Behavior-Language, the Structure of the Unconscious, and Literary Activity

I

Freud's interpretation of the unconscious opened up the black box of the human psyche; it not only provided a path for psychoanalysis but also widely influenced other fields of academic research. Lacan inherited Freud's theory of the unconscious and carried out further, deeper research. Using Saussure's linguistic theory to expound the unconscious, he put forward his own important view: that the unconscious "is structured like a language" (Lacan 167). Unlike earlier linguists, who stressed philology and etymology and attended to the diachronic study of language, Saussure directed his emphasis toward the synchronic study of language. He held that behind the concrete use of language—that is, behind speech (parole)—there exists a total system, namely language (langue), and that this system governs the structural rules of concrete utterance. These structural rules are deeply embedded in speech, so that people are not aware of them. This unconscious structure of language drew Lacan's attention and prompted him to recognize that the unconscious possesses a structure like that of language. On this basis, Lacan went on to expound the unconscious by means of the "metaphor" and "metonymy" proposed by Jakobson, using these two linguistic tropes to correspond to the "condensation" and "displacement" Freud had proposed, so as to explain the working manner of the unconscious.

This view of Lacan's comes into conflict with Freud's interpretation of the unconscious. In his metapsychological works, Freud proposed the two terms "word-representation" and "thing-representation": the former mainly refers to the auditory representation derived from the word, while the latter mainly refers to the visual representation derived from the thing. He held that the human's consciousness is based on the combination of the thing-representation with the corresponding word-representation, while the unconscious contains only the thing-representation. For something to become conscious, it "should be made so by being brought into connection with the corresponding verbal representation" (Freud 9). Clearly, Freud stressed that consciousness is connected with language and isolated the unconscious from language, holding that the unconscious is unrelated to language; yet Lacan interpreted the structure of the unconscious by the structure of language—these two views seem mutually opposed. From this a series of misunderstandings of the unconscious has also arisen. So how ought we to interpret the contradiction between the two? To clarify this question, it is necessary to introduce a new term: "behavior-language" and "behavior-language memory."

In "The Speech-Act and Behavior-Language in Literary Activity," we expounded that the human's behavior (expression, movement, posture) is a special language possessing socially shared meaning and universal communicability, and is even the human's most basic and most primordial language. (1) The reason we need, in order to know a person, to observe his words and watch his manner—both listening to his speech and watching his behavior, and often trusting his "look" and "conduct" more—is precisely that behavior itself expresses meaning. It possesses a semiotic character similar to that of language; it is "behavior-language." Through behavior-language we directly perceive the other, and we use the meaning expressed by behavior-language to compare with or corroborate the meaning expressed by speech, deepening our understanding of the other in the comparison and interpreting the truth. Just as, in order to understand a language, we must master that language—that is, we must have a memory of that language, namely speech-act memory—so likewise, the reason we understand behavior-language is that we possess "behavior-language memory." It is precisely behavior-language memory that constructs the human's unconscious. One may say that the human's consciousness is constructed by speech-act memory and that, apart from the speech-act, the construction of consciousness cannot be realized; while the human's unconscious belongs to behavior-language memory.

Behavior-language, as a special language, must construct meaning by means of difference. But this difference is not, as in ordinary language, built on the basis of the distinction "concept/sound-image"; rather, it is based on the distinction of "image-information," and is the recognition of behavioral patterns. Behavior-language is closely connected with the human's body; it is itself bodily behavior, unable to be independent apart from the body, and deeply embedded in the body. Behavior-language is the hub connecting human and human, human and world, and the human's sensation too is inseparable from behavior-language. Husserl held that the human's sensation is unified with kinaesthesis: "Sensation contains the world from the very beginning, because it always contains action, contains basic activity… Only through my own bodily (leiblich) activity can I gain all my sensuous impressions… The perception of sensation ('perception' in Greek is 'aisthesis') and the bodily movement carried out by me ('movement' in Greek is 'kinesis') here constitute an indissoluble unity" (Husserl 15–16). The human's perception of the world is built on the basis of behavior-language and the speech-act; any incoming information must pass through the construction of the human's language (behavior-language and the speech-act) and be structured before it can be accepted and perceived by the human—otherwise it is only scattered, meaningless information and is ignored. Therein, the most basic link is that the human relates to the life-world through his own behavior, constructs and assimilates the life-world with behavior-language, endows the life-world with the human's own structure, and thereby grasps the life-world. The world thereby also possesses the human's behavioral and life features and establishes a close, vitally interrelated connection with the human. Human and world merge into one; the human understands the world and masters it in his own mode of behavior and mode of life.

Behavior-language, as an "image-pattern" rather than a "concept/sound-image," is, viewed from the angle of semiotic character, still only an incompletely developed, special sign-system, lacking the clarity of ordinary language; although it possesses its own meaning, it does not possess the independence and mediating quality of ordinary language, cannot separate the human from the world, and still less can separate behavior from the human himself. It is both "idea" and "being," just as Merleau-Ponty says: form is neither a thing-in-itself nor an idea for-itself, but "the imperceptible intimate union of idea and being, the contingent arrangement by which materials begin to have meaning in our presence—a perceptibility in the nascent state" (Merleau-Ponty 18). Such an incompletely developed sign-system, lacking independence, cannot yet construct the world as a clear object separated from the human, cannot smoothly enter the human's consciousness, but can only structure the world and take it into itself, constituting the unconscious. Because consciousness is always consciousness "of an object," it presupposes the generation of the object and the construction of the relation between human and object; when behavior-language connects the world with the human himself and fuses them into one, not treating the world as "object," it cannot possibly let the human entirely throw off the hazy, chaotic state, cannot possibly form clear consciousness. The world exists only as the world experienced by the human; it is both "idea" and "being."

