Taijiquan & Deconstruction, Part 3: Nation and Simulation
3. Nation and Simulation
There is a spectrum of reasons why one of the most common binaries of martial arts discourse should be deconstructed. This binary is that of 'real versus fake'. Of course, it can take such forms as 'authentic versus inauthentic', or 'true versus false', and so on. But these are inadequate categories for any analysis, although they are tenacious. They keep returning. Many people involved in discussing martial arts organise their thinking by way of some kind of structuring reference to ideas of reality (good) and unreality (bad).
At the very least, any deconstruction attempts to isolate the terms and values we consciously and unconsciously use to structure our thought, to note their problematic aspects, and to displace things onto a different conceptual terrain. This process is not unique to deconstruction 'proper', of course. Similarly, one famous or infamous feature of Derridean deconstruction is its tendency to invert the usual order of things, and to reveal the ways in which things deemed 'secondary' are strangely 'primary'. But this too is not something unique to deconstruction.
Consider the discourse of reality or authenticity in taijiquan. We have already noted Adam Frank's account of its transformation from being a regional village martial art into being a modern urban physical culture activity (Frank 2006: 150). Because of this transformation, many people lament the loss of 'real' taijiquan, or at least its effective invisibility. However, Frank points out:
for the most part, the many millions of people who practice taijiquan in China for recreation are content to simply find a decent teacher and a relaxed group of peers with whom they can enjoy their morning practice. If they had to practice boxing, or even push hands for that matter, most of the park taijiquan would cease to exist. Its very popularity, its very power to reinforce notions of Chineseness, lies in the ease with which most taijiquan can be learned and disseminated. To practice 'real' taijiquan would spell the death knell for real taijiquan. (Frank 2006: 186)
Thus, here, there is a kind of inversion of the usual order of discourse: many may fetishize the idea of a 'real' taijiquan, but how many would actually practice such a discipline? This kind of question could open out onto a discussion of 'rebranding' or 'repositioning' taijiquan, so as to tap into the 'market' currently sewn up by aspirant students of Shaolin, for instance. But in this context, it is a rhetorical question. The point is that, in what it has become, in many registers, taijiquan means and is and acts as and does some very different things to something like Shaolin kung fu (although they cannot be entirely divorced, as we will see). As Frank sums it up:
taijiquan [i]s a master symbol of Chinese nationalism, an instance of consensual hegemony (Gramsci 1992) and an example of how national sports policy that actually predates 1949 replaces the 'real' (i.e., martial, individualistic, family-based practice) taijiquan with the 'imaginary' (i.e., performative, competitive taijiquan). Further, the state uses the real to strengthen its displacement by the imaginary. (186)
In this dense little passage, Frank condenses a lot. It warrants some unpacking.
Many readers appear critical of Frank's (and Wile's) arguments about the relationship between taijiquan and nationalism. This seems to be because a lot of the development of taijiquan predates the modern Chinese nation state. Accordingly, to attribute a nationalistic fervour or even flavour to the first archivists and intellectuals of taijiquan seems anachronistic; and this seems to be a problem of projection back from the position of the present – which is related to one of Althusser's definitions of ideology: the belief in the eternality and natural inevitability in all times and all places of the truth and reality of the values of the present. In other words, the challenge seems to be: how can something be nationalistic before nationalism or before the nation? The way Adam Frank expresses it is like this:
Like the Alamo's position in the construction and experience of Texas modernity, taijiquan in China 'is a shrine committed to memorializing a past event by authenticating a singular version of it' (Flores 2002: 33), but in this case, the 'event' is an ancient China whose history has been reconfigured by successive winners in the constant shift of dynastic power that has occurred over the centuries. (185)
Although it is common to approach such matters by way of reference to Benedict Anderson's work on the origins and spread of nationalism, Jacques Derrida's thinking of temporality in works such as Politics of Friendship (Derrida 1997) are also helpful. For there are indeed all sorts of conceptual and terminological difficulties involved in thinking back and discoursing on states of affairs before the establishment of nations. This is because nationalistic thinking – that is, thinking according to nation states – is so ingrained in us as to be almost inescapable. And yet, as Anderson notes in the early pages of Imagined Communities, the paradox is that whilst nations so often seem to present themselves as ancient, they are really modern inventions. Before nations there were monarchies, aristocracies, blood and feudal ties, and, above all, religious denominations. The idea of a nation was born comparatively recently, with (argues Anderson) the birth of the printing press as a technology that had all sorts of consequences, and the demise (partly because of the birth of the printing press) of the monopoly of Church Latin over the written word. This is because the printing press enabled the rapid dissemination of texts in indigenous languages. Martin Luther's protestant 'heresy' arguably only succeeded in challenging Rome because of the speed with which it was disseminated, in German.
