Just Listening: An Introduction

Abstract

The essays collected in this special issue all respond to a single question: how have the producers of Chinese literature, thought, art, science, and popular culture conceived of their relationship with the nonhuman beings—creatures organic and inorganic, animal or technological—that surround us as humans? While ranging across time periods and training their sights on vastly different objects, these essays manifest a particular interest in examining how voice (together with its notable absence)—as it slips from phenomenon to figuration and back again—appears to set the boundary that both separates and enacts engagement between the human and nonhuman realms. This introduction brings these essays into conversation with each other to highlight some of the unforeseen patterns they manifest as a whole. Among these is the chronological: read in order, these essays hint at a growing awareness of humans’ incapacity to connect, whether with one another or with the nonhuman: an emerging sense that voice does not necessarily correspond to the subjectivity of those that emit or withhold it or that, even if it did, there would be no sure way for a hearer to establish that correspondence, let alone respond with meaningful and appropriate actions or words.

In April 2023 a group of scholars of premodern and modern China, working in a variety of subdisciplines, gathered to consider one central question: how have the producers of Chinese literature, thought, art, science, and popular culture conceived of their relationship with nonhuman beings—creatures organic and inorganic, animal or technological—that surround us as humans? To what extent do their works depict, sometimes thoughtfully and sometimes inadvertently, these nonhuman entities as possessing agency, and what exactly is implied, revealed, or realized by these depictions? What can we learn from examining Chinese cultural artifacts through this lens?

This special issue offers a selection of papers presented at that symposium, titled “Hearing Things: Voices of the Nonhuman in Chinese Literary and Visual Culture.” The decision to build the title around voices was, in fact, made casually, inspired by the title of a panel convened at the 2020 annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies. A common marker of agency and interiority, evocative of both body and mind, the metaphorical attribution of voice to nonhuman entities would, I supposed, simply and efficiently convey the goals of the project. The phrase hearing things then emerged naturally: not just because a voice is something one hears, and not just because we don't expect “things” to have voices, but also because the phrase as a whole colloquially evokes imagination and uncertainty: am I, after all, just hearing things? In short, the title seemed to efficiently highlight a key assumption underlying discussions of the human-nonhuman interface: the inextricable connection between the presence of subjectivity and its recognition by another subject. And so, this became the title that went out in the call for papers, built around an almost-cliché placeholder, intended to suggest such presumed human attributes as agency, interiority, subjectivity, and consciousness.

What was not intended, though, was an insistence on aurality as such. So, it was a surprise to discover upon receiving the conference abstracts that the words hearing and voices had taken on a momentum of their own, having elicited essays that evince a shared interest, to a greater or lesser extent, in considering the nonhuman-human interface through the consideration of sound, specifically in the trilateral relationship of noise, language, and silence. As these essays make apparent, the categories of voice and hearing introduced a particular set of conceptual connotations, not least of which pertain to the question of how voice as a phenomenon, as something that is heard and understood, functions in tandem with its use as a figurative device signaling subjective experience and agency. In the essays collected here, voice (and its absence) serves, to varying degrees and in different ways, both as the vehicle of a message and as a message in itself, signifying the presence of an entity that has the capacity to make itself heard as well as the meaning of what that entity is saying.

Our contributors ask, for example, what are we hearing when the power of intelligible speech is bestowed upon a tree? And, conversely, what does voice refer to when it takes the form of shrieks and gibberish, spouted by the human protagonist featured in an anomaly tale? What kind of voice is implied in the unheard meditations of a painted monkey or in the bronze bell that chimes out on its own? More generally, what are the conditions that allow any of these things to be heard, not to mention understood? These questions and more, all drawn from the essays collected here, situate voice and hearing on a continuum extending between their existence as embodied, empirically experienced phenomena, on one end, and their use in the figurative representation of something intangible, on the other: an interiority, or an agency, of the kinds generally associated with the quintessentially human. Never simply a phenomenal event and never purely a metaphor, always communicating something of both, the voices we encounter in these essays sit on the continuum between the two, just as the entities that emit those voices are thereby positioned on the continuum extending between the human and the nonhuman.

Each essay in this issue, then, presents a text or an artifact—whether a poem or painting or statue, a film or cartoon or anecdote—that bids us listen to the beings and things from which we do not normally expect intentional, let alone intelligible, audible expression. They invite us to hear and understand, if not the shaped and inviting resonance of voices and sounds, then their inchoate and eloquent withholding. In this way, our contributors afford us an opportunity to consider how their chosen objects function as both things and figures and, at the same time, both as humans and as something not quite that.

Sharing the Stage

“Hearing Things” does not arrive in a discursive vacuum. It readily aligns with other discussions of issues that are topical and urgent—if also venerable and endlessly perplexing. Philosophers, theologians, and makers across the broadest range of languages and cultures—with China not least among them—have long been pondering, shaping, and challenging beliefs about human uniqueness, superiority, and centrality whether through philosophical reflection, religious practice, or artistic production. The widespread and enduring nature of this questioning is reflected here, in an issue encompassing topics that range from the third-century BCE philosophical compilation Zhuangzi to the twenty-first-century cinema of Guo Baochang 郭寶昌, and much that lies between.

