Ideographic Modernism

Christopher Bush's bracing and insightful new book reconsiders the role that China played for a series of modernist writers in the early twentieth century, and it proceeds by way of a powerfully self-conscious central argument: that nothing about China mattered more than the image of its writing, which not only provided some of the most telling signs of China's difference from the West (literally, of course), but also reflected the period's broader preoccupation with the “question of media” (xvii) at a moment marked by the proliferation of such technologies as photography, recorded sound, film, and wireless communication. Thus Bush demonstrates, through closely observed case studies of Ezra Pound, Paul Claudel, Victor Segalen, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valéry, and others that the modernist attachment to China did more than simply channel long-standing variations on orientalism through the period's “make it new” aesthetic; it also drew on the example of Chinese writing to fashion surprisingly resonant and subtle responses to the “mediatic character” of twentieth-century life. For this discovery alone, Ideographic Modernism represents a remarkable accomplishment, and it takes its place within a growing body of critical work helping to expand both the geographic boundaries and linguistic compass of modernism as it has been canonized and taught. In placing a fascination with Chinese writing at the “intersection of [modernists'] technological and ethnographic imaginaries” (xvii), Bush lets us see how the invented notion of the “ideograph”—so famously enshrined by Pound to capture the peculiar aesthetic power of a language that was more than just letters on the page—was both flagrantly exotic and altogether native to a culture confronting, at almost every turn, “the various writings of the new technological media: photography, phonography, cinematography, and so on” (xvii). Modernism, as Bush describes it, turned to China in hopes of better understanding the consequences of “language's reduction to a reified, almost technical medium” that could seem inhumanly removed from everyday communication and yet also more enchanting in the “revelation of its material being in an explosion of textures, tones, and shapes” (3). “Ideographic modernism,” we might say, is what happened when the West finally realized that no languages were more foreign than its own.But Bush wants to make China matter for modernism in ways that exceed what might be accomplished from any straightforward reading, however theoretically nuanced and attentive, of its “image” in the West. Bush decisively navigates the historical terrain of China's representation in Anglo-American and European cultures from the Renaissance forward in the book's introduction, which plays on Ernst Fenollosa's terms, exploring “the Chinese written character as a Medium”—dropping “for Poetry” from Fenollosa's original title to suggest the larger stakes of Bush's return to one of the period's most important sites of orientalist assertion. Bush explores the antecedents for modernism's devotion to the ideograph within a larger intellectual and philosophical context, rounding up some of the usual suspects (Montesquieu, Michaelis, Hegel, Herder, Mill, Weber) but then turning to the work of media theorists and historians (McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Lisa Gitelman) whose interests at first glance seem only marginally connected to the discursive practices of sinology. At one level, Bush draws these lines of thought together to make clear just what it means to declare that “orientalism, the ideograph, and media theory grew up together” (21), namely, to remind us not only that the word “ideograph” has no equivalent in Chinese but also that the Western figures who invented it were among the most determined to think through “the cognitive and cultural consequences of writing, broadly construed” (21). Bush turns to media theory, then, less as an emergent discipline that might help us to see modernist orientalism differently and more as a discipline that itself emerges—in the form of McLuhan's commitment to mediums that are messages and Kittler's technological determinism—from a network of early twentieth-century understandings of Chinese writing as uniquely shaped by its own forms and materialities and therefore as uniquely powerful in shaping the subjectivities of its users. Or as Bush quite wonderfully puts it, “In any number of ways, the ideograph-stricken ‘Oriental’ prefigures the benighted victim of media: materialist, superficial, passive, knowing much trivia but no real History, and putty in the hands of despots” (22).On another level, however, Ideographic Modernism is highly aware that it might not be methodologically sufficient just to offer up more proof that Western writers were frequently invested in imagined, figurative versions of China to the exclusion of China itself. To the degree that Pound, Claudel, or Segalen looked to their respective “Chinas” to depict a civilization whose written language had largely lost its power to refer to (and therefore in) the contemporary world—becoming, in effect, a “poetic” medium that belonged neither to a Chinese present nor to any present Chinese in the world—“ideographic modernism” names a style of