Taijiquan & Deconstruction, part 4: Hegemony and Identity
4. Hegemony and Identity
The academic predilection for terms such as 'discourse', 'hegemony', and even the old-familiar 'identity' still sometimes prompts questions and attracts criticisms. However – and despite my recent criticisms of Adam Frank's focus on 'identity' – I would argue that these three terms (along with the notion of 'textuality', as developed by Barthes, Derrida and Kristeva (Mowitt 1992)) constitute a kind of holy trinity of key terms for understanding many aspects of culture. They are equally essential to understanding many issues in martial arts studies too.
The theory of hegemony as I use it comes from the rethinking and retheorization of the work of Antonio Gramsci by the political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). It is important because one essential thrust of the theory involves the idea that what something 'is' is determined in and by 'discourse'. An identity is never given, it is made. What makes an identity are all manner of social, cultural and political statements and decisions about it – the types of conversations had about it, the kind of ideas connected with it, the place it has or is given in relation to other practices, ideas and institutions, and so on. Thus, formulations like: identities are produced by discourses. Moreover, discourses are 'structured in dominance': different discourses have different fields of agency, different types of connections, different degrees of 'force and law'.
Hence, what teenagers in the 1970s and 1980s felt about nunchakus or shuriken (that they were cool, that they were desirable, that they were a must-have, etc.) is only one type of discursive formation. There are others: what institutions such as school teachers, the police, the government, film censors, and so on, feel about such weapons is quite a different matter. Their discourse is hegemonic in contexts that can lead to the banning of such weapons from film and TV screens (as the British Board of Film Classification did to nunchakus and shuriken between the 1970s and 1990s), from public places, or indeed from possession full stop. However, this type of dominance may limit but may not stop the amateur production of these weapons in private garages, workshops and school metalwork and woodwork classrooms (as happened in the UK between the 1970s and 1990s).
There are a number of points to be noted from this. One is that the same item or identity can have different meanings, statuses and values in different contexts. In other words, one thing can 'be' many different things for different people, in different contexts and at different times. (As I noted in Theorizing Bruce Lee, as well as being a fashionable item in martial arts and teen gang culture in the 1970s, nunchakus also holds a symbolic status in other discourses, being as it was reputedly a weapon of the colonised indigenous populations in the Ryukyu Islands – thus, it was dripping with a kind of 'postcolonial cool', especially after Bruce Lee beats the Japanese Samurai sword wielding bad guy in Fist of Fury/Jing Wu Men).
Another point to be noted is that meaning and value are created discursively. Why did the nunchaku become and object of desire for some and a problem to be regulated or eradicated for others? It became these things thanks to its cinematic presence in Bruce Lee films. Without Bruce Lee films, no one in the UK would have known about or wanted nunchakus, and hence it would not have become an object of attention for any significant discourse.
Accordingly: discursive visibility and presence involve mediation (such as cinematic representation). This is why a large part of the various forms of 'banning' nunchakus involved taking them out of visibility. Even as late as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films, UK viewers were not allowed to see the nunchakus in the film. It was only with DVD rereleases of Bruce Lee films in the UK in the late 1990s that the nunchaku scenes started to reappear, unabridged.
The logic here involves an equation: no discursive representation (in film and TV) equals no knowledge of, no desire for, and no use of the object. This censorship was 'leaky' in the 1970s and 1980s because viewers saw these items in various ways in versions circulating before and circulating after the censorship.
We could continue this reflection on the logic (or illogic) of censorship, but this would take us away from the discussion I would like to focus on here, which is that of the relationship between discourse, hegemony and identity.
In cultural theoretical terms, identity is always double. Often this is phrased as 'identity is relational'. But I prefer to say 'identity is always double'. This is because one's personal identity will be determined by wider issues of cultural identity. In fact, the term identity is often used interchangeably to refer to either personal identity, group identity or national, cultural, ethnic or gender identity, and so on. Sometimes this slippage between the micro and the macro elicits criticism about the use of the term 'identity'. But my point is that the term is irreducibly ambivalent because it is irreducibly double. It is double because it is relational. This means that when we speak of something like 'Chinese identity' we are both doing so in a context and referring to a nation and referring to an ethnicity and referring to a subject. Well, if not 'referring', we are at least evoking.