As enduring as such questioning has been, however, there is still no denying the breathtaking rapidity and intensity of the recent transdisciplinary growth in interest in the broad category of the nonhuman, a surge spurred most obviously by the challenges posed by climate change and artificial intelligence. Given the enormity and urgency of these challenges, what can we hope to contribute to this wealth of thought about the nonhuman? As scholars in the humanities, what are we trying to learn from this modest collection of Chinese artifacts?

One answer is that the reflections offered here may help us attain greater lucidity regarding what we, as humans, can (and cannot) know about our world and our place in it, as opposed to what we have long believed. From texts to objects, all of the things examined here invite different modes of knowing, modes that bid us, as humans, to listen—in all senses of the word—differently and better, to recognize the porosity of the boundary separating us from the seemingly inarticulate Other. This, our contributors seem to suggest (without directly moralizing), might make us humans more human, better able to deploy not just our consciousness but also our quintessentially human conscience. Haiyan Lee, in expressing her own goals as a literature scholar working in the Anthropocene, seems to articulate that very idea when she expresses her intention “to demonstrate how literature's thick narratives can engender an ethics of care by bringing particular instances of non-human distress into aesthetic, affective, and moral proximity with us.”¹ Perhaps, by exposing and confronting our collective, perduring belief in human centrality and superiority (if not our proprietary hold on interiority), and by finally overcoming our refusal to perceive our own limitations, we just might start to resemble the ethical humans we sometimes imagine ourselves to be.²

Some readers may feel that such an ethics of care, as desirable as it is, does not quite measure up to the level of activism today's crises require. But many scholars differ on this point, especially those who explicitly position themselves in the Anthropocene, whether in their embrace of such fields as systems theory, new materialism, environmental humanities, animal studies, or plant studies. They hold out the hope that their interpretive frameworks will do some real-world good. Accordingly, they orient their work toward the goal of inspiring effective remediating action by other actors in the world, aspiring to spark a collective change of heart and a shift in perspective that would expand our capacity for compassion and, consequently, even spur those in power to change course. After all, some argue, this has been done before, as exemplified in the history of such action-oriented fields as gender studies (and its predecessor, women's studies) and ethnic studies.³

One early touchstone for this ever-growing community of scholars is Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, published in 2010 by the political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett. Articulating the recognition that human existence on Earth is not only not central to the planet's existence but, more to the point, is far from benign, Bennett's work coincides with the emergence of the field of environmental humanities, which began to take hold around that time.⁴

Bennett introduced a particularly evocative term, vitality, into the then-burgeoning conversation. She wonders how things might change if we were to compel humans to share center stage with the many other things with which we share the planet. In her words, what would happen “were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?” (emphasis added). Then, by way of explanation: “By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”⁵ Her list of “things” notably excludes all that is organic, from the obviously sentient, nonhuman beings (that is, animals) to the other seemingly insentient-yet-organic things that populate the natural world—an omission rendered all the more noticeable by her association of things with bodies. Bennett's curatorial gambit seems more action oriented, more rhetorical, than substantive; if one can conceive of the embodied vitality of a copper pipe, for example, it becomes less challenging to recognize that quality in a cow. Or, put in another way, it is easy, almost automatic, for us to project propensities and tendencies onto a lion or even a tree, but we need to be taught to credit a gallon of oil with its own agency. She proposes this fundamental shift in categories in the hope that such acts of downright poetic attention and imagination might change not just minds but also actions and, in doing so, perhaps avert disaster—that a shift in philosophical direction might contribute to if not single-handedly inspire much-needed shifts in policy and social behavior.⁶

Since the publication of Bennett's book, a prodigious amount of work has been done with these goals in mind, treating cultural artifacts of all sorts from all periods, from works of literary, musical, ritual, and visual art to advertising copy, ephemera, and product design. Much of this work demonstrates that people have actually been grappling for centuries with the possibility of nonhuman subjectivity. Joyce E. Chaplin, for example, in the Lovejoy Lecture she delivered in 2016, does not hide her exasperation with what seems like our willful, self-serving refusal to see the obvious or, more to the point, to listen to things (as opposed to the more open ears of the ancients). Responding directly to the rhetorical question embedded in the title of her lecture—“Can the Nonhuman Speak? Breaking the Chain of Being in the Anthropocene”—Chaplin asserts, in a decidedly clipped tone: “The answer is easy, the answer comes first: yes, absolutely, the nonhuman can speak. Consider animals. Of course they speak. To be precise, they communicate with each other. And, moreover, they do so to transfer information that matters to them. By these measures, they do speak, and meaningfully, and—more to the point—that makes them comparable to us.”⁷

