Qi & Taiji, Traditionalism & Transnationalism
Chinese martial arts are both national and international. They cross borders and are hence transnational. However, as Adam Frank emphasizes (Frank 2006), and to modify a phrase from Donna Haraway (Haraway 1991), the global dissemination (Derrida 1981) of Chinese martial arts involves a double process of the simultaneous erosion and intensification of nationalism wherever they occur.
Thus, outside of China, taijiquan and other 'traditional' Chinese martial arts carry the traces and weight both of the Chinese discourse of cultural nationalism and the discourse of Western orientalism (Chow 1993), and these forces often play themselves out in what Frank characterizes as 'the orientalizing and the self-orientalizing quality of the little old man image' (Frank 2006: 203).
But of course, the movement of any solitary signifier (Derrida 1981) or even of any interlocking cluster of signifiers, functioning to constitute a series or discrete and self-replication serial form (Mayer 2014), will not stay exactly the same, when moving from one context to another. Whether it is one signifier or one cluster of interlocking and interacting signifiers, the movement from one scene of discourse (say, China) to another (say, the USA) will involve a degree of modification, or 'cultural translation' (Chow 1995; Bowman 2010b), affecting both the 'text' and the 'context'. As Adam Frank puts it:
As a transnational practice, martial arts become a conduit for not only the movement of people but also the movement of identities. The localities that move from one space to another, through film, through products, through practices, and through individuals, constitute and reconstitute many forms of Chineseness. (Frank 2006: 207)
In the face of the problem of the phantasies that structure cross-cultural desire (on which point, see Chow's important essay about cross-cultural desire, 'The Dream of a Butterfly' (Chow 1998)), Frank notes that the unquestionably good thing about martial arts tourism or pilgrimage – or even, arguably, cross-cultural pedagogical relationships of any kind – is this: 'For foreign martial artists who travel to China in search of not just skills but wisdom, acquired from not just a teacher but a master, participation in the back-and-forth flows of the transnation becomes an unveiling process, a process of peeling away preconceptions' (207).
Of course, as Chow's discussion of cross-cultural desire suggests, the problem is that it is often the phantasy of the other culture as absolutely other that sustains the desire. Once the phantasy has been 'unveiled', the desire of and for either the other or the secret presumed to be possessed by the other, is at least jeopardized.
Of course, this could be said to depend on the nature of the desire and the nature of the desirer. In Chow's reading of the film version of M. Butterfly, one of the protagonists ensnared in the cross-cultural romance is able to continue to love once all has been 'unveiled', whilst the other party is not. So, rather than essentialising any of the components involved in such debates – desire, cultural difference, essentialism, etc. – it seems safer to begin from the observation that it all depends. In M. Butterfly, the French diplomat who (apparently) falls in love with a Chinese spy clearly has a completely different relationship to, well, their relationship, than his partner. And this makes all the difference.
The connections between Chow's discussion of the asymptotic, 'impeded' and constitutively 'imbalanced' character of cross-cultural desire in 'The Dream of a Butterfly' and any consideration of martial arts qua cross-cultural phenomenon are many. For instance, in Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man (2006), Frank hints at the problems – of cynicism and the demise of desire – that arise when myths have been shattered or 'unveiled'. Discussing the perpetual absence of the mythical 'little old Chinese man' that they had all once desired to meet and learn from, the practitioners are forced to reevaluate their desires and construct a new relationship with them, to them, or for them – in fact, perhaps, to revise and reconstitute their desires tout court. Either this or risk their martial arts learning projects and efforts 'burning out'. As Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, in psychoanalytic terms: it is the phantasy that structures the desire and sustains the relationship, through and through. In actual fact, Žižek paints a very vivid picture of the place of 'desire' in any sexual relationship: as he puts it, the 'truth' of sexual desire is not two people copulating and looking into each other's eyes and truly seeing each other; it is rather the fact that they are each indulging in a phantasy of the other; so much so that, for Žižek, the 'truth' of sexuality takes the form of the lone masturbator fantasizing about a certain 'type'. That is to say, for Žižek, even when two lovers are engaged in passionate sex, they are not exactly or entirely 'with' each other. In a sense, each is involved in a lone masturbatory phantasy.
Moving out of the realm of sexual desire and into the desire for other things, such as 'martial arts', phantasy is arguably also in play. And arguably this necessarily must change. As Frank reiterates, 'identity moves'. Those of us who have ever involved ourselves in activities like neigong exercises, which involve protracted periods of standing completely still should be able to attest to how crucially important 'belief' (a dimension of phantasy) is to our continued involvement in the activity.
