Dialogue and Reflection Grounded in the “Boundary” of Aesthetic and Literary Theory: Ma Dakang on His Scholarship

Concerning the cultural "boundary," Bakhtin advanced an extremely profound insight. In his view, the most intense, active, and fruitful life of culture occurs precisely at the crossings of these cultural domains. The boundary is a zone full of complex and diverse heterogeneous factors, full of dialogue, collision, exchange, interfusion, and change. Here, "one meaning, after meeting and confronting another meaning, another person's meaning, reveals its own deep underpinnings, because between different meanings a dialogue seems to begin. This dialogue dissolves the closedness and one-sidedness of these meanings, these cultures." (1) From another angle, the various cultural boundaries are also the result of artificial division. The human originally exists in an undivided, continuous spatiotemporal world, yet language draws boundaries between the human and the world and the myriad things, and establishes various metaphysical systems. Wang Bi says: "A name must have what it distinguishes; an appellation must have its source. Where there is distinction there is non-inclusiveness; where there is a source there is incompleteness; non-inclusiveness greatly departs from its truth; incompleteness cannot be named—this can be inferred and made clear." (2) When the human uses linguistic naming to divide the world and reveal the world, he has in fact already concealed the world. Especially those "boundaries"—they create an unequal relation between center and margin, conceal the most vital factors of the boundary zone, and artificially sever the complex interconnections of mutual interaction. Therefore, attending to the boundary and focusing on the boundary is often an important avenue for gaining scholarly insight. This attention is not only to discover the rich factors that have been neglected and concealed, nor merely to combine and reconcile the various heterogeneous factors in a simple "both-this-and-that" manner; it is, in attending to the boundary, to discover the "deep underpinnings," and then to seek clues among the heterogeneous factors and the various contradictions, transcending the boundary from a new theoretical base point. Looking back on my more than forty years of scholarly career—having taken detours and met setbacks—the one inspiration I have gained is attention to the "boundary." Whether deliberately or unintentionally, attention to the boundary has shaped my research path, and this may perhaps offer others a little reference.

I. Wandering at the Boundary of Disciplines

In 1981 I was admitted to the modern Chinese literature program of the Chinese Department of the former Hangzhou University, enrolling in the spring of 1982. In the same program there were only two of us—myself and Hu Xingliang (now a professor at Nanjing University). At the very start, our advisor, Mr. Lü Moye, required us to learn some theory. His meaning was clear: if one valued only the materials and phenomena of modern literature, without fairly high theoretical cultivation, it would be hard to write research papers of any standard. Therefore, in addition to electing the courses of Mr. Chen Jian on drama studies, Mr. Zheng Zekui on Lu Xun studies, Mr. Wu Xionghe on Tang and Song poetry, and Mr. Chen Yuankai on comparative literature, I also elected Mr. Wang Yuanxiang's aesthetics. Although all the teachers lectured wonderfully, in the 1980s, just as an "aesthetics fever" was rising in China, the aesthetics course naturally became popular, and Mr. Wang had to give it as a large lecture course. He lectured rigorously, each time carrying a tape recorder and playing classical music during the break. The works of Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and other scholars were widely loved by the students. From then on, my interest in aesthetics and literary theory grew further. During my studies, I wrote and published papers in both modern literature and literary aesthetics, and settled on "On the Aesthetic Features of Mao Dun's Fiction" as my thesis. Although writing the thesis was arduous, I was not satisfied with it; it made me deeply feel that, although modern literature is an extremely rich and colorful world of human nature and a treasury of thought, once one selects a research object, one cannot but be limited by that object, and these various limitations precisely could not satisfy my thirst for knowledge.