With this, Chaplin launches an argument that not only doubles down on the human-decentering premises and promises of the term Anthropocene but also reminds us that (even in the West) there have long been philosophers who “did not assume a hierarchy of human above nonhuman (often by valorizing thought and speech).”⁸ For her, as for the contributors to this issue, speech—and we must assume, by extension, voice—is not metaphorical, or not merely so. Her tone, if not her stance, is more polemical than Bennett's; she repeats at various points that we must face the fact that humans constitute a deleterious “geological force” acting on a vulnerable and suffering planet whose protestations we simply refuse to listen to. And, she argues, time is of the essence: “We are at a historical watershed. Our position relative to nonhuman animals, as one of superiority (which has been used to silence and dominate other humans, as well), is an artifact of high modern confidence, obviously misplaced. Now or never, we must replace our contempt for the nonhuman with appreciation and a sense of obligation.”⁹

Like Bennett, Chaplin is calling for a change in our subjective experience of the nonhuman—specifically, for the replacement of our contempt and disregard with appreciation and a felt indebtedness. Unlike Bennett, however, her target audience is not composed of movers and shakers, policy makers and politicians. It is more narrowly academic, much like our own readers. Yet, for Chaplin, only academics—and especially those working in the “history of ideas”—possess the tools with which to examine our societies’ ethical positions and reshape their aesthetic frameworks, and to thereby save the world from us and us from ourselves.¹⁰ The conviction that humanistic studies, specifically, can help produce real change is shared by others, including the scholar Chia-ju Chang, whose work focuses on Chinese environmental humanities: “Humanist thinkers understand that environmental problems are not simply technological or policy issues. Rather, they are implicated in a world where cultural symbols, political systems, and religious values still rule the way people produce, consume, and govern their lives. Hence, the current environmental crisis is a crisis of human habitus, narrative, and imagination.”¹¹

Both Chaplin and Chang draw attention to the impact of professional and disciplinary boundaries on both the shape and efficacy of their own efforts to inspire those in power to listen better and shift directions. They seem to view these boundaries favorably, as providing the clear and practical parameters for action. But others, we know, do not share this view and protest that social and political institutions of all sorts—including that of the nation itself—impose tragically hobbling limitations on what can be done, limitations that must be overcome if anything is to change. Lawrence Buell, a pioneer in the field of ecocriticism, is one such thinker. He does not deny the power that is still in the hands of scholars, but he argues that, if we are ever to turn our “appreciation and sense of obligation to the nonhuman” into effective action, scholars must first step back from their resolute focus on their particular national archives and free themselves from the prison house of their own languages.¹²

And indeed, language is where he feels the work must begin. He thus proposes a collaborative, translingual and translational, globally oriented keyword project. For anything to change, we (humans) must figure out both what we are talking about and how we should talk about them to one another; we need to look squarely at, rather than past, the languages we have thus far been treating as transparent and find ways to connect them, just as the global environment is itself connected: “The planetary scope of the multiple environmental ‘crises’ facing earth and earthlings in the twenty-first century requires a capacity to communicate on a planetary scale, in simultaneous recognition of shared concerns and cultural particularities, for which we are only now starting to generate the requisite vocabularies.”¹³

There existed at that time just such a project, already in the works, bearing the working title “Keywords in the Study of Nature and Culture,” which Buell describes with a mix of enthusiasm and frustration. It did eventually materialize—but not in the form he had been hoping for.¹⁴ Still, the recognition that the environment is intrinsically a transnational issue and that transnational issues require, as both a starting point and a continuous goal, a thoughtful approach to translation has been gaining traction.¹⁵ Even if the most ambitious iteration of that vision is never achieved, however, the observation that gave rise to it has sparked some meaningful, if more restrained, responses. The best of these manifest genuine curiosity above all: a desire to approach the non-Anglophone world, not with the intention of testing the validity of cherished theories in “foreign” contexts, and even less of imposing a prefabricated framework to “make sense” of what is unfamiliar. Rather, they proceed from the conviction that the local is the starting point for the global.

East Asia—China, Japan, and Korea—figures large in early efforts to develop a transnational, translinguistic approach to ecocriticism.¹⁶ Nevertheless, to some degree the belief that East Asian cultures were somehow unaware of, or wholly rejected, a human/nonhuman binary seemed to persist among writers both Asian and Western, at least enough to inspire, most notably, the work of Mark Elvin and Karen Thornber, both of whom persuasively demonstrated that East Asia's land and its resources were exploited in ancient times with as much abandon as anywhere else.¹⁷ Even more stunning at the time is Thornber's handling of the paradoxical (if unsurprising) reality that, notwithstanding the wealth of nonhuman-centering philosophical, doctrinal, and literary writings, there is no shortage of early texts that explicitly pass judgment on the modification and exploitation of natural resources for human consumption, usually expressing praise but also, occasionally, opprobrium.¹⁸ Haiyan Lee, who views even the practice of literary anthropomorphism as a form of symbolic exploitation, adds early Chinese fictional writing to the list of infractions, arguing that only in contemporary times have Chinese novelists stepped away from the use of anthropomorphism and engaged fully with the alterity of nonhuman creatures.¹⁹ Since then, we have witnessed a broadening of the study of the nonhuman world in Chinese history, from what had largely been a strictly historical and sociological perspective²⁰ to one that encompasses the investigation of modes of visual and literary representation, both ancient and modern.²¹ Work has increased not just to document the historical definitions and uses of nonhuman entities in China but also to identify the frames of reference that shaped them. This issue is a contribution to this effort.