In any case, it is clear that the international circulation of martial arts practices requires an analysis that spans or traverses many realms and registers. As Frank puts it, 'my concern is with the construction and experience of identity as both social and sensual, a position that requires moving beyond the macrolevel discourse through which globalization is usually theorized and instead maneuvering fluidly between history, political economy, and the personal stories of people who are both globalized and conduits of globalizations' (207).
This is why it is crucial to remember that, in the case of a Chinese practice like taijiquan, 'the actual movement of the art across borders through real human beings, involves a mutually constitutive dialogue between transnational images of Chineseness and the actual experience of practice' (208). The actual experience modifies, moves, and perhaps fundamentally transforms the initial state of fantasy/orientalism/discourse/identity. Perhaps.
I say 'perhaps' because it is not at all clear that such relations (hinging on 'phantasy') are, so to speak, constitutively 'translated', in the sense of modified in both directions, when taijiquan crosses from China to the USA or the West more generally.
To clarify what this means, and to try to weigh it up, it is helpful to ponder two different types or registers of 'cultural encounter' that Frank discusses. One is interpersonal. The other is linguistic and conceptual. The two are connected. In the first sort of example that Frank gives, we clearly see the dynamics of a potential transformation of preconceptions (aka 'prejudices'). But it quickly segues into the second, which seems far more knotty. Consider the following:
Non-Chinese students come to Wong's studio to experience Chineseness through taijiquan or other martial arts, to actually become Chinese for a few hours during their day. They expect Wong to enact a certain brand of Chineseness. Wong, in turn, both gives them what they want and confronts them about this expectation. The non-Chinese student comes looking for the little old Chinese man (even though Wong is young). Wong, on the other hand, wants no part of it, but he and other teachers who suffer similar instances of orientalization often feel that 'resistance is futile'. After all, taijiquan and qi-related media have become readily recognizable features in American popular culture over the last twenty years. (215)
Thus: a kind of orientalist desire initiates or plays a constitutive part in the non-Chinese choice of kung fu or taijiquan. The desire is to play at becoming Chinese, or finding out what it's like to be immersed in Chineseness. The teacher may want no part in this, but is able to capitalize on it, to a greater or lesser extent, and to challenge the cultural presumptions, again to a greater or lesser extent, depending. And, reading between the lines (but referring to other moments in Frank's discussion), we might say that various forms of 'overcoming' of 'identity' take place in the lessons – whether taking the form of 'realizing' that 'we're not so different after all' or, indeed, 'forgetting about identity/difference'. Accordingly, we are in the terrain of the possibility for cultural 'transformation', or at least modification.
However, here comes the twist: 'he and other teachers who suffer similar instances of orientalization often feel that "resistance is futile". After all, taijiquan and qi-related media have become readily recognizable features in American popular culture over the last twenty years' (215). In other words, no matter what interpersonal encounters there may be, perhaps these are overdetermined in advance by the attending discourse of Chinese martial difference or specificity, which boils down to one word: qi.
Frank astutely homes in on the discursive term 'qi', because in this term is condensed arguably everything about the difference and specificity of Chineseness vis-à-vis martial arts, at least. Of course, it is perhaps the case that in the West arguably all forms of Chinoiserie make some crucial reference to qi – from discourses about feng shui (which encompass both interior design and urban planning) to discourses about health, calligraphy and sexuality. Thus, to discuss 'qi' is to discuss 'Chineseness' in condensation and displacement.
The terms condensation and displacement derive from Sigmund Freud's epochal analyses in The Interpretation of Dreams. However, although Freud remain important in academic discourse, it was his student Jung who caught on in the popular imagination of counterculture America and Europe. And with the popularity of Jung came a certain reading of Chinese classics such as the Tao Te Jing. Frank points out that even a 'brief history' of the treatment of 'Chineseness' in the West reveals 'that the popularization of taijiquan as a product of Daoism has been closely linked with larger historical and geopolitical forces that have had a special resonance for particular generations. In the Europe and America of the 1920s and 1930s, Jung's and Wilhelm's work reached a large audience of intellectuals and artists' (212).