Only ordinary language, by naming the myriad things of the world and naming the human himself, distinguishing the myriad things by its "concepts," and absorbing, condensing, and elevating the human's experience, can form the human's clear consciousness; and only with the aid of the clarity, independence, and mediating quality of ordinary language does the human come to be distinguished from the myriad things of the world, and behavior come to be distinguished from the body. Language sets up the distance between the human and the world and his own behavior, and so the world, the myriad things, the human's body, and behavior come to be objects of the human's consciousness. Language concretizes the human's intention and constructs a clear intentional object. The world enters from the "nameless" state of "the beginning of heaven and earth" into the "named" state of "the mother of the myriad things," and the human can at last both "observe its subtlety" and "observe its manifestations" (Zhu Qianzhi 5–6). Therefore the linguistic concept and the human's consciousness are generated in step; language constructs at once the human's object of consciousness and consciousness itself, and so the world begins to present itself before the human with a wholly new countenance. This is precisely the reason why the creation myths of China and other lands almost all endow language with the power of creating the world. The clarity, independence, and mediating quality of language not only make the myriad things of the world the human's objects of sensation and cognition, effectively raising the human's cognitive capacity, but also make it possible for the human to imagine and reason beyond the actually existing, prompting a qualitative leap in human thought and the human's consciousness, and even raising the human into a metaphysical world. The clarity, independence, and mediating quality of language also peel the human's behavior apart from the body, link behavior with situation and behavior with consequence and set them up as the human's objects of reflection, give the human the possibility of consciously correcting and adjusting his own behavior, endow behavior with clear purposiveness, and raise the rationality and effectiveness of behavior, thereby rapidly improving human practice. The reason the human far surpasses the animal kingdom is precisely that the emergence of the speech-act powerfully prompted the development of the human's consciousness, the development of the human's cognitive capacity and practical capacity. (2) The speech-act at last made the "in-itself" human grow into the "for-itself" human. The human's being human lies precisely in this: the human simultaneously holds two different, mutually cooperating languages (behaviors)—the speech-act and behavior-language—and therefore possesses consciousness and the unconscious, which reciprocally act and mutually coordinate.

The split-brain experiments (in which the normal conduction between the left and right cerebral hemispheres is severed) also confirm the connection of consciousness and the unconscious with the speech-act and behavior-language respectively. In the split-brain experiments, the experimenters found that when an object appears in the patient's right visual field, because the left brain, which receives the information, possesses the verbal function, he can correctly say what the object is; whereas when the object appears in the left visual field, because the right brain, which receives the information, is a non-verbal functional area, he sees nothing—yet subsequently reaches out his hand to touch and grasp the object. From this, John R. Searle points out that the human brain possesses two mutually cooperating consciousnesses (Searle 123–24). In fact, this experiment powerfully shows that the human brain does not possess two consciousnesses, but possesses consciousness and the unconscious respectively. The left brain possesses the verbal function and is at the same time the human's area of consciousness; only it can clearly be conscious of the object. And the psychological process that is not consciously perceived by the human yet brings about the human's behavior is precisely the unconscious; it lies in the non-verbal area and uses behavior-language memory to guide the human's behavior. Of course, the left brain, besides the area of consciousness, equally contains the unconscious closely related to behavior-language; the unconscious runs through both left and right hemispheres, while consciousness exists only in the verbal-functional area of the left brain. For the normal person, consciousness and the unconscious are usually mutually cooperating; it is precisely this cooperation that enables the human to smoothly realize his own purposes through behavior. But even so, the human's everyday behavior still maintains a great deal of unconscious states. "Our knowing of bodily position and movement is generally direct and non-reflective. It is not often accompanied by the conscious kinaesthetic feelings we attend to, nor is it often derived from such feelings when they appear. The successfully completed voluntary act also need not take this attention to bodily feeling as a mediation" (Shusterman, Performing Live 168).

Among the human's various behaviors, the act of vocalization has a special significance: it is both issued by the human and controlled by the human, belonging to the human's body, and yet is independent apart from the human's body. This double character determines that only it can possibly develop into the most perfect independent sign-system, namely language (concept/sound-image). In order to meet the needs of the breadth and richness of the domain of human activity and of the frequency and complexity of human social interaction, the vocalizing behavior that originally expressed similar situations could not but undergo merging and simplification, gradually forming "class-concept/sound-image," at once moving toward abstraction and condensing the human's experience. The formation of the linguistic concept thoroughly changed the relation of human and world. From this, the dependent relation of vocalizing behavior on the situation it expressed was peeled away; its distance from the real world was enlarged; it set up the distance between the human and the myriad things, could even treat the human's own body and behavior as object, and went on to set up the distance between the human and behavior, especially vocalizing behavior—that is, it set up the distance between the human and language. Language at last became a sign-system of clarity, independence, and mediating quality. For example, the names involving horses in the "Jiong" ode of the "Lu Hymns" of the Book of Songs number as many as sixteen, differing by coat color or by breed. The Shuowen distinguishes forty-two names for the horse, by differences of age, coat color, form, and breed. In the process of human practice, those distinctions without substantial meaning were gradually abandoned; a great number of useless names were eliminated, merged into a few abstract concepts denoting "horse." The distinctiveness of human practical activity destined the inevitable process by which behavior-language (vocalizing behavior) moved toward abstraction, destined the inevitable process by which behavior-language (vocalizing behavior) developed toward the speech-act. Without abstraction there is no linguistic concept; without language, there is also no human himself raised above the animal kingdom.

When we have clarified the two languages (behaviors) the human possesses—the speech-act and behavior-language—and have pointed out that the human's consciousness is in essence speech-act memory while the unconscious is behavior-language memory, then we can easily understand the divergence of views between Freud and Lacan. Freud held that the human's consciousness is related to language while the unconscious is unrelated to language, stressing precisely that conscious activity cannot do without the speech-act, while the unconscious is not rooted in the speech-act—it is another thing. When behavior-language is merely behavior-language, not yet combined with the speech-act, it can only be in an unconscious state; whereas when behavior-language and the speech-act mutually fuse—that is, when, in Freud's terms, the "thing-representation" and the "word-representation" combine—then it enters the level of consciousness, the two jointly constructing imagination and fantasy, or what may be called imagistic thinking. Differently, when the speech-act is merely a pure speech-referential act, although it is conscious activity, it can only be abstract thinking. The events of which we are conscious and which we remember are in fact events expressed and constructed by the speech-act, not the actually existing events themselves. Those events not yet expressed and constructed by the speech-act, or the "remainders" and "fragments" of events which, though expressed and constructed, still have not been taken into the speech-act, can only sink down into the unconscious. Lacan's so-called view that the unconscious possesses a structure like that of language is, then, a discovery that the unconscious too is composed of some kind of language. But it should refer to "another" special language, namely behavior-language. The unconscious possesses the structure of behavior-language, and has something in common with the structure of the speech-act. Therefore, generally speaking, the discoveries of Freud and Lacan do not constitute a substantive conflict; but viewed in depth, Lacan's interpreting of the unconscious by ordinary language—holding that the unconscious is structured like a language—is again insufficiently rigorous and scientific. It can, to be sure, guess at certain features of the unconscious, but it cannot truly reveal the structure of the unconscious.