After graduating at the end of 1984, I was assigned to Wenzhou Normal College, where I took on the teaching of modern literature, aesthetics, literary psychology, and other courses. Because my family had a rich book collection, I had read many foreign literary works from childhood, and at this time I also wrote comparative-literature papers such as "Cultural Conflict, the Notion of Fate, and Sentimental Coloring: Shi Tuo's Records of Orchard Town and Daudet's Letters from My Windmill" (Foreign Literature Review, 1991, No. 1). The crossing of different disciplines benefited me greatly: it let me view literary works with a new eye, and it kept me, when thinking about aesthetic and literary-theoretical questions, from detaching from literary practice. Those were also the years in which I published relatively many papers. But my interest tilted more and more toward literary aesthetics. In the summer of 1987, I took part in the aesthetics seminar hosted by Mr. Zhou Laixiang at Shandong University. In the latter half of 1992, I applied to go to the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as a visiting scholar under Mr. Qian Zhongwen, and the Institute office arranged for Mr. Du Shuying to be my supervisor. Mr. Du was an extremely tolerant and generous scholar; at our first meeting he asked me to submit my paper, and at the second meeting he smilingly said I needed no supervision—just go my own way. Through the introduction of Dr. Jin Yuanpu, I took part in the doctoral course Mr. Qian Zhongwen offered. Mr. Qian's lectures had a distinctive character: he would either assign classic works in advance or select frontier questions, have the students prepare to speak, and only then make his own summary. The brief half-year of study effectively broadened my theoretical horizon. Before the term ended, I reported to him the outline of my soon-to-be-completed monograph A New Theory of Literary Function. Mr. Qian pointed out, incisively, that I should adjust the content, placing the aesthetic first to govern the other functions. His one remark suddenly enlightened me, and I realized the importance of the logical starting point: what kind of logical starting point one chooses already determines the entire line of thought and often harbors a certain idea-conception and theoretical framework. I readjusted my approach, gained a different interpretation of aesthetic cognition and aesthetic education, and renamed the monograph The Intoxication of Life: The Aesthetic Nature and Function of Literature (Nanjing Publishing House, 1993). The preface Mr. Qian wrote for it gave me great encouragement.

During my time in Beijing, I once took part in the academic salon organized by Drs. Wang Yichuan, Jin Yuanpu, Zhang Fa, and Tao Dongfeng, one topic of which was the "linguistic turn." For this I wrote a short discussion piece, then wrote "Various Aspects of Poetic Language" (Foreign Literature Review, 1993, No. 3), and later applied for a National Social Science Fund project. This was my own personal "linguistic turn."

Among Mr. Qian's students were those who studied phenomenology, reception aesthetics, and hermeneutics, and their research also aroused my interest and influenced me. Later, Mr. Zhou Qichao of the Institute of Foreign Literature invited me to write "The Chinese Reception of Reception Aesthetics" for Contemporary Chinese Studies of Foreign Literature within the project "Report on the Disciplinary Development of Philosophy and Social Sciences in China," which prompted me to study reception aesthetics and hermeneutics more deeply. In the course of reading, I discovered an interesting phenomenon: domestic scholars had formed several "reception aesthetics" of different theoretical frameworks; so, addressing the variation that occurs in "theory's travels," I wrote "Reception Aesthetics' Journey in China: 'Speaking Along,' 'Speaking Toward,' and 'Speaking Athwart'" (Social Science Front, 2012, No. 4). The different reception aesthetics under the pens of Messrs. Zhu Liyuan, Jin Yuanpu, and Long Xietao both enlightened me with various scholarly viewpoints and forced me to adopt an "exteriority" standpoint (Bakhtin's term), to grasp the logical framework behind the theories, forming a method of comparatively analyzing and thinking through problems within "relations."