However, in a crucial passage, Frank encompasses the range of ways in which the 'real explosion of Daoism as popular culture in Europe and America … occurred in the 1960s, when Daoism, along with Zen Buddhism and various Maharajiisms, spread in the United States' (213). He notes that 'Taijiquan was very much a part of this resurgent interest in spiritual practices', not least because, owing to changes in US immigration laws, 'for the first time in American history, a critical mass of enthusiastic "native" teachers coalesced to support existing interest, as well as generate new interest among a well-educated middle class' (213). Moreover – and crucially – 'Daoism was one among several exotic philosophies that offered alternatives to existing paradigms, and thus it made an important contribution to counterculture ideology' (213). With this came a crucial 'institutional' response:
Popular presses like Shambala Books heavily weighted their catalogs toward Eastern mysticism. Editors at Shambala, Yoga Journal, Tricycle, and New Age magazine not only published on the basis of what they thought their public wanted to read, but often led the way in explicitly or implicitly linking practices like taijiquan to Daoism. It is not that the link between Daoism and taijiquan was 'invented' during this period. Douglas Wile (1996) argues convincingly that the Chinese literati made the link as early as the mid-nineteenth century. But the hunger for alternative spiritual paths, combined with the marketing of taijiquan as a 'path to ancient wisdom', created a perception among American taijiquan aficionados that there were appropriately ancient little old Chinese men out there waiting to share their secrets. Together with the powerful, iconic image of Charlie Chan, the popularity of Confucian sayings in fortune cookies (which were invented in California), folkloric iconography in Chinese restaurants (e.g., Chinese zodiac placemats), and the actual increase of elderly Chinese in the United States that resulted from relaxed immigration laws, the racialized image of the wizened old Chinese man firmly attached itself to the American imagination. True, some of the knowledgeable teachers who came to America at this time were in fact elderly and male. Zheng Manqing, the first great popularizer of taijiquan in the United States, embodied this image for many American practitioners, and that in turn fed the social-sensual construction of Chineseness for many Americans who studied taijiquan. (213)
Moreover, as is well known, the start of the 1970s brought Richard Nixon's Shanghai Communiqué, Bruce Lee films, and the TV show Kung Fu (212).
However, Frank spends some time pondering the significance of the first major sighting of taijiquan in a US film: namely, the improvised version of what appears to be the Zheng Manquing short form in Easy Rider (1969). He writes:
Easy Rider, starring Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, and Dennis Hopper, contained not only signs of flower children looking for America and free love, but also the earliest cinematic reference to taijiquan in an American film. Hopper and Fonda are hanging out at a desert farming commune. A theatre group (the Gorilla Theatre) has just finished performing for the community. Fleetingly, we see a man going through what appears to be a half-improvised version of Professor Zheng Manqing's taijiquan form on the stage. No mention is made of what is happening in the scene. The characters watching the scene appear to know what they are seeing, and the taijiquan all seems very normal to them. What we are left with is an indeterminate exoticization of 'the Chinese', sandwiched between images of sharing, free-spirited wandering, and nature. While the scene has no direct significance to the story line of Easy Rider, it is in retrospect the symbolic seed of an emerging New Age discourse. As a counterculture symbol, Easy Rider also raises the question of whether or not we can read American taijiquan as resistance to state control of the body. (215)
With this, Frank hits on a clear mutation occurring around taijiquan in its migration from China to the USA. From having acquired a kind of 'nationalist' (at least in the sense of 'folk'/'traditionalist') valence in China, in the US it loses this connotation, is stripped of nationalism, and becomes a kind of anti-nationalist symbol of 'nature'. This reflects its overdetermination by a West-produced 'Daoist discourse'.
It is thus as 'natural' and not as 'communist' that taijiquan comes to somehow 'oppose capitalism' in the 1960s counterculture of the USA. As Frank puts it: 'The communal setting of the taijiquan scene in Easy Rider and the overall message of resistance to capitalism and of a return to nature coalesce to associate taijiquan with that resistance' (216). Then, later:
For the Easy Rider generation, cultivating qi, along with free love and war protests, was equated with cultivating resistance to the domination of the body. In short, the 1960s in America can be seen as a return to good old-fashioned Daoist resistance to authority. In later American media representations, acts of resistance became closely equated with martial arts. (216)
Because 'qi-related practices are ultimately concerned with cultivating health in the body', this prompts Frank to ask the following question: 'If, as Foucault argues, the modern state exerts control over our bodies, and it is in the interest of the state to keep them healthy (…), then the question arises whether the practice of taijiquan in America constitutes a moment of agency beyond state control' (231).
The answer to this question would certainly be yes, were it not for the complexities of transnational exchanges and their macropolitical significance and status. For instance, Slavoj Žižek and many others have argued that precisely this kind of countercultural 'resistance', all wrapped up in a 'Western Taoism' or 'Western Buddhism' is in fact nothing more nor less than what Žižek calls the hegemonic ideology of postmodern capitalism (Žižek 2001).
I have engaged with this debate many times, so I will not do so again here. Instead, I will conclude by turning to what I earlier introduced as the more knotty dimension of cross-cultural migration and the question of cultural transformation related to that term of condensation and displacement for Chineseness, 'qi'.