II

The connection and distinction between consciousness and the unconscious are related to the commonality and difference of the two languages (behaviors). The unconscious, as a behavior-language memory, must possess the structure of behavior-language. The basic premise of any language is shared meaning and communicability; it must be built on common social convention, for otherwise communication cannot be reached and it is no longer "language." These conventions, together with behavior-language, are internalized by the individual in a specific way and become the human's unconscious structure; they shape the human's mode of social behavior and capacity for action, as well as the capacity for mutual understanding and communication. The relation between the speech-act and the human's consciousness is likewise. The reason ordinary language becomes the most convenient and most important tool of interpersonal communication is also that it does not belong to "me" the individual but belongs to "us," possessing public character. Behind ordinary language is implied a common cultural convention. Because, in actual communicative activity, the speech-act and behavior-language are mutually background, mutually interwoven, mutually cooperating, mutually complementing, and mutually interpreting, this close relation causes the speech-act and behavior-language to form many common points in structure—that is, there are many commonalities between the social convention that behavior-language enjoys and the cultural convention that the speech-act enjoys; to some degree, there exists between the two the possibility of mutual communication and mutual substitution.

Viewed from the genetic history of the two languages (behaviors), the speech-act is built on the basis of behavior-language, and consciousness on the basis of the unconscious. The speech-act is the reshaping and recasting of behavior-language by concept and logic, the transcendence and sublimation of behavior-language; this is bound to give behavior-language and the unconscious a prior, determining significance relative to the speech-act and consciousness. The unconscious is the background of all mental life. The priority of behavior-language destines that the speech-act and the human's consciousness cannot entirely turn their backs on the structure of behavior-language. As Dewey points out, many words refer both to a process of action and to a final product; without the verbal meaning of these words, there would be no nominal meaning of them. This is no accidental coincidence; it is precisely the imprint that the structure of behavior-language has stamped upon ordinary language—the dynamic feature of behavior is bound to grant the verb its important position in ordinary language. It is precisely the human's unconscious—that is, behavior-language memory—that stores the human's behavioral patterns and retains the structure that behavior possesses, thereby influencing the structural features of the speech-act and the structural features of consciousness. Therefore it should be said the other way around: the structure of language is influenced by the structure of the unconscious; it is not, as Lacan says, that the unconscious is structured like a language. Ordinary language gradually formed its own distinctiveness in the later process of independent development, and especially in the culture of writing.

But the two languages (behaviors), after all, have different carriers, characters, and uses; they have a division of labor and are broadly applied in different domains, and therefore they also form mutually distinct structures. Julia Kristeva once spoke of the attention twentieth-century Western medicine and psychology paid to body language. Some researchers found that "grammatical, syntactic, and logical categories are all unsuited to bodily expression, because these categories all cut up and dismantle the totality of the signifier, and therefore do not accord with the undismantleable character of bodily expression." "The bodily sign possesses polysemy (that is, it has multiple meanings), and bodily information also does not obey the usual 'syntactic' order (subject–predicate–object), so bodily information is more like the speech of children and 'primitive' language" (Kristeva 325). The human's unconscious is constructed by behavior-language memory; it cannot but be stamped with the distinctive imprint of behavior-language.

On one hand, behavior relates the human to the world and constructs them into a unity—this, to be sure, displays the specific structure of behavior, but within it there is no division of "subject" and "object." Unlike ordinary language, behavior-language is non-conceptual; the unity of behavior-language neither distinguishes "subject," "predicate," and "object," nor, still less, contains grammatical and logical order-relations. It has no tense feature, makes no division and marking by such temporal concepts as "past," "present," and "future"; it is the infinite duration of time, yet holds fast the rhythm and tempo of behavior. It makes no spatial demarcation and positioning, but fuses space into an organic whole; and spatiality and temporality are given equal weight, themselves a unity. It is "nameless," imagistic, integrally coherent. (3) At the same time, the non-independence of behavior-language in its dependence on the body also destines it to be directly and closely related to bodily feeling, destines behavior-language to be not only imagistic but always to arouse emotion and to be accompanied always by emotion; and emotion, in turn, stimulates behavior-language and injects into it an inexhaustible dynamism. The unconscious is the "dark corner" of the soul; "as soon as one shines a light into the domain of the unconscious, one immediately steps into the hazy, indistinct realm of the personal unconscious" (Jung 129). Therefore the unconscious constructed by behavior-language memory is bound to differ considerably from the structure of the speech-act and considerably from the structure of consciousness. The non-conceptual, non-logical character of behavior-language determines that the unconscious has no part in reason and has a hazy, chaotic side, so that similar contents may very likely undergo "condensation," and adjacent contents may undergo "displacement." At the same time, the unconscious can hardly be accurately and completely translated, described, and analyzed by ordinary language; it is hazy and polysemous, and any translation, description, or analysis is bound to distort the unconscious itself more or less—it is this or that conjecture, or even misinterpretation, of it. Unless aroused, organized, and condensed by the speech-act and mutually fused with the speech-act, it can be displayed in the manner of imagination and fantasy and be perceived by consciousness; otherwise it can only sink silently into the unconscious. More important, in behavior-language the subject and object are not yet differentiated, the "object" not yet separated and established; before being reshaped by the speech-act, it cannot possibly enter the conscious state, which takes the intentional object as a necessary premise.

On the other hand, behavior, as a language, must follow social convention, and the structure of the human's unconscious is constrained by the structure of social convention. The convention that behavior-language follows belongs neither to a certain individual nor to a certain behavior; it exists "elsewhere." It cannot be spoken, yet it really and truly exists. It is an object, yet, like ideology, it is a "void" object, an empty, objectively existing "Other," belonging only to the group, to society, to the race, to tradition; this Other is like what Lacan calls the "capitalized big Other." The big Other governs the human's behavior-language, internalizes itself, together with behavior-language, in the human's soul in the individual's own distinctive way, and endows the human's unconscious with structure. The human's behavior becomes behavior-language precisely by virtue of social convention (the big Other); only thus can it let people communicate with and understand one another, and play a role in interpersonal interaction. Viewed more fundamentally, it is precisely because social convention (the big Other) exists that the human becomes a social human, that human society can be continued, that the human's life can be continued; it is convention that secures the internal stability of a society and a group. Conversely, the behavioral differences among different social groups define the group itself and go on to construct a specific social order. From this angle, among the three—the speech-act and consciousness, behavior-language and the unconscious, social convention and social order—there exists an extremely complex and profound structural connection.