This is one reason why Adam Frank employs the trope of the taiji tu or yin-yang symbol to structure so many dimensions of his book Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man (Frank 2006). Individual identity cannot be divorced from some construction of collective identity. It will always be constructed through it. And of course collective identity bears down on and impacts upon individual identity.
In other words, identities are produced in discourse, and in different discursive contexts, hegemonies form. This happens at the micro and the macro level, and in all sorts of different contexts – media, political, institutional, cultural, subcultural, academic. Thus we can apply terms like 'hegemony' and 'discourse' to practices and contexts of any level. They are relational terms and do not imply scale. The concepts derive from political theory, but there is no reason why, for example, a type of music could be said to have hegemony on a given radio station, and reciprocally within given households. The values and articulations of that radio station could be said to be hegemonic to the extant and within the contexts that it is dominant. If you are listening to Radio 4 you are not listening to Radio 1, 2, 3, or 5. And if political and economic movers and shakers are listening to and going on Radio 4, then it could be regarded as a dominant or hegemonic entity or identity.
Anyway, identity is double. This is why nationalistic discourses appeal to individuals to consent to collective projects and identifications. When a collective is constituted through a shared identification, then identity is coming into being. And it is double.
In what follows, I will work through some of Adam Frank's points in relation to the ideological establishment of the identity of taijiquan in China through the 20th century. As he observes:
For the reformers who began the slow process of modernizing China's bureaucracy in 1912 … the challenge was to channel this resentment [at the losses of the Opium War] into a positive energy that would place China in a strong-enough economic position on the world stage to eventually allow it to wrest foreign concessions and 'leased' territories such as Hong Kong and Macau from foreign control. The creation of a national physical fitness movement was one among many such projects. (Frank 2006: 162)
Strong bodies, strong identities, strong characters, strong national characteristics, strong nation: such is the logic. This is part of domestic policy. As mentioned before, many of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionaries had been educated in the US, Japan or Europe, and 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). Part of that nationalistic fervour was to be produced through sport.
As Frank puts it, the theory was that 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). Here, domestic and foreign policy intersect.
The year 1936, when the famous Berlin Olympics in which Adolph Hitler walked out on the ceremony that saw Jesse Owens and other African American athletes anointed with medals, was also seminal for early Chinese attempts to make taijiquan an Olympic event. Participating nations were given an opportunity to show off their national athletic arts. The Chinese fielded both men's and women's martial arts teams that performed short, modified taijiquan sets created by several teachers just for the occasion. (166)
Unfortunately, however, 'this planned, intellectualized approach to taijiquan virtually disappeared with the Japanese occupation that began in earnest in 1937. Within a few years, most of the top martial artists had been killed or fled the city' (167). But afterwards, 'The Party's glorification of martial arts and the ongoing push to popularize taijiquan were both a continuation of Guomindang support for martial arts before the war and a continuation of the cultural policy that Mao outlined during the 1942 Yenan Forum (…). Taijiquan and other "regional" martial arts were folded into the category of minzu chuantong tiyu ("traditional folk sports"; …)' (168).