From Hearing Things to . . . Just Hearing

The seven essays that follow this introduction are organized in rough chronological order, not merely to adhere to conventional practice but, rather, to acknowledge what appears to be an intriguing evolution in the use of speech and silence, and of information and noise, in the depiction of the nonhuman/human interface.

The collection begins with the pre-Qin period and its depiction of motivated and intelligible speech by nonhuman entities (both animals and plants) and ends in contemporary times, with the unmotivated (but informative) cacophony of intermedial—and blatantly mediated—noise. Along the way, these seven essays trace an arc, if not a smooth path, from a time when language could be (relatively) reliably deployed to establish communication between human and nonhuman beings, to a time when even the distinction between language and noise would seem as fungible as that dividing technologies of expression from their human inventors. Articulated from the perspective of representation, the sequence also illuminates a parallel movement from a time of identity between a nonhuman entity and its figural use (as in the essays by Graziani, Hong, Moser, and Kelly), to a time when the nonhuman resists figuration, and figure resists interpretation (as evident, in different ways, in the essays by Wei, Estep, and Lam).

The evidence for a clear and consistent progression from an era when all speaking things could be heard and understood to one when they couldn't is sparse but, to the extent that an arc can be perceived, suggestive. Read in order, these essays hint at a growing awareness of humans’ incapacity to connect, whether with one another or with the world: a sense that sounds do not necessarily correspond to the inner state of their emitters or that, even if they did, there would be no sure way for a hearer to establish that correspondence, let alone respond with meaningful and appropriate actions or words. Naturally, one seeks explanations for this change. Some (but not all) of the essays dealing with the late imperial and modern periods suggest that trauma (of dynastic transitions, rebellions, and the onset of modernity) exerted a significant impact on the representation of the nonhuman-human connection, and so in at least those cases, trauma theory can sometimes be fruitfully invoked. But from an ecocritical standpoint, the increased sense of alienation and uncertainty would seem to correspond to a belated, but ever more acute awareness of the essential, integrated nature of the human and nonhuman realms—an awakening reflected in this breakdown of communication and spurred by the realization of their impending disintegration.

At this point, however, the assignment of such patterns is, at best, both vague and speculative, crying out for a more systematic investigation that is beyond the scope of this handful of thoughtful and eloquent essays brought together largely by chance. In what follows, then, instead of offering either a neat, unifying framework for the issue as a whole, or the more traditional appetite-whetting summary of each individual essay, I take this opportunity to point to some of the ways particular groupings of essays enter into conversation with each other in light of their respective treatment of the phenomenon-figure continuum of “voice” and the nonhuman-human continuum of “things.” This approach, no doubt, occasionally highlights aspects of the essays that are not necessarily central to their author's arguments. Readers are therefore urged not to take this discussion as preempting the need to read the essays themselves but as preparing them to read with an awareness of at least one of the unintended ways they intersect.

When Nonhumans Speak and Listen

The first pair of essays, Romain Graziani's “Voices from the Other Side: Exploring Nonhuman Agents and Their Narrative Function in the Zhuangzi” and Jeehee Hong's “Simian Episteme, circa 1200,” explore objects that, while hardly contemporaneous, seem to have much to say to each other. Both the pre-Qin text known as Zhuangzi and the Song dynasty portrait of a macaque endow nonhuman entities with the capacity of language (speaking in the first case, and silently listening in the second)—and persuade readers that it is precisely their nonhuman status that makes them especially important to heed. Although it is the explicit thesis of neither one of these essays, they both attest to the reliability of certain basic distinctions that organized the world at the time when their chosen objects were created: humans are normally not confused with other entities, speaking and listening suggest the kind of intelligibility and intelligence usually associated with humans, and those who understand speech are potentially open to being persuaded by all perspicacious and communicative beings. At the risk of stating the obvious, it is precisely the vividness and reliability of these concepts and categories that endow their subversion with the rhetorical potency they clearly had.

Right from the beginning, Graziani asks the question of why the Zhuangzi so frequently uses speaking animals and things to convey its teachings. Eschewing even a mention of the seemingly handy term anthropomorphism and bypassing the old questions about the Zhuangzi's status as a forbear of Chinese “fiction,” Graziani marshals three seemingly unrelated anecdotes from the text to demonstrate that, far from glibly imposing human qualities on nonhuman beings, the authors of the Zhuangzi privileged nonhumans (in this case, a tree, a skull, and the spirit of a deceased turtle) as being in the unique position to “denounce, and try to transcend, the inability of humans to consider otherness in a nonreductive and nondestructive way” (emphasis added). Graziani argues that, by endowing the nonhuman other with a recognizable interiority—with the capacity for desire and morality—the text fundamentally ruptures the presumed ontological divide between human and nonhuman. More important, it does so with the specific goal of sowing doubt regarding the absoluteness of yet another binary thought to exist: between usefulness and uselessness, a distinction that acquires its significance from its role in motivating people's most destructive social and economic behaviors.