The distinction of "subject" and "object" truly becomes possible only after the emergence of the speech-act. "The individual is constructed as a subject in language and through language. Subjectivity is the speaker's capacity to take himself/herself as 'I'; it cannot in any way be defined by a wordless feeling of the self, nor deferred by some inexpressible spiritual experience of the self, but only by the linguistic self that transcends any possible experience" (Agamben 39). Of this function of language, Benveniste gives a good exposition. He points out that linguistic activity each time brings the speaker into a specific situation and into the different constructions of discourse. In any language, the speaker takes "I" for his own use, while at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, displaying "you," so as jointly to oppose "he," thereby setting up a relation, setting up a wholly new human experience; the pronoun "I" is thereby transformed from one element of a paradigm into a unique appellation, and a new person is produced. This new person is "I," the human as the speaking "subject." Subjectivity is "the subjective experience of the subject that establishes itself through linguistic activity and within linguistic activity" (Benveniste 142–43). It is precisely language that distinguishes and positions the various elements participating in the act of speech, granting each a different function—at once ceaselessly dividing the unity of the whole act of speech and constructing the new relations among the elements of speech, determining their roles and positions, condensing the speaker's experience, and gradually constructing the discursive "subject" and "object." The human's conception of self and subjectivity are established in this process, and the clear structural features of the speech-act are also established in this process.

From this point on, the unified, coherent whole originally constructed by behavior is cut up and determined by linguistic concepts; the integral relation of the human with the world and the myriad things is dissolved and then taken into the linear order of language, and the dismantled components are each separately named and endowed with specific functions—the subject-predicate-object relation is formed. Once ordinary language reshapes the behavioral unity into a linear structure and order, time too is correspondingly named and marked, and tense is displayed; cause-and-effect relations (antecedent and consequent) and logical relations are also gradually established. Language prompts the human to be distinguished from the world and to gain independence, and the human's position in the world—that is, the spatial relation—is thereby also produced and determined. But the temporality strengthened along with the linear feature of language prompts the disintegration of the time-space unity and devalues the position of spatiality. The emergence of the speech-act cultivated the human's capacity for self-reflection; it at last granted reason to the human himself. The structure of the speech-act is precisely the structure of the human's consciousness. The clear structural features and orderliness of the speech-act determine the rational features and logical features of consciousness. Correspondingly, the structural difference between the speech-act and behavior-language determines that ordinary language cannot translate the unconscious on an equal footing, cannot exhaust the unconscious and cannot but leave behind a great deal of remainder; the two, though related and communicable, are nevertheless incommensurable, so that one cannot but frequently use linguistic metaphor and symbol to express it in a roundabout way.

The structural difference between behavior-language and the speech-act shows that one cannot simply apply Lacan's manner to interpret the unconscious. The reason Lacan can guess at certain structural features of the unconscious is that the deep structure of the speech-act is cultural convention, which is the behavioral convention sedimented as the speech-act, in the long process of its use, is peeled apart from the linguistic concept—in essence no longer the structure of the speech-act itself, but degenerated into the structure of behavior-language (vocalizing behavior), closely related to and built on the social convention of behavior-language. This relatedness makes it possible for Lacan to reveal the structure of the unconscious in certain specific respects. But because, after all, a difference exists between the two, interpreting the unconscious by linguistic structure is bound to produce misguidance, leading to erroneous conclusions.

For all life, "memory" holds an extremely important position. One may say that life depends on memory. The human's consciousness depends on speech-act memory, the unconscious on behavior-language memory, while DNA is in essence the memory of cell-replicating behavior. The reason memory is extremely important for life is that it is the guarantee of life's ceaseless continuation along the temporal axis; because the operation of the universe is cyclical, it is precisely memory that endows life with the capacity to survive, enabling it to adapt to the cyclically changing operation of the universe. Memory is itself the fruit of natural selection, stemming from the long evolutionary history of life. All life must have memory in order to survive; it is memory that turns life from passive adaptation into active adaptation, preparing its response in advance before periodic change occurs in nature. To lose the capacity for memory is to lose the anticipation of and response to the periodic change of the environment, so that life cannot but wear itself out, overburdened. Likewise, once natural law is broken and a major catastrophe occurs, memory can no longer respond in time, cannot actively adapt to the suddenly changed nature, and this too leads to large-scale species extinction. Without memory, one cannot adapt to cyclically changing nature and is destined to be eliminated. And it is precisely memory, too, that lets the human's mode of behavior be passed on from generation to generation and enjoy a certain common convention, making behavior a special, communicable language.

Memory is also the basis of self-identification and social identification. The most core part of identification is identification with behavior—the internalization and memory of behavior-language; only behavior truly grants the human his identity and makes him live up to his name. In the process of self-identification, every action of the individual ceaselessly repeats and strengthens the memory of his own behavior-language, constructs his own distinctive behavior-language style, stamps his own mark on behavior-language, and, on every occasion, strives to display the behavior-language style that accords with the self, maintaining the coherence of the behavior-language style; while consciousness is only the confirmation of the unity of this behavior-language style and the harmoniousness of its relation to the self. (4) Social identification, for its part, is the acquisition of the group's behavioral norms; the individual imitates the group's behavior in his own way and internalizes, in a personal way, the convention contained in the group's behavior, so as to maintain a harmonious relation with the group, smoothly merge into it, and gain the identity of a group member. This process is in essence the memory of a specific social convention. This is mainly an unconscious process of acquisition; consciousness often plays a guiding, regulating, and correcting role only when obstacles arise in the individual's acquisition of the group's behavioral norms. Viewed from the actual process, whether in self-identification or social identification, the unconscious process plays the more important role. "Identifications are multiple, overlapping, and context-sensitive; some identifications are relatively subtle or fleeting" (Appiah 136). For every individual, social identification and self-identification exist at the same time in the process of his growth; he hesitates between the two, striving both to merge into the group and to maintain his self-independence, being both "centrifugal" and "centripetal." As Piaget says, this is a process of "assimilation–accommodation," only with different individuals having different tendencies. When the individual loses his sense of direction in the process of constructing behavior-language, or when his own original behavior-language comes into conflict with the behavior-language of the group to which he belongs, and he cannot smoothly internalize the group's behavioral norms, this constitutes an identity crisis, whereby he loses the sense of stability and security and generates inner anxiety.

Compared with the human, the computer possesses only one capacity, lying between behavior-language memory and speech-act memory. The computer cuts up and encodes behavior, simplifies, abstracts, and mechanizes it, and endows it with all sorts of programs and capacities of memory, recognition, and logical analysis; therefore, in respect of skill, the computer can entirely possibly surpass the human—but it has no human thought. The computer can only "think-process," but cannot "think." Even if a robot speaks the human's language, writes with language, and even writes literary works, all this is in fact the conversion of the speech-act into a special, highly abstract, mechanical, dismembered, and encoded behavior-language, the conversion into a skill. Only such skill can be replaced by a machine, while thought cannot be replaced by a machine. The robot can never think with "concepts" as the human does, nor imagine with "images." The robot can enjoy neither human consciousness nor the human unconscious; it has only various working programs, or what may be called "quasi-thinking."

