Taijiquan & Deconstruction, Part 2: Simulation: From Taijiquan to Mulanquan

February 27, 2014

Taijiquan & Deconstruction, Part 2: Simulation: From Taijiquan to Mulanquan

Reality and Hyperreality

In my last post, I began a deconstruction of Adam Frank's focus on 'identity'. However, although Adam Frank's ethnographic study of taijiquan maintains a steady focus on what he wants to focus upon – namely, the practitioner(s) and their interactions as cross-cultural 'contact zones' and sites and 'affective chiasmus' (my words, not his), he does not prioritize the human and interhuman to the expense or detriment of non-human contextual factors. In Chapter 4 of Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man he finds much of the 'cause' of and for taijiquan in the cultural logic of urban modernity and postmodernity.

As he notes at the start of the chapter, 'I had come to Shanghai at the end of 2001 with the notion that construction in the city was actually pushing the art of taijiquan out, cutting into the park spaces and streetscapes. What I found was quite different: a city vying to become the greenest and most environmentally advanced in Asia' (Frank 2006: 131). As a direct consequence of this project, 'The reconfiguration and greening of public space in Shanghai inadvertently highlights taijiquan as a kind of moving sculpture that exists within the larger moving sculpture of the city itself' (144). Taijiquan is a feature of the parks, parks which are central features of the postmodern global city, and so must be approached and understood also in these terms (as opposed to being understood solely in interpersonal terms):

As simultaneously public city and public artwork, therefore, Shanghai serves as both a crossroads of complex social relations between shifting classes, ethnicities, and groupings of all sorts and a vast source of sensual input for each of the individuals who inhabit these social categories. Identity moves through city and individual, and taijiquan provides one lens for understanding the constantly shifting nature of identity. Taijiquan becomes a public artwork embedded in public artwork. (144-5)

Parks are not merely – or even primarily – to be understood as 'artworks', of course. They have any number of other declared or undeclared statuses and socio-cultural functions. They might be regarded as a necessity of postmodern social relations, as much as extra frill on the edges of 'real life'. At the very least, as Frank observes, 'I became acutely aware of how the city itself structured identity for the people who lived there' (145). Parks are part of this structuration.

Moreover, as well as being 'art' in the sense of 'aesthetic construct', urban parks are also simulations of nature. To resurrect the term made famous by Jean Baudrillard, they might be regarded as hyperreal (Baudrillard 1983).

Some may baulk at the hyperbolical reading of urban parks as nature 'hyperrealised' – especially as, in my account, which follows and supplements Frank's, the mode of taijiquan's modern and postmodern existence in Shanghai has been aligned with the structuring effects of the parks, parks which are themselves part of the structuring of Shanghai identity, on both macro and micro (human) scales.

Nevertheless, there are justifications for setting out a hyperbolical (or, to borrow a term Derrida once used about deconstruction, a 'hyperdiabolical' (Derrida 1998b: 29)) reading of taijiquan in terms of postmodern theories of 'simulation'. One would be to make those of us who have ever held beliefs about taijiquan's intimate connection with nature and universal Daoist truth or reality come face to face with a kind of worst-case scenario, whose most basic form would be but what if it's not all that 'ancient and timeless' or 'universally true'? We can then engage with the complexity of the situation, informed both by the kind of romantic dream at the one end and the postmodern nightmare at the other – even while I continue to be, so to speak, 'stuck in the middle with you' (doing push hands).

Frank takes us on a journey through the historical transformation of taijiquan in Shanghai, and Chinese cities more widely, noting that around the dawn of the 20^th century:

Economic opportunity, along with the fashionability of the city, led many martial artists to move their families to Shanghai. At the same time, the new Republican government explicitly sought out the country's best martial artists to teach publicly. Andrew Morris has argued that the 'YMCA' mentality that characterized the nation's increasingly Western-educated bureaucracy laid the groundwork for not only strengthening 'the national body' but also instituting sports as leisure among the masses. (149)

This is what we might call a discursive transformation – a moment in which martial arts become embroiled in the forces and political projects of a fledgling modernity.

The ensnarement of martial arts teaching in the forces, dynamics and deliberate policies of modernity inevitably led to their transformation. On Frank's account, among many of the transformations precipitated by the urbanization and re-institutionalization of taijiquan teaching were the following:

Famous teachers such as Yang Luchan and Wu Jianquan joined with others to teach regular classes at the YMCA. But they were not about to teach their secret family arts to just anybody. Instead, the similarities in the family forms, corroborated by the reports of family members, seem to indicate that a certain amount of exchange occurred among teachers that resulted in a decision to create a long, slow form with higher postures that could be taught to the general public, the old, and the infirm. The original fast-slow explosive forms, as well as intensive push hands, weapons, and boxing training, would be reserved for serious students, and the secret energy training would be reserved for disciples (Wu and Ma 1988, 1999, 2001; Zee 2002). The Wu style taijiquan that wealthy Chinese learned during this period was thus a direct outgrowth of the economic and political change the city experienced. (Frank 2006: 149)

Frank's research enables him to ascertain that the people attracted to such taijiquan classes around this time were largely 'relatively affluent, attuned to ostensibly "Western" popular culture, and cosmopolitan', and he notes that this was 'fertile ground for the propagation of tradition in the midst of modernity' (Frank 2006: 150).