writing that is remarkably resistant to representation as a linguistic function. In keeping with the sophistication and recursivity of his examples, Bush makes claims that are hard to put simply, despite the terrific economy with which he often operates. Bush is interested in figures whose own interests in China almost spontaneously confess to being merely figurative interests in “China” at the slightest application of critical pressure. Segalen offers the most shameless variation on this theme when he writes of the Chinese, while in China himself, that to be honest he doesn't “think of them at all” but only what he “can imagine about them ... in a living and real form beyond all reality, that of the work of art” (74). Yet neither here, in a reading of Segalen's Stèles that anchors one of the book's most captivating chapters, nor elsewhere in Ideographic Modernism does Bush let his central figures' resistance to the realities of China become the occasion merely to indict their politics. This is not to say that Bush excuses any of the orientalism that so palpably informs much of the literature at issue but rather that he wants us always to remember that any system of writing—whether an “ideographic modernism” or, say, a “new modernist” critique—runs the risk of foundering if it does not adequately think through the relationship between the world that it refers to and the world that makes it possible in the first place. For Bush, modernist studies has lately shown an “excessive devotion to a model of contextualization” that can readily “[ontologize] the distinction between text and context, as if the distinction were somehow an inherent property of writings rather than a way of describing how we choose to relate them to one another” (xv). And in the specific case of the “China” that seems so fantastically unreal in light of the China we think we now know better, “contextualization” might be even riskier since, as Bush notes, “for all its talk of globalization and transnationalism, contemporary modernist studies knows less and cares less about China than did many writers and thinkers in the modernists era itself” (xiv).With respect to Segalen, who traveled and worked extensively in China, or Pound, the force of Bush's argument demands that we take seriously the fact that figures fully capable of knowing better “cared” more about what their fantasies made possible; thus Bush treats Stèles as one of the period's most radical experiments with an “impersonal and subjectless” (80) writing, while Pound's imagism registers the desire for a “universal poetic language grounded in the universality of visual experience” (59). For both, Bush argues, the forms of Chinese language mediated some of the ways that visual representation came to challenge the written word in an age of photography, and recourse to the idea of the ideograph allowed them to conceptualize the sort of person—always racialized as “oriental”—who might best grasp the traces that technologies inscribe on history and culture. In other chapters, however, Bush proceeds more inductively, charting references to China in writers such as Benjamin or Valéry that previous critics have tended to minimize or gloss over. And Bush is marvelously persuasive when he suggests that what might appear as instances of China's casual “exemplarity” for Western intellectuals are in truth deeply telling symptoms of the West's pervasive use of Chinese examples whenever “a signifier of the signifier” is needed (100). Bush charts, for example, just how frequently Benjamin invokes Chinese subjects or comments on China itself, and he revealingly juxtaposes some scenes from Berlin Childhood Around 1900—where the young Benjamin recalls his absorption in a common piece of porcelain—and passages from his essays on mimesis and mechanical reproduction that turn on similar moments in which problems of “embodied cognition”(107) return to materials that are, Bush helps us see, effectively derived from China. Bush finds China at the complex origin of Benjamin's “late corporeal-mimetic account of cinema,” which links the naive pleasures children take in imitation to the rise of mass culture in the era of film; Bush brilliantly follows the course that Benjamin charts from his own embodied fascination with a mediating piece of “China” as a child to the “effects of technological media” writ large by cinema (113–14).Ideographic Modernism concludes with a chapter centered on Valéry's story “The Yalu,” which features one of the only figures of “le Chinois” is his extensive corpus. But from this minor reference Bush is able to reconstruct how Valéry imagines the phenomenology of the global in a world where wireless communication has voided any sense of distance between China and the West. The last word in Bush's incisive and insistent book is not, however, given over to another version of how modernism “discovered” China's presence in the world. He leaves us instead with a more profoundly troubled and intellectually engaging sense that the West has perhaps at last exhausted its ability to forget that China has in fact been with us ever since we have (or have not) been modern, as close and strange as figures on a page of writing we now realize has been about “us” all along

Chinese history and philosophy · History · Travel Writing and Literature