Problems of temporality aside, Adam Frank does fascinating things with his creative reading of Benedict Anderson. For instance, he connects taijiquan and Chinese nationalism like this:
While Anderson is primarily concerned with print-capitalism in the creation of 'vernacular languages of state', I am extending his argument here to include taijiquan as a kind of kinesthetic vernacular language of state. Regardless of whether the language we are talking about is print or architecture or movement, the state controls the standardization of that language and privileges its standardized forms over other languages. Thus, certain taijiquan forms become vernaculars of the Chinese state, while others are ignored or subsumed within the nationalist discourse, if not banned outright. What goes on in park practice or sequestered, secret practice in family homes is often in tension with standardization. For the individual practitioner who might dabble in a family-based, 'traditional' form and something like the forty-eight-movement form developed for national and international competition, the contradiction between state and teacher, between interpretations of Daoism and socialism, between a family's history and a nation's history, may occur within a single body. (161)
But, is it really the case that – and, if so, how did it come about that – in Frank's words, 'At the level of the nation, taijiquan has become not only the single most popular exercise in China but also one of the most visible symbols of Chineseness that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) projects to the world'? (158-9) Frank's own answer starts with events in the 1920s, in which the promulgation of taijiquan was 'part of the construction of a whole national discourse about "strengthening the national body" that arose in China in the 1920s' (159). From this, he contends, taijiquan 'emerged from that discourse as a kind of "master symbol"'.
The temporality of this argument is unclear. But the word 'emerged' suggests that it was not always thus that taijiquan was always and already the necessary master symbol of Chineseness. In other words, we are dealing here with a process of becoming, rather than fixed or essential being.
In Politics of Friendship, Derrida introduces the term teleiopoeisis. This is a term he uses to describe the logic of the establishment of meaning and value for entities. What it means in practical terms is this. If we believe that a martial art (say, Mulanquan) is ancient, and stretches back to the historical era of Mulan, then we are a lot more likely to accord it a position of respect or even reverence than we are if we believe it was dreamed up by state apparatchiks in 1999. In other words, temporality, history, time, can be manipulated, for whatever reasons. If newness is valued then some old thing can be repackaged as brand new. If age is valued, then we can construct a lineage that shows we are direct descendants of Zhang Sanfeng.