In my scholarly career, Mr. Xu Zhongyu and Mr. Zhang Delin were also my benefactors. Beginning with the publication of "The Aesthetic Generation in Art Appreciation" (Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 1989, No. 6) in the late 1980s, I always enjoyed the two gentlemen's favor. Mr. Zhang later told me that he had happened upon a paper on his desk, neatly transcribed and properly formatted; although the author's name was unfamiliar, after reading it he found it good and recommended it to Mr. Xu. It is said that Mr. Xu read every manuscript, personally vetting it, never showing favoritism; and the more than ten articles I submitted were all published in succession. One of them, "On Aesthetic Communication: The Human's Ideal Mode of Existence" (Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 2002, No. 1), was too verbose, and Mr. Xu personally abridged it. After completing the monograph A Study of Poetic Language (China Social Sciences Press, 2005), I asked Mr. Xu to write a preface, and he gladly agreed. At that time, although I had published quite a few articles in Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, I had never met Mr. Xu once. For someone who had just stepped over the threshold of the academic hall, gaining the recognition of senior scholars could indeed be transformed into the impetus to keep moving forward. At a dinner during an academic conference, a middle-aged scholar suddenly approached me and warmly solicited a manuscript. I did not know him and was too embarrassed to ask directly; only after he left did I ask the colleague beside me—it turned out to be Mr. Zhang Weimin, editor-in-chief of Literature and Art Forum, in whose hands I had long since published several articles. Compared with today's young scholars, we are a relatively fortunate generation: in those years there were not so many professors and doctors, and an article could always receive a personal reply from a journal's editor.

In 1993, not long after I was promoted to professor, I took on an administrative post; the burdensome affairs deprived me of my freedom, and I no longer had the leisure to haunt the library hunting for primary materials. This forced me to give up modern literature and turn to the study of aesthetics and literary theory.

II. At the Boundary Where Theories Interlace

In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi points out that between two mutually conflicting theoretical systems there exists a "logical gulf": a person carrying out formal operations on the basis of one interpretive framework cannot demonstrate a proposition to the other side; correspondingly, he himself inevitably "indwells" within the theoretical framework he adopts, and may even fail to listen successfully to the other side or to discern his own limitations. To achieve a theoretical "breakthrough," one must cast off "indwelling" and cross the boundary. "The scientific discovery that turns from one framework to the next, in the tense and brief instant of exploratory insight, breaks through the limits of prescribed thinking." (3) Polanyi's "turning from one framework to the next" is not a simple switch of theoretical standpoint, abandoning one's own original framework and turning to the other's; rather, it stresses entering deeply into the theoretical boundary, gaining an "exteriority" standpoint, attending to the contradictions and collisions between different theoretical systems, reflecting on both sides' logical lines of reasoning, overcoming the limitations of both sides' original frameworks in comparison, and thereby transcending the "logical gulf," constructing a new theoretical framework, and achieving theoretical innovation. Only such innovation can make a difficult problem suddenly clear and yield truly creative insight.

In writing the monograph The Intoxication of Life, on one hand I favored the aesthetics of experience, admiring Dilthey's "lived experience of life" and Croce's "intuition," stressing the presence of the body and the direct engagement of life; on the other hand, I interpreted literature beginning from language, which in fact already clashed with the framework of the aesthetics of experience. Language is, after all, a "medium"; even if one stresses the "embodiment" of language, one cannot erase its mediating character. While bringing the human a "realm of clearing," language always inevitably separates the human from the world and sets the world and the myriad things up as the human's "object." Although I was not yet clearly aware of this divergence, I had already, consciously or not, sought to cross the logical gulf between the two frameworks, attempting to heal the rift between them through primordial language, defamiliarization, metaphor, linguistic blanks and the "appeal structure" (Iser's term), intertextuality, context, and so on; the monograph A Study of Poetic Language was the natural extension of this approach. It was precisely the logical gulf and tension between two different theoretical frameworks that prompted me to keep thinking and exploring at the boundary of different theories.

During this period, I attended to such theoretical questions as cultural criticism, electronic media, the visual, and literary time, writing such works as The Aesthetic Utopia: Essays on Literary Aesthetics (Jilin People's Publishing House, 2001), The Rebellious Eye: Literature in the Horizon of the Aesthetic and Culture (Ningxia People's Publishing House, 2006), and A Study of Literary Time (China Social Sciences Press, 2008). All of these studies were to expand my own theoretical horizon, attempting to discover and think through problems at the crossings of various different theories and to grope out a path that breaks through established notions.

