Taiji Dreams: Orientalism as a political tool
Taiji Dreams
One way of characterizing the significance of Edward Said's many works, particularly those on 'orientalism' (Said 1995), but also those on the ideological conflict over Israel/Palestine (Said 2005), and so on, would be to say that he repeatedly shows certain connections between 'dreams' and 'politics'. Specifically, in Said, Western dreams and fantasies about 'the Orient' organise thinking, writing and action vis-à-vis countries and peoples deemed to be 'Oriental', and this thinking, writing and action feeds back into the production or perpetuation of orientalist dreams. The political implications are perhaps even clearer in his work on the conflicting dreams and fantasies about 'the Holy Land' that are shared in common by Jews, Muslims and Christians. These conflicting dreams have fuelled conflict in and around and over and about a territory – a territory that is for many of those involved more symbolic than physical – since the Middle Ages, and it continues today (Said 2005).
This kind of relation between dreams and lived practices has many dimensions. For instance, Cohen has shown the connection between nationalist ideological discourse and martial arts practice in Israel (Cohen 2009). And this is not surprising in such a context. But Adam Frank focuses on case studies that may be said to be a world away from the pressures of such contexts as studied by Cohen. Specifically, Frank looks at the ideological circulation and mutations of taijiquan as a signifier of Chineseness (Frank 2006) – a study which relates more closely to the earlier work of Said than the later.
Of course, Frank's work, emerging in 2006, is not a mere repetition or replaying of arguments made by Said in the 1970s – even though it is not uncommon for academics to continue to 'invent the wheel' first rolled out in Said's 1978 book, Orientalism (See, for example, my critique of Tierney (Tierney 2006) in my Theorizing Bruce Lee). Indeed, Frank combines Said's insights with those of thinkers like Benedict Anderson and a focus on lived, sensual, experiential relations, in order to configure the relations between 'dreams' and macropolitical forces:
The world of imagination offers an alternative means for understanding identity as something that is both socially and sensually constructed. Imagined identities, like imagined communities, can rise and fall through textual vernaculars. Again, I extend Benedict Anderson's notion of vernaculars here to include more than just print. In the realm of martial arts, they also include film, television, and poetry that is written in classical forms but intended to be recited aloud. (190)
Accordingly, as well as focusing on the ethnographic scene of the moment of cross-cultural interaction, Frank shows how even the physical-sensual interplay and senses of identity are supplemented by history and society by 'tracing a history of how martial arts texts, including visual texts, have contributed to the imagining of self in China' (191).
Crucially, Frank shows how easily and frequently there is a slippage between texts of different orders and registers: historical fact is conflated with legend – and legends of of all orders, whether from folklore, literature, or even contemporary film – in order to give an account of the present. As he observes:
I often asked practitioners in Shanghai to tell me about the origin of the art. With very few exceptions, they began with Zhang Sanfeng. However, as time went on, I noticed that the version of the Zhang Sanfeng story I was hearing bore a striking resemblance to a popular Jet Li film called Taijiquan Zhang Sanfeng. Whether the story spawned the movie or the movie spawned this particular version of the story is difficult to determine, but the story, told through film, passed on orally, and passed on through the 'ancient' Forty Chapters evokes, in Frederic Jameson's terms, conflicting modes of production that coexist and struggle within the same artistic process. (Frank 2006: 193)
All of the modes of inscription – writing, oratory, folklore, film, and even video games and comics – 'serve as teaching devices in the present': 'But because they are of the past, they also transmit experiences of Chineseness for both Chinese and non-Chinese people. They offer a framework for imagining the past' (193).
The imagination of the past has an effect on the present, and can be manipulated. This is what Derrida referred to as 'teleiopoeisis' (Derrida 1997) – the manipulation of understandings of the past to orientate fantasies, dreams, imaginings, understanding and practices in the present. Frank gives a stark example of this:
The ca. 1937 film The Legend of Mulan, for example, depicts the famous tale of a devoted daughter who takes the place of her aged father when troops are called to arms to fight invading barbarians. Within the context of 1937 China, The Legend of Mulan may be read both as a resistance to the incursions of the Imperial Japanese Army and as a modernist representation of Chinese womanhood. To echo Douglas Wile's sentiment about the popularity of taijiquan among nineteenth-century elites as a re-masculating process, Mulan might represent a call for social action to men who had become politically and militarily impotent under the double weight of colonization and Japanese militarism (Wile 1996). For the modern Shanghai person, however, neither the film nor the legend on which it is based is allowed to inspire resistance. Instead, in the midst of the anti–Falun Gong crackdown of 1999, the story of Mulan inspired the creation of a state-sponsored set of sword-and-fan dances, called mulanquan, practiced primarily by women. Mulanquan became the very symbol of legitimacy. (197)
As such a glaring example of institutional-ideological intervention illustrates, it is not 'simply' beliefs about the past that are modified and manipulated when history is reinvented along different axes. It is also belief and practice in the present. In other words, as is well known, the ideological control of historical knowledge can be used to great political effect. In these examples, we are seeing the state management of 'Chineseness'.
If Frank is right that the construction – or at least popularization – of mulanquan was a concerted effort to fill up the space formerly occupied by Falun Gong in China, then it is clear that the political management of imagination in this case is a matter of domestic cultural policy. Obviously, it may also have involved a calculation that Westerners and other foreigners may have been attracted to come as tourists to China to learn a (new) 'ancient' martial art related to the Disney film they had recently seen. But its primary context of intervention is clearly internal to the Chinese state.
But what is the status of 'taijiquan dreams' elsewhere, outside of China? Frank discusses martial arts migrants, pilgrims and tourists throughout his study. At one point he notes the time he disputed his Chinese teachers' opinions about students of taijiquan. According to Frank, his teachers would often voice the opinion that foreign students were becoming not only the most diligent students but also the majority of students (202). Frank himself disputed this with his interlocutors. But, he reports, in the context of a discussion of the emigration of martial arts teachers from China, there was 'a sense' among the practitioners 'that the little old Chinese man of yore, a symbol that appeared in novels and in films, a symbol of what was wisest and best in Chinese martial arts, had perhaps emigrated to America' (203).
He reports that one of the oldest and most senior taiji masters of the association he was involved with in Shanghai, Ma Yueliang of the JTA, 'had apparently noted the change earlier than most' (203). Frank speculates that Ma's insight arose
perhaps because he understood both the orientalizing and the self-orientalizing quality of the little old man image all too well through firsthand experience: foreigners venerated him through racialized lenses, and Chinese people venerated him as some sort of unfrozen mammoth from an idealized past. Yet, in the JTA, it was Ma who frequently commented that over-mystification of the art detracted from teaching it and learning it. Now, in the face of what they considered the new reality of Chinese martial arts, the caretakers of the JTA saw that Ma was right, for the former easy opposition of Chinese and foreigner melted away before their eyes as a new category of 'transnational taijiquan practitioner' emerged. In the face of such change, was it possible that taijiquan was no longer Chinese at all? (203)
The question of transnational taiji dreams is what we will examine 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.
Said, Edward W. (1995). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin.
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