Taijiquan and Deconstruction. Part One: 'identity'
1. Identity
I have argued before that 'deconstruction is a martial art' (Bowman 2010). A draft of the chapter in which I argue this is available here. However, that work was organised by an intention to explain something of the tactics, strategies and ethics of Derridean deconstruction. In it, taijiquan is essentially made into an analogy for the kind of deconstructive operation carried out by Jacques Derrida. The logic of the combat movement principles of taijiquan were represented in such a way that they could be drawn into an equivalence with those of deconstruction.
However, Adam Frank takes things further and does something quite different with the relation he draws between poststructuralism (of which deconstruction is the pinnacle) and taijiquan, in his 2006 book Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man (Frank 2006). In this book, Frank draws multiple relations between poststructuralism/deconstruction and taijiquan. Indeed, he uses the taiji tu or yin-yang symbol, which is used so often to explain the logic of taijiquan (as well as philosophical Daoism), as an organizing structure both for the conceptual organization and movement of his book and for the, and for the argument he constructs within it.
This argument can be characterized in many ways. In terms of the focus of the book on 'identity' (the book's subtitle is Understanding Identity through Martial Arts), Frank shows the necessity for shifting focus from the personal to the cultural or social, and from the singular present to its multiple histories. In other words, if you want to understand matters of 'private or personal identity', or indeed the singular present moment, one must inevitably refer to moments outside of the self and outside of the present. In Daoist or taijiquan terms, this is the grain of yin in the heart of yang and the grain of yang in the heart of yin. In the terms of deconstruction, the one entity or identity is essentially the différance of the other.
We could have a lot of fun going through the ins and outs of this conceptual matrix. Analogies, images and metaphors would abound, just as they do in any discourse about the logic of taijiquan or différance. Indeed, many people have drawn Daoism and deconstruction into various kinds of relations, with varying degrees of success (see for example Hall 1991; Clarke 1997), but few have done so with the success and subtlety of Frank. This is doubtless because of his equally 'theoretical and practical' investment not only in taijiquan but also in cultural theory and methodological issues in ethnography. This allows him to move from what he calls 'sensual social' matters – say, of interacting with oneself and one's partner in push-hands practice or other elements of a taijiquan class or post-class conversation – to the most intimate matters of what psychoanalysis calls 'phantasy' (orientalist ideas about essential cultural difference, for example), and outwards, into fields of media, politics, history, language, culture and economics – and back again. For instance, Frank often ponders the question of exactly where the problem of 'cultural difference' resides. When it seems to him that an idea of 'cultural difference' (in the form of presumptions about the other, whether orientalist or racist, etc.) is present in some way, he immediately wonders whether it is only present in his head, or whether it popped into his head because it seemed to be affecting others around him. This question ('am I just imagining this or is it real?') raises problems of verification: how does one establish where ideas of cultural difference are working? How does one establish what they are doing?
Frank's solution is to maintain the problem as a problem. He certainly tries to read it off and from the evidence of the situation. This requires contextual analysis (based on what people said and did), and also auto-analysis (based on his own thoughts, hopes, fears, actions and reactions). But he does not try to resolve or dissolve the problem, in the sense of dispensing with it and categorising it as something that has been resolved. Instead, he treats it as something that long has and long will continue to emerge and have effects. Thus, he accepts that he has certainly more than once harboured various phantasies about cultural difference, and he tries repeatedly to engage with them – what they have made him think, feel and do, and what it would mean if and when they change. Then, he maintains a non-judgemental position vis-à-vis the likelihood that his Chinese friends and colleagues may well harbour certain cultural assumptions about him, as a white westerner/American.
In other words, rather than trying to treat 'cultural difference' as a necessarily bad problem to be solved, he treats it as an inevitable occurrence with a very wide range or dynamic constellation of consequences, from fear or hatred at one extreme, to fetishization, love or desire at other points. And he treats all of these possibilities as moveable. This is because social and cultural relations are formed from contingent histories and ongoing events. As he repeats, 'identity moves'.
Frank's insights are constantly persuasive. His use of the taiji symbol (taiji tu) as a matrix for showing how the most intimate and personal is always also political, historical, sociological, and so on, is excellent. But the taiji tu and the logic of différance – or the 'différantial' structure of the so-called 'identity' of any so-called entity – is not the exhaustion of Derridean deconstruction. Thus my criticisms of Frank centre on his key focus: 'identity'. For, no matter what he says about its complexity, the one thing that Adam Frank clearly believes in, first and last, is the identity itself. This doesn't move. One might ask where he gets this notion from any why he insists on it.
It wouldn't seem to come from Derrida. As Derrida once put it: 'an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures' (Derrida 1998: 28). Indeed, 'identity' is one of the primary categories that Derrida tirelessly deconstructed, implying as it does, or being based as it is, on an assumed border between an 'inside' and an 'outside'. As he put it, naming the target of much of his thinking: 'To keep the outside out. This is the inaugural gesture of "logic" itself, of good "sense" insofar as it accords with the self-identity of that which is: being is what it is, the outside is outside and the inside inside' (Derrida 1981: 128).
There are many other passages of Derrida that could be quoted and discussed to support this. But my point vis-à-vis Adam Frank's perspective is that despite all of the 'différantial' movements of his text, what does not move is his adherence to the problematic of identity.
Once again, there is an enormous amount that needs to be said about this – and it is not an attempt to shoot Frank down in some way. In his own words: 'Ultimately, all these negatives are meant to yield a positive':
In this book, I have tried to capture the play of multiple discourses within the unity of a particular embodied practice. To what end? All this talk of racisms, power, hegemony, deception, and capitalism run amok is not meant to give the impression that taijiquan is a painfully negative experience that one should avoid at all costs. My goal has been the opposite: to highlight the obstacles to practice and understanding that teachers and fellow practitioners shared with me during the course of my fieldwork. Ultimately, all these negatives are meant to yield a positive. By understanding the tendency to conceive taijiquan in terms of race, those who practice the art might more easily cut through the obstacle of preconception to experience it in a new light. Those who do not practice, but who see people practicing taijiquan in a park or read a book or rent a videotape, might approach the art, as well as their conception of China and Chinese people, in a more sophisticated way. Perhaps transnational practices like taijiquan allow us to engage in an act of reduction about identity, where comparison is no longer 'cultural', but internal. Practice can lead us to a moment when we are neither a particular self nor not that self – in other words, a moment when socially structured identities are negated through direct experience. (Frank 2006: 241)
This beautifully crafted passage illustrates both the strengths and the limitations of Frank's approach. We can see the complexities of identity and its vicissitudes. But ultimately this work is still organised by focusing on a mirage.
A real thoroughgoing deconstruction engages in the process of inverting and displacing. At times Frank certainly inverts: he shows how individual or group consciousness is produced by all sorts of 'unreal' or inhuman supplements – media representations, literary figures, and so on. But he does not displace the discussion away from the human to the inhuman of the interhuman, and rather maintains an effective belief in – to borrow a phrase from Laclau and Mouffe – the individual as the origin and basis of human relations.
In this focus on 'identity', we may wish to conclude that Frank is neither deconstructive enough nor Daoist enough. But this would be harsh – and in any case would signal only the point of reopening the problematics.
References
Derrida, Jacques (1981). Dissemination. London: Athlone.
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