Speech-act theory attracted me precisely because of its "cross-boundary" character, its emphasis on "speaking is doing," linking speaking with doing and linking language with bodily behavior. For this I wrote a series of papers: "Aesthetic Form, Literary Fiction, and Human Existence" (Literary Review, 2012, No. 1), "Discourse Acts and Literary Interpretation" (Literary Review, 2013, No. 6), "Discourse Acts and Literary Fiction" (Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 2014, No. 1), "The Beginning of the Theory of Fiction and Its Modern Fate" (Academic Monthly, 2014, No. 6), "Returning to Literary Activity: From Saussure to Austin" (Literature and Art Studies, 2014, No. 7), and others.

One may say that speech-act theory is the main theoretical basis used in the monograph A Study of Literary Fiction in the Horizon of the Modern and the Postmodern (China Social Sciences Press, 2014) to resolve the question of fiction. At the boundary of the different theoretical paradigms of pragmatics and semantics, I came to recognize more clearly the distinctiveness of literary fiction.

In aesthetic and literary-artistic activity, "fiction" is an extremely important and highly contested topic. For instance, Wellek, Warren, and Widdowson hold that "fictionality" and "imaginativeness" are the salient features of literature, while Eagleton and David Novitz oppose this view. In fact, the dispute arises precisely because they respectively employ different linguistic paradigms. Eagleton and Novitz view fiction from the angle of semantics. From this angle, although the semantics of discourse admits of true-or-false judgment, drawing a sharp distinction between "fact" and "fiction" is almost unworkable; moreover, using fiction as a criterion already excludes documentary literature from the literary world. Scholars such as Wellek and Warren, by linking fictionality with imaginativeness, have in fact already turned tacitly toward pragmatics—only they did not attain theoretical self-awareness and gave no convincing exposition.

The one who made a focused study of the question of literary fiction was Iser. Unlike Wellek and Warren, who linked fictionality with imaginativeness, Iser distinguished fiction from the imaginary and proposed the view of the "triadic unity" of the real, the fictive, and the imaginary. Setting out from anthropology, he pointed out that the human's particularity lies in existing both "centripetally" and "centrifugally." This feature of the human determines that the human is not only attached to reality but also needs, through the "fictionalizing act," to enter the world of literary imagination. Fiction is a "transgression" of reality. Iser's distinction between fiction and the imaginary is meaningful. His calling "fiction" a "fictionalizing act" also implies that he was already thinking about fiction from the angle of pragmatics. Unfortunately, his understanding of the fictional discourse-act stopped at the point of "insincerity," and so he gave up making a deeper exposition from the pragmatic angle. And in his discussion, he often confused fiction from the semantic angle with fiction from the pragmatic angle, so that, although his analysis was quite elaborate, it did not truly clarify the essence of literary fiction.