As sharp as its remonstrative power is, however, in the context of this special issue Graziani's reading of Zhuangzi carries with it the seed of hope. Rather than pointing to the impossibility of mutual understanding and reciprocal learning across the normative boundary between humans and animals, it does just the opposite. By shocking the reader into a state of receptivity by transposing the capacity for human language onto nonhuman entities, it transforms that boundary into a continuum, applying what we recognize even now as a playful touch. (These selected passages from Zhuangzi almost seem to prefigure those assertions by our own contemporaries, Joyce Chaplin and Chia-ju Chang, about the efficacy of the imagination in correcting human behavior.) Graziani's argument suggests that the Zhuangzi's trees, skull, and turtle spirit do not merely decenter the human; they position the human as their object, situated at the receiving end of instruction or transformation, and the nonhuman as the potent, vital, and communicative source of wisdom.

The painting featured in Hong's “Simian Episteme, circa 1200,” does something similar. However, rather than shocking the reader into a state of receptivity, it exploits its own materiality to surprise and educate through the wordless imposition of its material presence. To be sure, it, too, disturbs settled epistemic and discursive categories and thereby illustrates the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman, but the category being broken is more explicitly medial—and less diegetic. In short, it shifts our focus from represented, or “voiced,” meaning to the schemas of representation per se.

Hong explores a Song dynasty painting's embodiment of what she calls “epistemic suspension,” the infinite deferral of definitive knowledge, achieved through the artful manipulation of the boundaries between sound and vision and between animal and human. This effect can be fully achieved only, Hong shows, by viewers who can situate the painting solidly within its contemporaneous matrix of competing and converging cultural and formal conventions, especially those dictating the techniques for representing sound in painting, the standards determining which types of subjects warrant being rendered in detailed portraiture, the development of close figural connections between monkeys and monks, and the conventionally defined attributes of the macaque vis-à-vis both other monkeys and humans. By giving form to this unruly web of associative thinking, the painting effectively mirrors human epistemological practice, ultimately compelling the viewer to reconsider a host of assumptions, not least of which includes those regarding mimetic versus figural representation. Ultimately, this may compel the viewer to imagine the existence of the interiority of its almost but not quite human subject, even as it deftly withholds clues to its true nature.

The painted monkey's mute lesson to its human viewers appears in this light to be even more destabilizing than that offered by the Zhuangzi's menagerie. However, and somewhat surprisingly, it is not closed to interpretation. Quite to the contrary, the painting does provide viewers with a legible “key” to its meaning, thanks to its display of Buddhist iconography. The image's dizzying interweaving of signifiers converges around its single most unambiguous sign: the monkey's downcast eyes, a clearly attested semiotic reference to meditation and the spiritual awareness that this implies.

It would seem, then, that very much in keeping with the fervent hopes of contemporary writers like Bennett, Chaplin, and Buell, these two texts instantiate the belief that a shift in human imagination can be transformational, even if the belief is expressed in “mere” rhetoric. On the face of things, the Zhuangzi and the painted monkey instruct us humans to relativize our perspectives—and then to look inward, either to change the self for the sake of the world (in the case of the Zhuangzi) or to do so simply for the sake of one's place in that world (in the case of the painting). But at a higher level, they point to the fruitful possibility of reevaluating many of the categories we live by, and maybe even the epistemic basis on which they are formed.

Mute—and Mutating—Materiality

If clear, agreed-upon categories of human and nonhuman are (at least) the linguistic precondition for launching a critique of those categories, then what happens once hybridized beings, such as talking trees and meditative monkeys, become, if not common, then less-than-remarkable tropes—normal, recognizable features of a particular genre of philosophical argument? What rhetorical tools emerge when basic, seemingly coherent epistemic categories become less clearly defined, less absolute—and, as a result, less susceptible to being subverted in order to surprise, in order to spur the hearer to reflection? For Zhuangzi, the tree, skull, and turtle spirit must first have been thought of as representative of beings that (unlike humans) are intrinsically incapable of speech, if their speech was to have the desired effect. For the painter of the monkey, macaques would have to have been perceived as ontologically incapable of anything like quiet sitting, if their sitting for a portrait, gaze turned inward, is to have the power to communicate anything at all.

But as readers and viewers, we evolve in response to what we read and see. The more exposure we have to the slipperiness of cognized categories, the more difficult it becomes for the rupture of those categories to function effectively as tools of instruction or critique. If this is indeed the case, we might then ask, How do humans continue to hear the voices issued from the nonhuman realm once we have become habituated to such acts of ventriloquism? And what do we make of nonhuman entities that, even when not audible, emit a comprehensible figurative voice? Faced with such categorical uncertainty, do we recognize in (or attribute to) them the same qualities of agency, intelligence, and vibrancy we once attributed to a talking tree? The next two contributions to this issue—Jeffrey Moser's “Cauldron, Copper, Cash: Medieval Bronze in Motion and Flux” and Thomas Kelly's essay, “The Crying Statue in Early Qing Drama”—may be fruitfully read with these questions in mind.