The human's behavior-language memory, by its different types, constitutes respectively the deep unconscious, the surface unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The behavior-language memory ceaselessly repeated by the race in its life-activity constructs the deep unconscious—that is, instinct, such as the sexual instinct, the death instinct, and so on. The human's deep unconscious (instinct) is rooted in the history of the race; it can only speak the race's behavior-language, speak the language of the "Other." Therefore desire belongs not to the "self" but to the "Other"; it is "the language of the Other." The individual's behavior-language memory, for its part, belongs to the surface unconscious. Those behavior-language memories that were originally combined with the speech-act and were later detached from ordinary language and isolated and forgotten also sink into the surface unconscious. Viewed from another angle, every individual must live in a specific social group and therefore stands in a certain tense relation with the social convention of a specific group, being both compelled to actively adapt to the group's behavioral norms and attempting to throw off bondage and maintain his own independence, thereby forming his own distinctive behavior-language and internalizing it as unconscious structure. Therein, the group's behavioral convention internalized together with behavior-language constitutes the collective unconscious. Unlike Jung's interpretation of this concept, here the collective unconscious embodies the system of behavioral norms formed by the social group in its long historical process; it is embodied both as a mutually interwoven synchronic network structure and as a layered diachronic sedimentation. The human's individuality can exist only in the tension-field constituted by historical remnants and the system of behavioral norms, in the fissures of a specific social convention; it is jointly formed by the intersection of inherited historical remnants and contingent circumstances, and can only be a small flower occasionally blooming in the vast desert of tradition. The so-called "subject" and "self" can also only be built on the basis of the "Other," built on alien grit, while at the same time ceaselessly opening toward another "Other." The various memories ceaselessly sediment, shaping the human's consciousness and unconscious, shaping the human's infinitely rich soul.

Unlike the psychic essence of consciousness, the unconscious is both psychic and closely related to the physiological, because behavior-language is itself bodily behavior, bodily performance, possessing corporeality—yet, as a language memory, it also possesses spirituality. The human's deep unconscious (instinct) is based on changes in the biochemical composition and level of the living body. When the change in biochemical composition and level reaches or exceeds a certain threshold, the living body perceives this change and makes a psychic response, initiating behavior. The former process is physiological, the latter an unconscious psychic process, and then comes the overt bodily behavior. Consciousness, for its part, only plays a role of monitoring and regulating. From this angle, the deep unconscious (instinct) is where the activity-energy lies; it powerfully propels the human's behavior. With the satisfaction of desire, the energy is released and vented, and the living body restores its internal equilibrium. The surface unconscious, for its part, more dominates the individual's behavioral features and at the same time turns back to reshape the actor's own body. This mode of behavior of the individual, confirmed or corrected by consciousness, is regarded as the symptom of the self's individuality and the important basis of self-construction. Here, historical heredity and the present-day system of social norms intersect, and the corporeal and the spiritual mutually influence. This is also the process of the individual's socialization, the contest of individuality and groupality; social culture cannot but engrave its own imprint upon the individual's body and behavior. It is precisely in this process that there are displayed Foucault's "discipline," Althusser's ideological "interpellation," Bourdieu's "habitus" and "distinction," and also the individual's helpless silent resistance, or what de Certeau calls "ruses" and "tactics." Contrary to the deep unconscious, the collective unconscious is mainly a conservative force; it compulsorily demands that behavior be brought into convention, and even issues prohibitions on certain behaviors, preventing the behavior from occurring. This is repression. Therefore repression is manifested not only in the process by which the human's consciousness monitors, manages, and filters behavior-language; more important, the social convention sedimented in the unconscious constitutes the main source of repression. These conventions accumulate layer upon layer, so that the deep unconscious (instinct) is often hard to express directly. In the black box of the unconscious there exist irreconcilable inner contradictions, conflicts among various different behavior-language memories and among different forces, and repression and counter-repression; but because of the non-logical and non-rational features of the unconscious structure, the various factors can coexist at the same time and do not mutually exclude one another. For literary and artistic creation, the reason the collective unconscious has important significance is that it profoundly reveals the constraining factors implied behind behavior, displays the commonality of a specific social group, and thereby reveals the social structure and order of a specific society.

III

In everyday interactive activity, the speech-act and behavior-language mutually cooperate; for example, in conversation we often unconsciously beam with animation and gesture with hands and feet. At this time, although behavior-language participates in the act of speech, creating a coordinated context for the speech-act and strengthening the expressiveness and infectiousness of the speech-act, it is, after all, only a supporting role, playing a relatively secondary assisting function. But in aesthetic activity or literary-artistic activity, these two languages (behaviors) no longer stop at general cooperation, but undergo an extremely full, deep cooperation; it is the resonance and co-vibration of speech-act memory and behavior-language memory, the convergence and surging of consciousness and the unconscious.

Because the absence of speech-act memory is also the absence of consciousness, pure behavior-language can only sink into the boundless ocean of the unconscious, can only be what Agamben calls "silent experience," unable to become an object perceived by consciousness—and so it naturally cancels any aesthetic and literary-artistic activity. At the same time, only when the speech-act fully participates can the bodily pleasure produced by behavior-language be raised into spiritual delight and transformed into aesthetic feeling. "Only when language functions can the mind emerge from the body-mind experience, because language enables the organism's feelings and movements to be named and thereby objectified and endowed with determinate meaning; thus, in the process of communication, they can be reconfirmed and used anew" (Shusterman, Body Consciousness 260–61). Likewise, apart from behavior-language memory, the speech-act too loses imagisticity, vividness, and a sense of life, degenerating into lifeless abstract thinking. Neither side is dispensable. We often say that literary-artistic creation needs childlike innocence, not only because the child's soul is pure and unsullied, but still more because the child has a behavior-language not yet obscured, sullied, and suppressed; his feeling of the world tends more to use rich behavior-language, to relate to the world and assimilate the world with behavior-language, personifying the world and endowing it with a vigorous breath. "If a person does not perceive this tendency to movement that functions in combination with the state of some consequence, then he has only sensual satisfaction and not the slightest of what we call appreciation. The perception of the tendency to movement makes us tense, stimulated, excited; the perception of completion, of consummate ending, gives us calm, form, measure, and organization" (Dewey, Experience and Nature 240). In aesthetic and literary-artistic activity, only when the two languages (behaviors) undergo deep cooperation and mutually arouse each other can we truly throw open the heart, penetrate the mysterious depths, and be involuntarily shaken. This feature—lying between the two languages (behaviors) yet fully tapping the potential of both—determines the marginality of aesthetic and literary-artistic activity.