This is particularly important in terms of our lives and values because, as John Mowitt once put it, where we believe we come from determines very much where we think we are and where we should be going. And this is known and exploited equally by ideologues and marketers. Thus, notes Frank:
The high point of a taijiquan tournament is not the push hands or full-contact fighting, but the public performance by the senior men and women who are the heads of their respective family lineages. The competition, which conforms to rules set down by the state, is really secondary to the world of the 'cultured individual' (Sapir 1949b) that the masters demos are said to represent. Competition and its apparatus provide the nuts and bolts for the state's construction of taijiquan as master symbol, but the masters demos are the spirit of the symbol, for it is here that the audience, both foreign and Chinese, can actually see dozens of people who embody 'the little old man' for whom they have been searching, massed in once place. (185)
Indeed, Frank is adamant that a (romantic, nostalgic, phantasmatic, allochronic, self-orientalising) nationalism permeates every level of discourse in and around taijiquan in China. 'Martial arts tournaments, martial arts tourist sites, and research produced in Chinese sports science and history journals contribute to a picture of how a nationalist discourse has developed in regard to martial arts in general and taijiquan in particular' (159). But, more:
Most taijiquan practitioners in the PRC, despite their attraction to one style or another, are not really practicing a particular taijiquan. Rather, by playing the slow form or learning a sword dance or two, they are enacting an imagined moment in the past in order to experience who they are, or who they are supposed to be, in the present. Taijiquan, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, produces both a 'feeling of' and a 'feeling for' Chineseness. (158-9)
But where did it all come from? Nationalism does not arise in a vacuum. According to Anderson, different nations were essentially forced into existence by virtue of the pressure on kingdoms and geographical spaces to self-identity as nations and play the (inter)national 'game', or to be pounced upon and become colonised. The older imperial orders were increasingly challenged by national forces of all orders. And as Frank puts it, in the case of China:
revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen acquired the right combination of military strength, political influence, and luck to stage a successful revolt and dismantle the imperial structure. Many of these radical revolutionaries, including Sun himself, were educated in Japan, the United States, or Europe. Their overseas experiences and educations heavily influenced their notions of China's priorities, the foremost of which was the cultivation of national identity – a sense of 'Chineseness' – that superseded the allegiance to local place and local language that had historically provided fertile ground for warlordism in China. They also hoped to use an energetic nationalism to overcome the sense of inferiority that many Chinese had felt in the seventy-five years since the Opium War. (161-2)
Key to the constitution of nationalistic sensibilities was the generation of a certain type of pride. And, according to Frank: 'the recently constituted modern Olympic movement, which almost immediately became a proving ground for national pride, held a special attraction for new officials concerned with "strengthening the national body." If Chinese athletes could excel in even a few Olympic sports, the resulting national pride would facilitate a sense of nation among the masses. It would also inevitably raise the new government's standing in the international community' (162-3):
Policy makers in the new government took this world of possibility to heart. Among other strategies, they reasoned that the easiest and quickest way to collect Olympic gold medals would be to advocate for the inclusion in the Olympics of 'folk sports' (minzu chuantong tiyu) at which Chinese athletes could immediately excel (Jing Cai 1959; Zhang Shan et al. 1996; Xu, Zhang, and Zhang 2000; Morris 1998). The most popular and obvious choice among these sports were martial arts, since high-level teachers already existed, and, to some degree, international interest had already been generated in Asian fighting arts through the slow popularization of Japanese judo, which began with the synthesizing of the art in the 1880s by Dr. Jigorō Kanō, 'a Japanese reformer steeped in the lore of Western physical education'. (163)
Frank has much more to say about the strengthening of the hold of nationalistic discourses on taijiquan. These occur in the modern era, but they build on materials 'fit for purpose', so to speak. So, rather than accusing academics such as Wile and Frank of projecting modern discursive formations 'back in time' ('nationalism', 'Chineseness'), it seems better to acknowledge the complex and subtle ways in which notions of the 'back in time', such as 'ancient' or 'essential Chineseness', are decidedly modern discursive constructs. As Rey Chow argues in Primitive Passions, a passion for the primitive (the ancient, the timeless, the state of nature, and so on) emerges in times of crisis in modernity or postmodernity (Chow 1995). In other words, modern discursive formations and socio-political configurations are actively involved in the construction of the very notions of the 'back in time' against and through which they are defined, as both history and, romantically, destiny.
References
Baudrillard, Jean (1983). Simulations. New York City, N.Y., U.S.A.: Semiotext(e), Inc.
Derrida, Jacques (1981). Dissemination. London: Athlone.
——— (1997). Politics of Friendship. London: Verso.
——— (1998b). Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
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