John Searle's interpretation of fictional discourse is of major significance. Searle distinguished, from the pragmatic angle, the logical statuses of different types of discourse. He held that the "vertical rules" contained in everyday discourse link discourse with reality. The logical status of fictional discourse is different: "the conventions of fictional discourse should be regarded as a set of horizontal conventions that suspend the vertical rules linking discourse with reality." (4) For everyday life, the function of language referring to reality is extremely important, the basic condition for language to participate effectively in real activity. Fictional discourse, by contrast, suspends the "vertical rules," changes the referential relation of discourse to reality, and suspends the link between discourse and reality, thereby gaining the liberation of discourse itself. Whether the semantics of the discourse is true or false, it all flows into the vortex of the literary fictional act. It freely constructs a "possible world" running parallel to reality, a non-real "world of otherness" in Marcuse's sense. The fictional discourse-act is the precondition for the unfolding of imagination. Without fiction from the pragmatic angle, without the transformation of the referential mode of discourse, there is no free imagination, because discourse is firmly tethered to the pilings of reality. It is precisely fictional discourse that leads us into the realm of freedom, where the repression of reality becomes ineffective, the unconscious potential is freely released and participates in the imaginative process to jointly construct the world of otherness. In an instant, we release long-pent feelings, glimpse the hidden, deep unconscious experience, and our minds are powerfully shaken—this is aesthetic experience and intoxication. Only by viewing literary fiction from the pragmatic angle do the independence, aesthetic quality, and literariness of literature gain a foundation. Although the writer, the subject matter, and the discourse cannot cast off socio-historicity and ideological character, the "fictional realm" of fine literature enjoys a special exemption: it lets the participant enter "another" world, gain Schiller's "zero state," return to life itself, and resist the various disciplinings of ideology. Literature both possesses socio-historicity and ideological character and deconstructs ideology, exalting an enduring human nature and life. To acknowledge only one side and deny the other, simplifying the problem, necessarily falls into error.

But Searle's theory has two problems: first, he overlooks that language is like a "chameleon," having no fixed, unchanging logical status, but often changing with usage and context, its referential mode able to be continually transformed; second, he confuses "fiction" in the different senses of pragmatics and semantics, and therefore denies the inner connection between literature and fiction. In fact, from the semantic angle the inner connection between fiction and literature cannot be clarified—for instance, a lie is a kind of fiction yet is not literature, while documentary literature possesses truthfulness yet is classed within literature. Yet from the pragmatic angle, a lie still attempts to refer to reality in a distorted way, disguising itself as "true" to deceive others with a false appearance; it does not suspend the vertical link, and so a lie should be excluded from literary "fiction." Documentary literature, by contrast, has a special character: it enjoys the tension of "dual reference"—the characters, events, time, and place in the work all have their real referents in reality, but the work also adopts a literary style. The former shows the documentary feature and admits of true-or-false judgment; the latter (the stylistic feature) invites the reader to change his reading attitude, suspend the vertical link, transform "outer reference" into the text's "inner reference," enter the realm of imagination, and become intoxicated in the literary world of otherness. Those real persons, events, times, and spaces are also transformed into signs and stage-settings within the fictional world; their link to reality is temporarily set aside, and the work thereby gains aesthetic quality and literariness. In the process of reading documentary literature, the referential mode of discourse continually shifts with the reader's reading attitude, and so it has a dual feature. "Fiction" in the different senses of semantics and pragmatics certainly has a certain connection, but the difference is fundamental. One may say it was precisely at the boundary of the different theoretical paradigms of semantics and pragmatics that I found the path to resolving the question of fiction, and went on to expound the literary aesthetic and its various distinctive features.

III. Between the "Sayable" and the "Unsayable"

In my scholarly path there is a clear thread: from first attending to "relation," then to "activity," and then concretizing it as "behavior." Although speech-act theory links language with behavior, it still only explains how behavior is influenced by language and does not clarify behavior itself, which is endlessly variable. "Behavior" itself has a meaning-representing function, and this is the main reason I turned to semiotics. From the monograph On Literary Activity (Zhejiang University Press, 2012) to On the Literary Act (China Social Sciences Press, 2018) and Cognitive Semiotics: A New Path for the Study of Aesthetics and Literature and Art (Zhejiang University Press, 2023), this arduous process of thinking is displayed. Language, as the most typical sign, not only let me enter semiotics fairly smoothly but also made me pay more attention to the difference between language and other signs. Mr. Zhao Yiheng and various foreign semiotic theories gave me much nourishment. The logical gulf and tension between the two lines—from relation, activity, to behavior, and from language to sign—can precisely spark thought, and papers such as "Speech-Act Theory: A New Paradigm for Exploring the Mystery of Literature" (Literary Review, 2015, No. 5), "Cultural Poetics, Behavioral Structure, Historicization" (Culture and Poetics, 2016, No. 2), "Speech-Act and Behavior-Language in Literary Activity" (Literature and Art Studies, 2016, No. 3), "Behavior-Language, the Unconscious Structure, Literary Activity" (Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 2016, No. 6), "Narrative Act, Psychological Identification, Spiritual Construction" (Social Sciences, 2016, No. 6), "Theoretical Turn: From 'Activity' to 'Behavior'" (Literature and Art Forum, 2017, No. 9), "Exploring 'Cultural Genes' from the Structure of the Symbolic System" (Social Sciences, 2018, No. 4), and "'Setting Up Images to Fully Convey the Idea' and Chinese Aesthetic Culture" (Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 2018, No. 6) appeared at the convergence points of different theoretical frameworks.