The stable signifiers that were so clearly deployed in the first two essays, and which anchored and gave meaning to the epistemic suspension they provoked, here elude our grasp. First, we turn to Moser's essay, which is all about the slippery, elusive nature of certain things, at least as they are experienced from the perspective of the humans in their midst. For Moser, that quintessentially slippery thing is bronze, endowed with a natural capacity to slip between states of liquidity and solidity, to either cede to or defy human attempts to shape or control it, seemingly at will. Pointing to its unbounded nature and placing it within the class of things that is neither a being nor an entity, he leads his readers on a journey through its supremely mercurial life (and I use that phrase advisedly), illuminating the inherent mutability that allows bronze to function as both a sign and a guarantor of stability: a dual function that turns it into an agent of transformation in its own right, determining its own metamorphoses as well as those of the human political and economic structures in which it is embedded. Even more jarring, we learn that the particular vitality of bronze gives it the power to obliterate the distinctions among the very discursive systems that were being used to characterize it in the Song dynasty.

Through this analysis, bronze is shown taking on different discursive roles, such that what the people of medieval China “said about bronzes” and the “materiality of the bronzes themselves” were bound together in a “mutually constitutive relationship with the materiality of the world through which culture and society come into being.” We see bronze cast into bronzes, the embodiment and protector of the mandate of heaven, their carved images of mysterious creatures simultaneously broadcasting and containing the dangers lurking beyond; and witness them sinking into the earth when it became evident that the mandate was no longer in force (and reemerging when the mandate was again deemed effective). We learn of accounts of bronze objects short-circuiting their very essence in protest of chaotic circumstances. And finally, we see the economic pressures that transformed bronze's malleability into the liquidity of currency, which overrides any clear distinction between agent and object.

Looking back, if Jeehee Hong's essay reveals the epistemological effect of a framed (in all senses of the word) object, then Jeffrey Moser's serves as an enriching counterpoint, as it delves into the agency of something that naturally escapes any such containment. Both the painted monkey and quixotic bronze exert their power in wordlessness and, for the most part, silence, their rebellious voices merely implied. These voices may be strictly figurative, but they are there, prioritizing medium over message as the most effective vehicle of meaning.

At the same time, Moser's “Cauldron, Copper, Cash” offers a useful entry point into Kelly's “Crying Statue.” In this essay Kelly reconstructs the contest between the seventeenth-century playwright Hong Sheng 洪昇 (1645–1704) and certain acting troupes across China over how to stage the scene of a statue coming to life in his play Changsheng dian 長生殿 (Palace of Lasting Life). The debate centered on the question of whether an actor should play the role of the statue, taking it from an inanimate to an animated state (as preferred by the actors), or whether an inanimate statue—a prop—should remain in place throughout (as desired by Hong). Like the strange, resistant vitality of bronze, the signifying power exerted by the statue rests on the epistemic slipperiness that comes from the human experience of it as both an autonomous agent provoking human responses and a malleable object subject to human manipulation. Also like bronze, the lived impression of the thing's vitality is itself dynamic and in flux, a product of specific interactions between its inherent properties and the uses to which it is put, uses that were tied, one way or another, to ritual.

In the case of the “crying statue,” not only is its specific use onstage itself a potent variable in determining its epistemic effect, but that use also determines, as Kelly explains, its constitutive properties: should it be made of flesh or wood? The decision hinged on competing interpretations of the final, climactic scene in which the statue appears onstage and, to the amazement of the onstage witnesses, appears to weep. For the acting troupes, the weeping of the statue should signal the unambiguous victory of life over death, a moment of joy and celebration that could only be fully enacted by a human. For the playwright, in contrast, this scene should portray nothing less than a soul-scorching ritual of mourning. He felt that the statue should be used, in Kelly's words, to present “a solemn meditation on mortality and the collective expression of grief.” The appropriate dramatic effect could be created only by a stubbornly inanimate, decidedly nonhuman prop, one that cannot weep of its own volition but upon which the onstage entourage and the audience alike can and do project their grief.

Kelly's essay explicitly brings the requirements of ritual into contact with the expectations of theatrical performance, affording another point of resonance between his essay and Moser's. But Kelly trains his attention on a debate pitting the affective power of restraint against that of spectacle, and the (perhaps counterintuitive) empathetic draw of the nonhuman against that of the human. What makes the play so effective, at least as staged according to Hong's instructions, is the stubborn ambiguity of the fundamental nature of the statue, its indeterminate place on the nonhuman-human continuum. Does the animated statue make us weep because it is so convincingly human, or because it is not? Is our compassion aroused by the symbolic power—the figuration—of the statue or by its straightforward materiality? These questions remain open, to great effect.