Wile notes that 'the Cultural Revolution disrupted and almost destroyed [many martial arts organizations … which were branded by Red Guards as examples of feudalism' (168). However, by the 1980s the Chinese Communist Party were starting to become much more supportive of legitimising martial arts institutions, and also actively promoting the sporting dimensions of martial arts again:
By that time, the Party became even more energetic about promoting the tournament system, and local, provincial, and national-level professional martial arts teachers found opportunities to link with their foreign counterparts as the door to cultural exchange opened wider. The International Shaolin Festival at Zhengzhou became one of the most visible manifestations of this combination of local interests and state-level cultural policies. It also served as a kind of sensual festival of identity construction, where audiences and performers could exchange notions of nationalism and internationalism through the structured world of the tournament. (168)
Throughout all of this historical transformations, the interplay of personal senses of identity, group senses of identity, and national senses of identity should all be emphasised. As Frank notes, in the atmosphere in and around these major tournaments in China, 'those of us who practiced Chinese martial arts shared a camaraderie that seemed to transfer readily across national, cultural, even stylistic boundaries'. Then, ominously, the first line of the next paragraph reads: 'At least on the surface' (Frank 2006: 157).
The sense of foreboding conjured up here refers not to enmity, but rather to the force exerted by nationalistic identifications that subtend and often trump any other form of bonding at these events. This is so, even though, as Frank observes:
Throughout the city, but especially in the vicinity of the stadium, banners proclaimed unity in Chinese and English: 'To make progress together' declared one banner in English, while a Chinese rendition said 'Using martial arts to become friends and make progress together' (yi wu hui you gongtong jinbu). As one of the largest comprehensive martial arts tournaments in China, the Zhengzhou tournament attracted participants from dozens of countries. (157)
This all indicates the emergence a new form of business 'marketing logic', organised by branding and 'networking', so as to make contacts. The branding plays on the strange nexus of 'popular conceptions of Daoism as individual cultivation' (185) combined with stalls selling 'souvenirs that seemed to have little or nothing to do with martial arts but had much to do with martial arts tourists fulfilling a dream by traveling to China for the first time' (157).
Moreover, the events are thoroughly internationalised ('The tournament itself adhered to international rules, rules that had largely been developed as part of a transnational effort led by the Chinese government's sports bureaucracy to add Chinese martial arts events to the already existing Olympic repertoire of Japanese judo, Western-style boxing, fencing, and various forms of wrestling' (158)). And the organisation not only enables but actively promotes a preferred type of martial arts tourism ('At the conclusion of the Zhengzhou tournament, a few days remained to visit the Shaolin Temple and to attend one of the largest martial-arts-oriented performances in the world: the Shaolin Festival in Dengfeng, a key conduit for both the national and transnational transmission of Chinese identity as it is conceived through martial arts' (175)).
Via these and other examples of the logic of commodification conceived as part of a new 'vernacular language of state' (including discussion of tourism to the Chen village and the Shaolin Temple), Frank hammers home the point that:
The Chinese government had been very astute in understanding that martial arts in China are simultaneously separate and of a piece. In the nationalist project, Shaolin and taijiquan were not only easily lumped together but actually lumped together in the public imagination through movies and television. Therefore, it was no surprise that the tournament in Zhengzhou, ostensibly devoted to Shaolin, included taijiquan events, or that Shaolin people competed in full-contact fighting and push hands at taijiquan events. Images of the nation thus became inextricably tied to images of martial arts. (182-3)
Martial arts, then, become a vehicle for the articulation of a dimension of national identity (qua nationalism). But this articulation is also couched as inclusionary and border crossing: it involves appeal to an international community of practitioners, fans, believers and consumers. However, this culture-crossing is subtended by an economic logic: making connections, networking, making 'progress' happen.
None of this is to say that individual entities or the events themselves are 'false'. Rather it is to indicate the extent to which identities are double – sometimes even duplicitous. The devout spiritual believer who purchases accordingly; the friends who are friends purely for business aspirations; the international connections for national reasons: none of these things are new or scandalous or unique to martial arts. They are discursive forces and relations that constitute relations and identities. What seems hegemonic here is a clear chiasmus of nationalist and economic forces.
This would be a macro dimension of the relations between identity, discourse and hegemony. But, as Frank also demonstrates, discourses produce hegemonies and identities in all kinds of ways. His account of the academic discourse around taijiquan is what I will turn to next.
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.
Mowitt, John (1992). Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Durham and London: Duke.
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