The paper "Speech-Act and Behavior-Language in Literary Activity" was once submitted to the Shanghai meeting of the council of the Chinese Association of Literary Theory. In the middle of the meeting, Mr. Zhao Xianzhang could not help texting me several times to discuss the paper's content, and during the tea break we discussed it with great interest. Mr. Fang Keqiang warmly solicited the manuscript; as it happened, the article had already been given to Mr. Chen Jianlan of Literature and Art Studies, which again prompted me to think it through anew. The common point of our generation is a fervor for scholarship: whoever made a discovery would arouse everyone's excitement, encouragement, and discussion. The small-scale conference on the relation of "word," "image," and "idea" hosted by Mr. Wang Feng again led me to think about Chinese aesthetic culture from the angle of semiotics. Attending academic conferences and exchanging monographs among friends broadened my scholarly horizon.

In Western modern theoretical discourse, language enjoys a prominent position. Although Western scholars have all along been critiquing logocentrism, rational-centrism, and dualism, they have in fact found it hard to escape the "prison-house of language" (Jameson's term); language has gained the highest glory and is held to mean that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world." (5) Ancient Chinese philosophy, however, opened up another path of thought. Laozi and Zhuangzi questioned language and disparaged speaking, holding that the "Dao" is "nothing" and cannot be spoken. Confucius too said, "What does Heaven say?" Since the "Dao" is "nothing," can the human grasp the Dao at all? On this Zhuangzi gave an extremely incisive explanation: using a series of parables—Cook Ding carving the ox, the craftsman wielding the axe to raise a wind, Wheelwright Bian hewing a wheel, the hunchback catching cicadas, the ferryman handling the boat, Carpenter Qing carving wood into a bell-stand, and so on—he repeatedly illustrated the same principle: grasping the formless Dao directly through "behavior." The logical gulf between Chinese and Western thought ought to become the prime mover and starting point of theoretical creation.

This kind of Zhuangzi parable stresses a common premise: when Cook Ding and the others transform a skill into a survival instinct, they need to enter the unconscious state of "the fasting of the mind" and "sitting in forgetfulness," suspending sensory feeling, forgetting the self, and "matching Heaven with Heaven," so that their potential can be fully exerted and they can enter the realm of attaining the Dao. Any intervention of conscious activity would split this unified relation and repress or distort the exertion of the instinctive behavior. This is a state in which the human's unconscious experience, instinctive behavior, and object are in a relation of identity; the object is no longer the human's "conscious object" but is fused with the human, becoming the human himself—and this is the one true gateway to embodying and attaining the Dao. Zhuangzi's parables reveal a profound principle: instinctive behavior not only closely relates to unconscious experience but also grasps the Dao of nature. It is precisely instinctive behavior that links and fuses the human with the world, establishing between human and world a "non-objective relation" of thing-self as one, and thereby grasping the world and grasping the Dao. The human is nature, is the world; the human's Dao (virtue) is Heaven's Dao. Therefore, the so-called "non-action" is not "lying flat" but acting in accordance with the human's natural nature and the way of Heaven. The "great image" and the "great sound" are likewise "non-objects"; relative to the human's consciousness, they can only be "formless" and "faint of sound," yet they have already been received by the body. Thus, beyond what Wittgenstein calls "the limits of my world," we discover another, far broader world of unconscious experience—a world not limited by "the limits of my language," sedimented over the long term by behavior.