Early in his essay, Kelly reminds us of the importance of historical context in the reception of Changsheng dian. Appearing in the wake of the fall of the Ming dynasty, the play, with its tale of the repercussions of the An Lushan Rebellion, was often cited as a not so thinly veiled allegory of that more recent trauma. As we continue our consideration of the late imperial period, the next essay explores a late Qing text that voices trauma by returning us to the world of the phenomenal, audible voice while evincing increased skepticism regarding the signifying capacity of categories of form and sound that were thought to define the human.

Making Noise in an Articulated World

Li Wei's “Dehumanized Voices and Traumatic Articulations in Late Nineteenth-Century Chinese Classical Tales,” analyzes two tales that were collected in the nineteenth-century anthology Yeyu qiudeng lu 夜雨秋燈錄 (Recorded on Rainy Nights by Autumn Lamp) by Xuan Ding 宣鼎 (1832–1880), illuminating the complex relationship that conjoins trauma, dehumanization, and voice—this latter functioning both literally and figuratively. Read in conversation with the preceding essays, “Dehumanized Voices” provides an inverse perspective on the territory of the human: rather than staging the humanization of nonhuman subjects, as we have seen, Xuan Ding's tales depict moments of dehumanization. Rather than transposing presumed human qualities onto nonhumans, or demanding that we imagine nonhuman entities possessing interiority and agency, they distort or even strip away presumed human qualities from individual actors, leaving readers wondering who, or what, is left. Key to Wei's essay is the effect of trauma and the use of trauma theory as a useful lens in examining the disintegration of the human and its transformation into something that is not.

Wei's essay touches upon the question of categories at every turn, analyzing stories that brutally depict humans who have become unrecognizable as such. But her essay holds its ultimate epistemological surprise in abeyance until the end. Until that point, we may not be particularly fazed when the voices in the text—embodied or disembodied, articulate or incomprehensible, preserved in writing or emitted in sound—are treated as a primary human attribute that, as such, are susceptible to distortion for the sake of the narrative. It is the presumed humanity of voice, after all, that makes it possible for us readers to recognize trauma in its silencing (or freakish garbling). In Xuan Ding's time, the overriding trauma was that which resulted from the two-pronged assault of a repressive, gradually dying Confucian regime and the immediate horror of the Taiping wars. In this context, Xuan's “fictional” record of inhuman cries, projecting outward from mutilated and degraded bodies, provides a cogent representation of the psychic damage done to the humans in Xuan's world. Considered side by side with the inanimate statue whose silent weeping concludes Changsheng dian, these twisted, screaming bodies seem at first glance to present a contrastive, even contradictory, model of the presentation of trauma. But together, the humanized, silent statue and the dehumanized, squawking bodies demonstrate that trauma is most powerfully expressed by any dramatization of the slippage between epistemic categories: whether between the phenomenal and figural voice, or between human and nonhuman beings, or in the interplay of registers of voice and registers of humanity.

Had Wei ended the discussion there, we would have missed the ultimate, cutting irony that makes Xuan Ding's work so effective. As she shows, Yeyu, taken as a whole, paradoxically weakens the very sense of order on which literary writing was thought to be based and that it was thought to reflect, and it does so in two ways. First, the collection redraws the lines demarcating traditional literary genres of self-expression. By effectively pouring his heart out in fiction, specifically in the fictional genre of “anomaly tales,” Xuan almost perversely bestows upon them the laurel of authentic self-expression and social critique traditionally reserved for lyric poetry. Second, Wei argues that in his own self-preface, Xuan subtly exposes himself, as author, to a process of dehumanization not unlike that to which he subjects his protagonists. Thus, by shifting the boundaries not just of self-expression but also of the humanity of the self that is doing that expressing, Yeyu gives full voice to otherwise silent trauma, exposing the would-be humanizing forms of social and literary order as the true, prime forces of dehumanization and leaving only the dehumanized voice with the freedom to speak authentically, as a human.

By this point in our reading, voice (along with its silences)—which began as a vehicle that conveyed motivated, comprehensible meaning and that conferred intelligence and intelligibility on both speaker and listener—has gradually given way to noise, whose comprehensibility depends solely on the hearer. Meaning is the fruit of the attention, receptivity, discernment, and interpretation of the hearer; no longer, it seems, is it dependent on the presumption of human intentionality.

Informative Intermediality

With our final two essays, we enter modern and contemporary times: a point where noise does not disguise a message but becomes it, and where the human emitter of voice—the expressive self—is irrelevant, if not a veritable impossibility. First, Chloe Estep's “Manuscript and the Human in Modern China” demonstrates how advances in manuscript technology and the embrace of modernity led to a decisive, if not fatal, transformation of the very notion of the human writing subject. Then, Ling Hon Lam's contribution, “What Noise Does a Psychotic Door Listen To? Information, Intermediality, and Guo Baochang's Peking Opera Film Dream of the Bridal Chamber,” offers a close reading of Guo's film through the lens of cybernetics, to track and elucidate the absorption of the theatrical, feeling subject in a noisy yet information-filled collision of various forms of media, traditional and modern. Both authors demonstrate how the human embrace of technology leads not only to a kind of disenchantment regarding the long-held ideal of the human subject's capacity for self-expression, but also to a vacuum where that ideal used to stand. There is still a voice of sorts, it would seem, but one can only guess what or who is deploying it, and what it is saying. Indeed, if Li Wei's contribution points up the paradoxes whereby humans precipitate the displacement of their own voice, Estep's and Lam's essays lay bare the forces that, once created and unleashed by humans, threaten to silence the expressive human voice entirely.