That aesthetic and literary art need the full cooperation of consciousness and the unconscious has been confirmed by much research. In Creativity: The Magic Synthesis, Arieti points out that literary-artistic creation must pass through a primary process (an unconscious process) and a secondary process (a conscious process); it is the combination of the two. Dewey, for his part, expounded this from the angle of the wholeness of aesthetic and literary-artistic activity. He held that aesthetic experience can be gained in any field of behavior; so long as fragmentary experience becomes a coherent, complete, and meaningful "an experience," it can become the embryo of the aesthetic and of art. In this process, the human's body and mind participate in artistic activity as a whole; he expands the intention of his own life and carries out the work in accordance with his own organic structure, including the coordination among the brain, the sense organs, and the muscular system. "All deliberation, all conscious intent, grows out of things once performed organically through the interaction of natural energies. Were it not so, art would be built on quaking sand—nay, would flow in air… Art is the living and concrete proof that the human is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse, and action characteristic of the live creature" (Art as Experience 25–26). Aesthetic and literary-artistic activity mobilizes to the greatest degree the human as a whole state, mobilizes consciousness and the unconscious, mobilizes speech-act memory and behavior-language memory, thereby carrying out an activity like "God's creation of the world."

As pointed out above, social convention constitutes the collective unconscious and becomes a repression of behavior-language memory; it often only lets pass behavior-language that conforms to convention and represses behavior-language that violates it. But one important feature of social convention is that it is the product of a specific context and exerts its effect only in that specific context; apart from this context, it is set aside. For example, when a teacher is situated within the group of teachers and students at a school, he very naturally acts according to the norms of a teacher. Once he returns to the private space, these norms become void; he no longer needs to bow and bend with custom, but entirely relaxes himself and acts as he pleases. The world constructed by aesthetic activity is, as Heidegger says, "another heaven and earth," or, as Marcuse says, an "other-world"; the non-reality of this world weakens and even casts aside the repression of behavior-language memory by the collective unconscious, so that the human's deep unconscious is fully released, and the human's behavior-language memory and speech-act memory gain infinite dynamism and undergo deep fusion. This is precisely the inner mechanism by which aesthetic creativity is formed.

The marginal situation in which consciousness and the unconscious coordinate and the speech-act and behavior-language interweave endows aesthetic and literary-artistic activity with a double feature. On one hand, behavior-language links and fuses the human with the world, constructs the human and world into a unified living body, fuses the aesthetic subject with the aesthetic object, bridges the split of the two, cancels the objectivity of the aesthetic object, and creates an integral relation of no-object and no-self. In this process, the world is infused with the human's life, the myriad things are dyed with the human's emotion, and all become sentient, feeling life-activity itself, sharing the form and rhythm of life—so that gazing at the mountain, feeling brims over the mountain; viewing the sea, intent overflows the sea. Lipps's "theory of empathy," Groos's "theory of inner imitation," and Croce's "theory of intuition" are in essence built on the basis of the features of behavior-language. This is also precisely the root of why aesthetic and literary art can never erase the notion of "animism" and always maintain what Gadamer calls "contemporaneity." On the other hand, the speech-act resets the distance between the human and the world, constructs the human as subject, presents the world as the human's object, demarcates the vivid concrete image from its context and throws it into relief, and takes it as the object of aesthetic contemplation. At the same time, it also organizes, arranges, and shapes behavior-language memory, illuminating the other with the rational radiance of consciousness. Baumgarten's "perfection of sensuous cognition" and Kant's "reflective judgment" fix their attention on the role of the speech-act in aesthetic activity. Here, the speech-act mainly plays a role of arousing and condensing behavior-language memory and elevating intuitive experience so as to raise it to the level of consciousness; it does not compulsorily cut up, norm, and trim it by concept. It is precisely the reciprocal action of consciousness and the unconscious, and the full cooperation of the two languages (behaviors), that creates what Martin Buber calls the "I–Thou" relation—that is, the relation of intersubjectivity; and it is also precisely the reciprocal action of consciousness and the unconscious, and the cooperation of the two languages (behaviors), that makes aesthetic and literary-artistic activity at once cognitive and experiential, at once intellectual and emotional, at once conscious and spontaneous, at once mediated and direct—possessing at the same time rational and non-rational coloring, possessing at the same time spiritual and bodily delight, possessing at the same time "having-self" and "no-self," "named" and "nameless," temporality and the trans-temporal realm. "What makes an experience an aesthetic experience is the distinctive feature of converting resistance and tension, and stimuli that are in themselves inclined to separation, into a movement toward an inclusive and consummate ending" (Art as Experience 60). From the above double feature, neither the pure vision of semiotics nor that of phenomenology, neither that of epistemology nor that of ontology, can fully reveal the fundamental nature of aesthetic and literary art; research must possess a synoptic anthropological vision.

Nietzsche once expounded the distinction between the Dionysian spirit and the Apollonian spirit. He held that literary-artistic activity contains these two spirits, but that the two do not share equal halves; rather, they are weighted toward one side, and they constitute respectively Dionysian art and Apollonian art. If we look from another angle, we can equally discover that any literary art is the fruit of the full cooperation of the speech-act and behavior-language. Therein, Dionysian art is art in which behavior-language predominates: behavior-language bridges the distance between the human and the world, makes the human merge into the world and be intoxicated in the world, the human and the world integrally one, and the world brims with the human's life-will; while in Apollonian art the speech-act predominates: the speech-act creates the distance between the human and the world, turns the world into the human's object of contemplation, and projects the rational radiance that language possesses onto the world, as if the sun-god illuminated the universe. "All the foundations of being, the Dionysian ground of the world, and the portion of these that invades the consciousness of the human individual, can be exactly overcome anew by the Apollonian power of transfiguration. So these two artistic impulses must, in strict mutual proportion, in accordance with the law of eternal justice, unfold their powers. Wherever the Dionysian violence surges up as we have experienced it, there the Apollonian must descend to us, wrapped in clouds" (Nietzsche 108). In concrete aesthetic and literary-artistic activity, which of the two languages (behaviors) occupies the dominant position depends on the cultural environment in which one is situated, as well as on the type of literary art. If we look from the source of cultural creation, then it should be said the other way around: all human culture is grounded on behavior-language and the speech-act; the two languages (behaviors) both jointly shape the human's soul-structure and determine human cultural creation. The deep structure of a specific culture depends on the features, mutual relation, and overall structure of both behavior-language and the speech-act. Or one may say that the development and change of culture display the tense relation among the human, social convention, and cultural convention; it is a process of ceaselessly constructing convention and habit and breaking convention and habit. Only by setting out from the features and mutual relation of behavior-language and the speech-act can we decipher the commonality and distinctiveness of the cultures of the various peoples.

