they good for?" That's the name of a pop song written by many a college-dad. At least this is true of Petrarch, whose father forced him into law school, which he hated and was always trying to get at his poetic calling. To page forward some, the humanities survived the evacuation of Christianity from powerful universities in the late 19th century in large part to give a bourgeois elite a purchase on the values that defined an emerging order. Aristotle portable for running Africa or India.

This kind of culture was promoted by big institutions and the men who aspired to their vision. In turn of the century America, the institutions were private, in parallel to the development of religious and earthly humanistic studies in the Islamic world as studied by George Makdisi. But, in modern times virtually all higher education in Western Europe and East Asia came at the direction of the state. In these areas, the wealthy countries, state interest in culture also intensified in the production and curation of what many people call classics in modern Western film, theater and the visual arts.

This abbreviates a complicated story, but I want to suggest that state sponsorship, even in aggressive and chauvinistic forms, is a defining part of many of us consider humanistic refinements. The US National Endowment for the Arts may not be to American art what Cinecittà is to Italian film, but managerial forms of control bound up in manipulable ideas of social good are part of both. So, what could those models of flourishing tell us about the possibilities of what authorities might have in China with their new interest in traditional arts and letters?

With the humanities in the state they're in, how do we think about the values of our traditions in the arts and letters with the specific possibilities present in the state-led Confucian revival? I suggest we shouldn't automatically be so suspicious of formations like the Confucius Institute. We should at least remember that non-Western studies in the US would probably never have spread and thrived without the Cold War sponsorship of strategic studies by the federal government.

If academic and institutional norms don't reduce to us-free, them-unfree formulas, what might a vital, engaged and different humanities look like under official auspices of someone like President Xi? 

In China, the precedent I would think of would be an academic institution like the Beijing Film Academy and the Central Academy of Drama. From marquee-auteur directors like Zhang Yimou 张艺谋 and Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 to their leading stars like Zhang Ziyi 章子怡 and Gong Li 巩俐, these two alumni lists are the most important in the flowering of Chinese film in the last two decades. Their star power and political savvy steered the industry out of the propaganda form into critical and commercial global standing, and they did it when so much else in China was shutting down.

Great directors may still need to sell out to earn blessings, and often their daring early work is obscured by mainland censors. Nevertheless, the carefully-supervised movie business has room now for skillful artists to negotiate the film-festivals and the broader market making movies as sharp, as sensual and as serious as any I've seen in the Atlantic film world. Might we imagine a state-run Chinese humanities similarly open to talented scholars? Might this in fact be easier when so many important academics already occupy quasi-bureaucratic roles in think-tanks and advisory boards?

To conclude, I want to think about the analogy of film and scholarship in a different light. Aside from these auteurs, most Chinese movies broad and forgettable, conservatively adherent in story-form and content. That is to say, it is hard to compare them favorably to most Hollywood movies at any given time. The point is that the excesses and incongruities of the system sometimes let through beautiful and challenging work.

If the humanities grow in China with state sponsorship, the system that directs or challenges thoughtful scholarship will be different than ours. However, at a time when the liberal arts are in serious trouble in the liberal West, we shouldn't limit our thinking to concern about the convenience or chauvinism of a Confucian humanities. We need to be more aware of the partiality and politics of our own disciplinary formation to appreciate how others might work.

Genealogy of Normals

Why do we talk about genealogy and what do we mean by it? "We" here are humanists, ostensibly the scholars furthest from disciplinary engagement with biological science where genes and descent are discussed in literal terms.

I'm considering this question because of something I said offhand without really thinking about it. The other day in discussion section I found myself describing the 19th century mass extinction of social and cultural forms. Continuing the prehistory motif, I think I mentioned the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the "great dying" around 250 million years ago. I wanted to explain a massive reduction in diversity in a familiar way and to convey a sense of objectivity to it. What had been a massive and complicated array of life-forms was reduced hugely, and one particular strand, your diapsid reptiles if you will, would become dinosaurs, diversifying to rule in the Mesozoic age.

To take the example of political thought, I suggested to the class, one could at the middle of the 19th century define very different kinds of public or collectivity particular to Islamic, Confucian, and Western liberal traditions. In the 19th century, the last model triumphed, and within a hundred years it filled every evolutionary niche, and all political situations are judged as successful or failed nation-states with better or worse legal codes. There are references to sharīʿa in the constitutions of Muslim countries; there is the sign of the supreme ultimate on the South Korean flag, but these are phenotypes belying the common genotype of the nation-state. The genetics presented in statist forms of partisanship, bureaucracy, and nationalism is of a new kind. Perhaps non-Western nation-states have exclusively Western formal features, perhaps they reflect a blend of hegemonic and local forms, but they are definitively new.

How is this the common sense account? It is handy, meaning it was at hand, and I used it because I wanted to borrow the authority commonly associated with sciences. When I'm just talking, and not thinking about things in the writerly way, I associate science with clarity. So, I wanted to borrow one of the clearest depictions there and that's a dominant metaphor of modern power: that of evolution. For the students I was talking to, I don't think I gave them something too irresponsible. But the evolutionary genealogical model isn't the fittest for more intense forms of discourse.