Sebeok's theory of signs inspired me from another angle. He brought the "modeling" activity of the organism into the horizon of semiotics to construct a "modeling systems theory," expanding the territory of semiotics. Regrettably, he regarded "imitation" as the basis of modeling, in fact returning to Peirce's semiotic approach and falling anew into dualism. Emulating Sebeok's practice of thinking about signs beginning from the "unconscious organism," while removing its limitations, I reinterpreted "modeling": the organism relates to its environment through behavior, adjusts its behavior to adapt to the environment, forms a structured behavioral pattern through continual repetition, and sediments it as unconscious experience—this is "behavior modeling." In this process, incoming useful information is "encoded" by behavior and simultaneously sedimented as unconscious experience, inherited as instinctive behavior, and the environment becomes the organism's "biological field," "life field." Instinctive behavior both corresponds to the sensory information received and closely relates to unconscious experience, fusing the organism and the environment into one. That is to say, the organism, relying solely on unconscious experience (behavior modeling) and without having to initiate actual behavior, already directly grasps the environment. Humanity received this precious gift of the organism; this direct grasp of the world is what people call "lived experience" and "intuition." Behavior modeling becomes the most basic mode by which humanity establishes a relation with the world. Sebeok's modeling theory, after transformation, echoes Zhuangzi's thought across the distance and becomes a bridge for crossing the logical gulf between Chinese and Western cultural thought.

The birth of language brought a leap-like change to the modeling activity. Language is differentiation: it distinguishes the human from the world and distinguishes the myriad things from one another, transforming the originally undivided "non-objective relation" of human and world into an "objective relation." Consciousness is always consciousness of an object. At the very moment language is born, the (conscious) object and consciousness are generated synchronously.

Theoretical reflection on how "consciousness" is generated cannot detach from its own preconditions, cannot detach from the organism's instinctive behavior and unconscious experience. And among all behaviors, only "vocalizing behavior" has the dual character of being both "embodied" and "disembodied"; only it can become the stable carrier that projects and condenses unconscious experience and generates language with relative independence. It is precisely the relative independence of language that gives it the function of differentiation, distinguishing the world and the myriad things from the human himself, separating things from their background, letting the human enter the "open region" and reveal the "world of clearing." As Goethe said, those objects that are about to appear must, in order to manifest themselves, separate. Language is the automatic, natural screening, classification, condensation, and abstraction of unconscious experience, thereby forming the "global sharing of brain information" (Dehaene's term), rising to the threshold of consciousness, generating the conscious object, and then unfolding humanity's metaphysical activity.

Language has the capacity for objectification and symbolization. The relative independence of language can set anything up as an object and attempt to interpret its form, and that form then becomes a "sign." Likewise, language can also forcibly strip the human's behavior (posture, action, expression, and so on) from the body and interpret the meaning of the behavioral pattern, and behavior modeling is thereby transformed into a "sign" representing unconscious experience and sensory experience, which I call "behavior-language." Yet this special "embodied" "sign" still preserves its original mode of enactment; it experiences the world by establishing a "non-objective relation" with the world through bodily behavior. Grasping the meaning of behavior requires direct bodily experience, while the very naming "behavior-language" severs behavior from the body and "objectifies" behavior, in essence already distorting the meaning of behavior. Just as with Laozi's treatment of the unsayable "Dao," the naming "behavior-language" is likewise merely a "forced naming" I cannot avoid.