Precisely because two languages (behaviors) exist at the same time in the aesthetic process, Wang Guowei, speaking of the poet's creation, says: "Toward the universe and human life, the poet must enter within them, and must also stand outside them. Entering within, he can therefore write of them; standing outside, he can therefore observe them. Entering within, he therefore has vital spirit; standing outside, he therefore has lofty bearing" (Zhou Xishan 367). When behavior-language predominates, the poet enters within the universe and human life; once the speech-act takes the dominant position, the poet again stands outside the universe and human life. The poet occupies a marginal position, ceaselessly crossing between consciousness and the unconscious, swinging in the tension-field constituted by the two languages (behaviors), turning from one side to the other, thereby giving play to the role of both languages (behaviors) and gaining the best creative state. This extremely full, deep communication and resonance between consciousness and the unconscious is precisely the inspirational state of creation.

IV

Performance art and literary activity stand precisely at the two extremes of the cooperation of the two languages (behaviors).

In everyday activity, the focus of the human's consciousness is often the purpose of behavior, and the intentional feature of consciousness makes behavior itself, apart from its goal, recede into the unconscious, so that the human neglects behavior itself. Performance art, for its part, isolates behavior from the whole living space of its activity and throws it into relief, creating a distance from the real life-world; this also suspends the real purpose of behavior, making behavior itself strikingly become the object the human gazes at, the object on which consciousness focuses. Performance art forces the human to face behavior squarely, to reflect on behavior, and to discover from behavior the implied meaning obscured by everyday life. This feature of performance art precisely fully utilizes the cooperation between the two languages (behaviors). In performance art, behavior itself becomes the object described and displayed by the body (or other things), yet behavior is peeled apart from the body—while behavior is displayed, the body is hidden. "Art thus excludes the material body from the domain of the plastic; the body presents the human image only in the manner of representation, not as the human person" (Le Bot 121). For the appreciator, it at the same time awakens the behavior-language memory in the unconscious and the speech-act memory in consciousness. Only when behavior-language memory (not behavior) and speech-act memory (not the speech-act) both participate in the process of appreciation, only when consciousness and the unconscious mutually cooperate, can behavior itself truly be transformed from the unconscious state into an object of appreciation and reflection. Speech-act memory always indispensably intervenes in the process of appreciating performance art, and so behavior is no longer melted into the human's body, no longer recedes into the unconscious everyday activity; in viewing and reflection, it becomes "idea" and "theory," strikingly displaying behavior itself and its meaning. Therefore, even performance art that on the surface seems to be displayed only by pure behavior-language is in fact the cooperation and fusion of the two languages (behaviors).

Literature, as the art of language, equally cannot do without the two languages (behaviors). In literary activity, the speech-act takes the human's behavior as an important object of narration, while at the same time taking behavior-language memory as the object of arousal. These are two distinct yet coordinated processes: the former attends to the external behavior of the narrated object and expresses and depicts it through the medium of the speech-act; (5) the latter uses the speech-act to arouse and mobilize the behavior-language memory in the unconscious of the author (or reader). Precisely when behavior-language memory is fully aroused and mobilized, the behavior of the narrated object is no longer merely viewed by the author (reader); at the same time, it is imitated by the behavior-language in the author's (reader's) unconscious, and behavior-language establishes a unified, harmonious connection between the author (reader) and the narrated object. This is the process of the fusion of object and self, of object and self becoming one, in literary creation (appreciation); it is also the process of experience, the process of empathy, inner imitation, resonance, and self-identification, constituting the realm of not knowing whether I am the butterfly or the butterfly is I. This relation is neither primal chaos—because the speech-act has already played a dominant role and shaped, with ordinary language, a clear, distinct world—nor the opposition or separation of object and self—because behavior-language memory too is fully mobilized, bridging the gulf between the author (reader) and the narrated object and constructing an integral, human world rich in sound, form, emotion, and meaning, a homeland of being. The literary world is precisely a world jointly constructed by the two languages (behaviors); what we call the "speech-construction act" in literary activity (6) is in essence the mutual cooperation of the two languages (behaviors). The meaning of the literary work depends on the coordination and force-condensation of the two languages (behaviors), is produced in the process of their reciprocal action, and ceaselessly generates, flows, and expands along with the unfolding, interweaving, and mutual surging of the two languages (behaviors). This situation of the fusion of the two languages (behaviors) in literary activity makes any effort to interpret the meaning of the work merely from the angle of ordinary language come to nothing, so that we can only set out from concrete appreciative practice, experiencing, comprehending, and grasping it in the dynamic, and cannot place it before our very eyes.

In From Text to Action, Paul Ricoeur speaks of the inner contradiction of hermeneutics. He points out that Dilthey distinguished two reading attitudes, "explanation" and "understanding," and applied these two attitudes respectively to the field of the natural sciences and the field of the human sciences. But once we inquire into the scientific conditions of hermeneutics, we find that this distinction becomes blurred: "The conflict is this: on one hand, the concept of interpretation is subordinated to the psychologizing concept of understanding and possesses the unverifiable, intuitive feature deriving from the psychologizing concept of understanding; on the other hand, it demands the objectivity connected with the human sciences. This split in hermeneutics, between tending toward psychologizing and seeking the logic of interpretation, ultimately involves the relation between understanding and interpretation" (Ricoeur 155). Ricoeur's perplexity arises from the complexity of the speech-act itself. The speech-act is always entangled with behavior-language, and in general it is hard to clear away its involvement with behavior-language. Especially in the literary work, its speech-act and behavior-language are in full cooperation. When we fix our attention only on the speech-act and examine the speech-act itself, then we can broadly trace out the logic of interpretation from it and seek a scientific objective basis; but once behavior-language is involved and we see the reciprocal action of the two languages (behaviors), we cannot but rely on experience and intuition, inevitably tending toward psychologizing, and our understanding thereby possesses an unverifiable feature. The distinctive feature produced by the combination of the speech-act and behavior-language destines the dilemma of hermeneutics.

The feature that distinguishes literary activity from other linguistic activity is this: it creates a special linguistic space, and no matter whether this space is close to or similar to the real world, it is a non-real linguistic space—as John Searle points out, it temporarily gives up the tendency of mutual adaptation between discourse and world. The non-reality of the linguistic space suspends the effectiveness of social convention and also releases the various inner repressions, thereby not only letting the various behavior-language memories in the surface unconscious be smoothly expressed without obstruction, but also letting the deep unconscious (instinct) be released and the human's life-force be released. Conversely, the human's deep unconscious (instinct) in turn injects enormous energy into behavior-language memory, injects enormous energy into consciousness, injects enormous energy into the speech-act; it propels the speech-act to create a metaphysical world and ceaselessly raises the human's spiritual realm. The coordinated action of the two languages (behaviors) unearths the human's enormous potential, lets the human gain at the same time the deepest, darkest unconscious world and the most ethereal metaphysical world, and twines together the human's body and soul.