There are two reasons for this: 1) I don't know evolution, not really, and 2) gene-flow doesn't capture the interface between knowledge and power that's at the heart of meaningful modern intellectual historiography.

First, evolution: what is that? My understanding, like quite a lot of humanities and social-science types I know, is a collection of 19th-century tropes like the Darwinian struggle, meaning a justification of the ways of power already in place conveniently located in a racialized discourse at hand.

Second, this limited reception of Darwin can't capture a lot of what transforms in traditions as they flourish or fail. What metaphor of parentage or adaptation explains the relationship of fertilization and mutual transformation between the Buddhist and indigenous Chinese traditions in the 7th through 11th centuries? Perhaps sophisticated bio-ecological understandings like scientists today might have could do this, but nothing in the theory-shorthand many of us do.

So, if this isn't the best, why is it hard to resist? I think that has to do, at the very least, with Nietzsche and Foucault. However, I want to suggest that both forms of genealogies leave a lot of room for rethinking for intellectual historians.

In sum: Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals was an act of violation, defaming the sanctimony of liberal and Christian values in associating them with slaves, with slaving, with the shame and self-loathing inflicted by those impotent in violence. Foucault took this de-elevation further in locating the agents of development in microphysical processes, the reorganizations of space and time hour by meter that are commensurate with modern power. Both are valuable, but we need more to come to terms with the thought structuring, responding to, and obscured by our world.

The problem with even those genealogies point to origins, to points and processes of speciation, to concretes of historicity of which we need to be more critical than we have been before. In difficult environments, life forms change over generations or they die, and this modern environment is particularly hostile to certain forms of self-formation and communal mutuality.

However, to understand forms of spiritual or intellectual sustenance in the margins of public society or among vulnerable people, we will need an idea of tradition or continuity between life and death, in suspense. Understanding what might become of Confucianism or Anglicanism, or the much more complex case of sharīʿa jurisprudence, need to account for how living forms might become more porous and plastic than they have been before. In this, the questions of influence or heritage to which the genealogical explanation incline us are limiting rather than opening. 

Nevertheless, the fact that the genealogical or genetic model is the model at hand for a lot of us is significant in and of itself. It after all is an immanent product of the processes we are trying to come to terms with.

Rock and Plastic

Academic arguments that have a lot of parts can be difficult to use. A lot of wise source use involves taking things apart, enlarging and expanding parts and setting aside what isn't right for the purposes you have. So, how do you do this responsibly, both being faithful to the original terms of whosever work while not committing to what in it might be wrong, misunderstood or just distracting?

Robert Neville calls this the difference between piquant and bland interpretation, which is a great metaphor. Here, though, I want to talk about taking some thing out and and reworking it responsibly, treating an original consistent work of someone else with what I might call a sense of plastic art and doing so responsibly. One particularly famous case of this might illustrate things better.

Edward Said changed everything. And when someone changes everything, he changes it for everyone, forming the discourse, and not everyone takes him in the most productive directions.

That opening passage of Orientalism linked scholarship and culture in the politics of Western empires as a concrete formation, effectively as a monolith. Since reading it, departments and people calling themselves Orientalist have gotten fewer and fewer, but people want a crack at the monolith. Bernard Lewis couldn't do it, but scholars since then have tried to rethink the connections of knowledge and power.

After all, politicians make wars, not scholars. The 19th-century imperialists, like the leaders of our time, tended to be philistines. Might Said have committed the very banal mistake of scholars in assuming they are much more consequential to the broader world than they are?

In The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa quotes a letter from Max Müller. The godfather of religious studies is shocked to learn that during the debates about the future of Ireland, British prime minister William Gladstone was reading Jacoillot's Le Bible dans l'Inde. That bestseller put the origins of Christianity in a covert Aryan Buddhist mission to the ancient Mediterranean. Needless to say, it was universally rejected by scholars but left a mark on the chattering classes who took their own interests in scholarship that had little to do with consensus within university walls.

Just a funny story of course, but it points to a real divide. In our own time, wouldn't we say that the success of postcolonial and critical theory in the curriculum and the policing of overt Islamophobia in scholarly publishing has done nothing to change Western actions in and attitudes toward the Islamic world? So, was Said pushing a claim too hard, without enough of that "nuance" we keep hearing about?

At different times, Said insisted that scholars really did set up the intellectual conditions for global hegemony. I'm not proposing a pious overlooking of parts of his thesis that might need to be considered other ways. But a more plastic, mutable reading can be more flexible if it takes what Said says within his frameworks and working spaces. For me, sometimes Said needs to be read as more plastic than he would have wanted to be.

When he describes that what Orientalists brought into the world was new kinds of knowledge: how non-Western peoples can be known more fully than they could know themselves: that is a trenchant cut into epistemologies of modern power. Like the classical anthropologists, Orientalists were more likely than we remember to be sympathetic to the peoples they studied, but the point isn't really what they said or how they said it. So to conclude the example, the Orientalists set out an inequality of knowledge that it took Said to memorably call out.

What I'm calling plastic, pliable reading doesn't sound acutely insightful; it isn't new, but it's something I try to remind myself about constructions: that constructions aren't the opposites of truths; they are appreciated for what they are made out of and for and how they might be otherwise.