As mentioned earlier, whilst it seems theoretically possible for practical encounters between people from different cultures to precipitate identity and discourse modifying transformations, the problem is that these encounters are already so to speak pre-constituted or preliminarily 'mapped out' by historical discourses which have provided expectations and prejudices, which mediate the encounters of individuals. Frank proposes that the structuring term of taijiquan encounters is the second-order semiotic term 'Chineseness'. But in the last chapter of his book he refines this to propose that a key discursive operator in all of this is the term 'qi'. So, what happens when 'qi' is translated from Chinese to English, or from China to America?
When a speaker 'borrows' a word, that act may involve specific strategies to communicate social messages beyond the meaning of the word. In the case of qi, the attempt to define the word actually provides one of the chief contexts for using it. In addition, even while the definition of qi remains unclear to the members of this community in which it appears, it is the very act of using the word that produces social solidarity, enhances the speaker's status, and evokes a shared image of an exoticized Chinese Other that supports a larger transnational discourse about qi. (220)
Thus, English language discourse about qi is always also going to be 'about establishing status and solidarity within a community of like-minded specialists' (220). This is because, 'As nonnative speakers, as borrowers, we … rely on higher-status members of our peculiar speech community (the community of taijiquan and qigong practitioners) to elaborate the parameters of how and when the word can be used. We also rely on these high-status members to serve as our conduits to a transglobal cultural phenomenon – the spreading of qi-related practices beyond China' (223).
The 'translation' or even just the employment of the term is never neutral. It involves all sorts of hierarchizing and affiliating operations:
As instances of transglobal cultural exchange, borrowed words can take on larger roles as measures of interests and values that cross geographic and political boundaries. Qi is one such instance. The increasing use of qi in English, especially in the last twenty years, provides us with a small window into how values, tastes, and beliefs in American culture – at least predominantly white, middle-class American culture – have paralleled, to some degree, those in Chinese culture. Qi, therefore, serves as an example of a living, moving Chinese identity, an instance of borrowing that goes well beyond language. (224)
Where else does it go? As Frank elucidates, such 'code switching' can relate to 'asserting political power or emphasizing social factors such as class, educational level, and race' (220). So it also goes into the forming of new group identities, hierarchies and types of relation. Some of these – perhaps, indeed, the vast majority – are inevitably going to be commodified relations. And it is here that processes of pitching, branding, marketing, packaging and repackaging come into intimate sensual-social contact with 'identity'. Frank discusses the aesthetics of the taiji and yoga exercise VHSs and DVDs of the 1980s and 90s:
The tapes, through words and images, tie taijiquan to New Age practices and to American conceptions of physical fitness. Spandexclad aerobics bunnies emphasize, in our minds, the importance of looking good over an esoteric Daoist quest for immortality. Images of the exotic Chinese also persist, though in a somewhat jumbled form. The Buns of Steel tape, for example, is filmed in a Japanese Garden, evoking nature and 'Orientalness', with the implication that Japanese and Chinese gardens share precisely the same aesthetic values. (227)
As such, in the face of such crass cultural/commodity hybrids, we might enquire into 'what has changed'? On the one hand, images of the 'East' remain orientalist through and through. The representations of 'Chineseness' are saccharine, crude and both geographically and conceptually incoherent, as with so much pure orientalism. But, on the other hand, everything has changed: the language, the elements involved, the juxtapositions and relations, the presence of so much that is Western, and so on. This is both hybridity and simulacrum. It presages the emergence of the arguably currently hegemonic 'oriental aesthetic' in Hollywood action cinema that was perhaps born with Blade Runner and that was certainly mature by the time of The Matrix (Park 2010).
As Frank points out, during the 1990s and early 2000s, 'the "sublime, exotic Orient" aesthetic is a regular feature in martial arts instructional videos that address qi' (225). In such texts, we often see 'the picaresque, exotic China: obligatory traditional architecture, astonishingly beautiful gardens, traditional Chinese instrumental music playing underneath [the] images, and all the while, the skyscrapers, overpasses, subways, KFCs, and McDonalds that make up modern Beijing and especially Shanghai are hidden from view, or at least minimized' (225).
However, as the 21st century marches on, and as the vast, spiraling magnificence and awesomeness of Chinese urban (post)modernity comes more and more into the foreground of what Park calls the 'oriental style' of not only action and martial arts films, east and west, but also instructional DVDs and martial arts discourse more widely, the questions may now becomes one of the future of the contours of the representation of 'qi' in the new urban aesthetic of the representation of 'Chineseness'. My proposition would be that it will continue to intensify, as what Rey Chow calls a 'primitive passion', or 'symptom' of the transnational and the urban (Chow 1995).
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.
Said, Edward W. (1995). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin.
Žižek, Slavoj (2001). On Belief London: Routledge.
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