This way of literature and art—demarcating itself from the real world and creating a non-real world—constitutes the double mechanism of aesthetic liberation and aesthetic inhibition. On one hand, non-reality removes the various repressions, liberates the human's unconscious, and liberates behavior-language memory; on the other hand, consciousness's perception of non-reality inhibits the human's real behavior, prompting the human to give up real behavior and permitting only the combination of behavior-language memory and speech-act memory to be active on the psychic level, so as thereby to realize the experience of the soul. Because the behavior-language memory in the unconscious gains liberation and is aroused into enormous energy, this lets the human fully experience a sense of life and a sense of freedom; and this freedom stops only at the freedom of the soul and the freedom of imagination, and is not the freedom of real action—therefore literature and art are only the symbol of freedom.

However, this liberation of the unconscious and even the deep unconscious is not confined to the recollection of past behavior, letting the human return to the bygone or the primal; it is not merely nostalgia, a conservative force, but, on the contrary, opens toward the future and possesses a revolutionariness. Even the behavior-language memory in the deep unconscious, when it breaks free of the repression of the collective unconscious and the monitoring of consciousness, regains a truly innovative capacity. This is the vigorous outburst of the life-force; it displays itself in an unprecedented way and leads the human toward wholly new domains. And the non-logical, non-rational features of the unconscious cause the various mutually conflicting behavior-language memories to coexist in a jumble and to have the possibility of mutual intersection; once the repression is removed and they enter a carnival state, they become a force that bursts through the logical bondage and rational limitation in consciousness. The creation of human civilization is, to be sure, at the cost of the repression of the human's instinct, and the history of civilization's development has indeed ceaselessly accumulated all sorts of repression; but the purpose of civilization's development is to lighten repression, to give the human more freedom, to make life more in keeping with the human's nature. Therefore literary-artistic activity's liberation of the human's unconscious, its liberation of behavior-language memory, precisely foreshadows the picture of humankind's future life and shines with the radiance of human nature. Literature and art are an expectation of and promise to humankind's future.

In literary-artistic activity, the relation among consciousness and the unconscious, speech-act memory and behavior-language memory, is not always in a state of balance; more often there exists a frequent contest between the two sides. Viewed from the historical process, there is a wave-like trajectory of development and evolution: primitive art was weighted toward the unconscious and behavior-language memory, weighted toward non-rational frenzy; the valuing of consciousness and rational factors was gradually strengthened with the emergence of the culture of writing, and especially of print culture, and was fully displayed in works of critical realism; while in the postmodern period it again turned toward the unconscious and behavior-language memory, owing to the resistance to logocentrism and the emphasis on the factor of entertainment. The body-writing advocated by feminism, besides revealing the relation of body and power and the imprint of power stamped on the body, has its main point in the recognition that, because of men's long-standing control of discursive power, logocentrism and the rationalism that shadows it are bound to be permeated by androcentric thought. To break free of male constraint, the woman author should write with the body; this is in essence to throw into relief the dominant role of behavior-language memory in the writing process, to throw into relief the dominant role of the unconscious, so as thereby to throw off logocentrism, rationalism, and androcentrism.

In the present era of new media, the unconscious and behavior-language memory have won a significance of their own all the more. Shusterman points out an astonishing paradoxical phenomenon of the new-media era: the valuing of the body. He says that, just when long-distance communication makes the human's body no longer present, just when the new technology of media challenges the actual existence of the real body, our culture seems more and more to value the flesh, to worship the flesh. Although the media grow more and more virtual, the body seems to have become more and more crucial. Of this paradoxical phenomenon, Shusterman's explanation is that the media's advertising of beautiful bodies partly fosters interest in the body, but more important is that it points toward the quality of the human's own direct experience. This pursuit of enhancing the individual's bodily experience, this reconfirmation of the vital, self-transforming body, "is something wholly different from the body-image the media's promoters suppose: the dull, rigid body—as the inert opposite of the electronic agility of the media. Although the opposition of the body to the mass media is still maintained, this media-image that forms a sharp contrast is not a mirror of passive, static reflection, but a positive creator manifestly possessing an unlimited range and capacity" (Performing Live 184–85). To this end, Shusterman put forward the proposal of constructing "somaesthetics."

New media have changed the relations of interpersonal interaction, turning the direct interaction among persons into virtual interaction, an interaction in which the body is not present, and thereby making the original social convention void. This is bound to bring about the human's identity crisis and to change the human's unconscious structure—and this change is not a change of the human's deep unconscious (instinct), but a change of the collective unconscious sedimented from the various conventions, weakening the repressive mechanism, so that behavior-language memory gains the opportunity for carnival, and leading to the deconstruction of reason and the extolling of the non-rational. And so body, desire, and the unconscious are thrown into relief not only in the field of literature and art but also run rampant in the various fields of life; it even no longer confines itself to unconscious psychology and behavior-language memory, no longer is merely a psychic phenomenon, but directly displays bodily behavior to challenge traditional custom, so as thereby to attract eyeballs and win attention.

Viewed over a longer span, this non-face-to-face, long-distance virtual interaction of the new media will also cause the effect of behavior-language in public life to be weakened all the more, and thereby become pale and feeble; its originally vivid, lively, colorful, and rich "vocabulary" will gradually be replaced by abstract, patterned, sign-ified facial masks and diagrams, and behavior-language cannot but fade, and even, to a certain degree, be cast aside. And so the human no longer fully enjoys the direct experience that behavior-language brings. An era of only knowledge, without experience, arrives. The new generation is exactly like the Don Quixote of whom Agamben speaks, who "can only undergo but cannot possess experience," or like Sancho Panza, who "can only possess but cannot undergo experience" (Agamben 13). The loss of experience not only makes the literary type in the traditional sense tend toward extinction, but will also make literature and art lose their real foundation. For literature and art, this will be a fearful nightmare; the lack of experience is bound to lead to the weakening of the life of literature and art, and the younger generation of authors can only indulge in groundless, empty fantasies or in copying and collage.

Of course, the prospect foreshadowed by new media need not be so pessimistic. The "somaesthetics" Shusterman opened up has pointed out for us a new path of response. His so-called "direct experience" and "bodily experience" are mainly what we call the unconscious and behavior-language memory. He stresses, through the cultivation of bodily behavior, bringing the human's behavior-language onto a healthy track and thereby improving the human's body-mind structure, so as to realize his proposal of "somaesthetics."

New media are destined to change humankind's future; they bring at once new challenges and opportunities to human life, new challenges and opportunities to the development of the human's body and mind, and will also bring new challenges and opportunities to literature and art.

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