Put like this, it seems inevitable that what the 'martial' art produced in such circumstances – of slowing, gentrifying and philosophizing – was going to change also. Frank notes the 'slow erasure of taijiquan as a martial art from the minds of Shanghai's young people. So few martially adept practitioners remain in comparison to the massive number of people who practice taijiquan as a kind of health exercise that the belief in the efficacy of the art has waned' (150).

In this sense, taijiquan gains features not only of 'public art', in the sense of something visible and visualised as 'on display' in the public parks, which are themselves artwork serving various social functions, but also as 'public art' in a different sense – the sense of a part of the 'art of the public': not only an 'art of the self', in Foucault's later sense, but also an art of managing population, in Foucault's earlier sense.

This is why Frank calls taijiquan a master symbol of Chineseness. It has been used in building national consciousness in Anderson's sense (Anderson 1991), in producing what Frank calls a social-sensuousness – a sense of Chineseness in the body and mind – and also 'the propagation of [a sense of] tradition in the midst of modernity' (Frank 2006: 150). Ironically, what was propagated and sensed as 'tradition' was of course an invented tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). And in this sense, 'traditional' taijiquan in Chinese urban parks can be regarded as 'postmodern' and 'hyperreal'.

This does not necessarily give taijiquan a negative valence. The situation is more complicated. Always. However, it should alert us, ultimately to the political dimension.

By this, I mean the following. Cultural institutions and practices are contingent and entail what Althusser would call 'spontaneous ideologies' (Bowman 2007). These belief systems can be seen to arise within what Stuart Hall would call a specific 'conjuncture', made up of macro and micro cultural, economic and sociological dimensions bearing down on people and groups and producing conscious and unconscious reactions and formations (such as institutions and practices, like, say, YMCA classes in taijiquan and middle class urbanites deciding to take these classes in a given city at a given time).

Crucially, however, practices, institutions and their ideologies are never simple passive expressions of wider social, political and economic conjunctures, forces and relations. Rather, they also have their own capacity for agency. This agency is never necessarily simply conscious. But consciousness and agency can emerge; as in the case of Falun Gong in China in the nineties.

Peter Lorge details the emergence and development of many modern institutional forms of qigong in China from 1949 (Lorge 2012). Many of these were more or less state sanctioned or approved. Indeed, Lorge notes that the very agreement on the use of the term 'qigong' to conceptualise and designate certain practices was very a state institutional decision of the mid-20^th century. However, in the complex post-Cultural Revolution situation, a very wide range of qigong related practices emerged, among which was Falun Gong.

Falun Gong trod a very controversial path vis-à-vis the government, and arguably gained a sense of agency in the face of and even antagonism towards the Chinese state. This lead to confrontations and a government clampdown.

However, Falun Gong had itself come to hold a very visible place in China's urban parks. And, one might say, 'public art' or simulated hyperreal nature abhors a vacuum. So what could fill up the space that Falun Gong practitioners had been removed from? The answer is itself wonderfully hyperreal: a new, state of the art, arguably state invented 'tradition': Mulanquan. Frank writes:

Mulanquan, named after the famous female warrior about whom Disney made an animated film several years ago, incorporates both sword and fan dances and appeared on the scene immediately after the Falun Gong crackdown. While some practitioners claim that it is an 'ancient' art, its inventor did not begin teaching publicly until after the crackdown, and articles about mulanquan appear frequently in government publications, while television shows devoted to the practice facilitate its spread. Witnesses to the Falun Gong crackdown in 1999 claim that the Shanghai government literally bussed in taijiquan practitioners to fill up park space that had previously been occupied by Falun Gong practitioners. (Frank 2006: 143)

To the extent that Frank's account holds true, 'mulanquan' would thus be the exemplary postmodern simulacrum of ancient martial tradition. Directly informed both by an already-mythic story that can be spun in many ideological directions (gender equality, Chinese heroism, etc.) and the recently popular 1998 Disney cartoon adaptation that very many potential martial arts health tourists would already be familiar with, the appearance of a new 'ancient' 'traditional' martial art, one that looks like taiji but that is performed to music and has massively exaggerated balletic gestures and movements, etc., is something that is literally too good to be true.

Now, whereas most martial arts discourse is keen to look down and scornfully upon something as potentially 'fake' as mulanquan, to my mind, mulanquan becomes an exceedingly important case study for martial arts studies of any kind to engage. This is because it has condensed within it so many – possibly all of – the most serious cultural and political problematics that any serious study of any other martial art or practice should be informed by. Mulanquan may be hyperreal, postmodern and entirely political in its mode of appearance, political deployment and 'market positioning', but what we can learn from thinking about this can enrich our engagement with even the most 'real' and 'true' and 'genuinely historical' topics we might prefer to engage with.