In “Manuscript and the Human,” Estep homes in on early twentieth-century China, which saw an acceleration in the weakening of the intimate relationship between the writer and the stylus that enabled the act of writing—effectively distancing the (figurative) voice from its speaker. Pushing back against the long-standing belief that the printing press was responsible for the shift from individual authorship to the fragmentation and dilution of the authorial voice, this essay draws our attention instead to the power of the fountain pen—a stealthier soldier of the modern. Infiltrating Chinese society with its seductive, democratizing convenience, it is the fountain pen that replaced the ancient, painstaking, and subtly expressive medium of brush and ink. But, lest we imagine that this shift represented the choice of individual writers who favored speed and ease, Estep walks us through a virtual gallery of mass-media representations of the stylus, contrasting its depiction in the newspapers, posters, and films of the day with its portrayal in medieval Chinese poems on the writing brush. She reveals that here, too, the human is not so much replaced as it is dehumanized—and not through the brutality of trauma (as recounted by Wei) but through the act of mediated, representational distortion: the deformation and mass dissemination of the human body (and, implicitly, the mind), in some cases appearing as two-dimensional simulacra and, in another example, as anonymous, detached hands that seem to perform the act of writing autonomously, but are merely tracing predrawn lines.

Situated in the context of the other essays in this issue, Estep contributes a new perspective on the question of how media—or, more precisely, an increased focus on media to the detriment of meaning—disrupts and rearranges the categories that had long enabled humans to define their place in the world. We have seen voice (as a vehicle for human expression) being transposed from humans to animals and things (in Zhuangzi), from language to media (in the cases of a Song dynasty painting and the practice of bronze casting), and from content to genre (in the examples of lyricized anomaly tales). In the process, we have started to think of “voice” as noncommunicative and unmoored, stripped of its ability to reliably express felt interiority or articulate reliable communal values. The human/nonhuman continuum has grown more volatile, the boundaries less stable and more porous, but not in a way that Zhuangzi would have recognized, not in a way that harmoniously blends apparent dichotomies to attain to a more transcendental, benevolent understanding. We might attribute this failure to transcend the dichotomous categories in which our understanding is mired to a kind of countermovement—and this is what Estep's essay helps bring home—as a different boundary has been hardening and a new set of categories has been forming: ever more definitively separating voice from the human body and message from human meaning.

And this leads me to the final essay of this issue, which in an unexpected way brings us full circle. Lam's “Psychotic Door” springboards off the rarely remarked fact that the emergence of Chinese opera films coincides with the birth of cybernetics. Using cybernetics to perform a close reading of Guo Baochang's opera film, Dream of the Bridal Chamber, he reveals the unexpectedly effective signifying capacity of unmotivated noise. The gambit is disconcerting at first because, apart from their contemporaneity, little seems to connect the seemingly misbegotten chimera of Chinese opera film and the ambitious, transdisciplinary theory of cybernetics. And yet, it soon becomes clear that Dream of the Bridal Chamber finds its raison d’être in precisely that connection. As is typical of such close, contextualized readings, Lam's argument eludes easy summary—there is no substitute for reading it carefully. But his painstaking examination of what one might call Guo's “cybernetic salvation” of what had been viewed as an unsalvageable, ill-conceived genre serves as a perfect capstone for this special issue.

Guo Baochang, expressing himself through his film and translated for us by Lam, has shown just how easy it still is for humans, in our need to hear things that make sense to us in our own terms, to overlook the signifying power of both media and the intermediality it enables. More to the point, Guo compels his audience to experience just how futile that “need” is. Dream of the Bridal Chamber does make sense, but it does so only by working like the psychotic door at its center, shutting us out while opening us up to our own perduring and self-defeating desire for and reliance upon clear, stable categories that are confirmed by direct and stable access to perceptual phenomena.

Reading Lam's essay, one can also almost hear the voice of Zhuangzi, who, if he were living among us today, might sound a lot like Guo Baochang. He would relish the chance to point once more to the fatally distorting nature of our own inherent biases and limitations, especially those stemming from our desire for meaning. Guo's film teases its viewers into a new version of human-relativizing wisdom by compelling us to grapple with our stubborn fixation on the human, our resistance to the machine in all its forms, our need not only to hear things but also to know what we are hearing, and our irrepressible yearning to determine whether what we perceive through all of our senses is ontologically real or simply representational. Giving in to these proclivities (for that is all they are), Guo seems to say, condemns us to dwell in the delusion that only intentional, identifiable expression carries meaning and that the illegible voice of the nonhuman, be it embodied or metaphorical—or, as in Dream of the Bridal Chamber, acousmatic—bespeaks nothing at all. We may not always like what we hear, but hear it we must.

Notes

References