In fact, before language "symbolizes" things, behavior modeling has long since established a unified relation between human and thing; therefore, behind any other sign there exists a dual process: behavior modeling fuses thing and self, while language modeling distinguishes the two, and the two jointly make an interpretation. Nature is thereby stamped with the human's life-imprint and becomes "humanized nature." Precisely because any other sign is jointly constructed by behavior-language and speech-act, and can ultimately be jointly interpreted by these two, I term behavior-language and speech-act together "primary signs," and the other signs "secondary signs." Because behavior-language and speech-act constitute a tension relation owing to their different modes of enactment, I call this the human's "interpretive structure" or "mental structure," and even the "cultural gene." Behind what people call "lived experience" and "cognition" lie behavior-language and speech-act respectively; together they reveal the mystery of human sense and feeling, and reveal the complex, changeable connection between human and world. Therefore I name this semiotics "cognitive semiotics"—a "new cognitive semiotics" different from existing cognitive semiotics. "Imagination," for its part, fully exerts all the human's semiotic potential; fundamentally it is the deep fusion of speech-act and behavior-language, the interfusion of consciousness and the unconscious. If speech-act can leave the body, open up the spiritual dimension, and continually explore, extend, and construct toward distant time-space and the fictional world, then behavior-language is rooted in the body, excavating the infinitely deep unconscious experience, tracing back toward the human's roots, toward life itself, toward the remote past.

When "cognitive semiotics" interprets sign-generation from the angle of the interaction between organism and world, it already changes the original semiotic notion and theoretical base point: the sign is no longer merely a meaning-representation but is first of all the "relational mode" between human and world, with meaning-representation built on the basis of the relational mode. This correction effectively expands the interpretive power of semiotics. This tension structure of the primary sign system, constituted by both behavior-language and speech-act, happens to become the theoretical framework I use to interpret what is common to Chinese and Western culture. Once the complex, changeable tension relation of human and world—both "monistic" and "dualistic"—is revealed, one can reinterpret the "both-this-and-that" feature of literature and the various arts and the trajectory of their evolution; reinterpret aesthetics and all human cultural activity; and deeply reveal the causes behind various difficult problems. For instance, "the a priori" and the "sense of time-space" are rooted in the dual construction of the primary sign system; they were shaped long before individual experience and covertly determine the human's sensory experience. Because the languages of the various peoples diverged in their respective developments, producing differences in the independence among different languages, they further produced differences in the tension structure of the primary sign system. The tension structure of the primary sign system and its tendencies determine, on the whole, the distinctiveness of different cultural domains and different national cultures. It is precisely the differences of the tension structure and tendencies that lead to the difference of Chinese and Western "modes of thinking" (Ji Xianlin's term) and the difference of cultural emphasis. Likewise, ancient Chinese aesthetic thought originated in taste, and long employed such terms as "chewing," "savoring," "flavor," and "immersing" that eliminate distance and highlight bodily quality to describe aesthetic appreciation, even directly likening artistic style to bodily bearing—differing from Western aesthetics' emphasis on the distancing senses of sight and hearing; its distinctiveness is rooted in the dominant position of behavior-language in the tension structure of the primary sign system. This is also the reason I endorse the "aesthetics of pleasure-sense" proposed by Mr. Qi Zhixiang, because "pleasure-sense" communicates and fuses "pleasure" with the Kantian "sense of beauty," overcoming the limitation of Kantian aesthetics, while "cognitive semiotics" focuses on exploring the generative mechanism behind it.

Mr. Qian Zhongshu once expounded "synaesthesia," saying: "In everyday experience, the visual, the auditory, the tactile, the olfactory, and the gustatory can often be opened up or made to communicate with one another, and the domains of eye, ear, tongue, nose, and body need not be bounded. Color seems to have temperature, sound seems to have form, cold and warmth seem to have weight, smell seems to have substance. Such things constantly appear in ordinary language." (6) If one deeply probes the cause behind "synaesthesia," it is not hard to discover that its root lies in the constructive function of the primary sign system. For the organism, the visual sense, the auditory sense, and the various senses all closely relate to behavior modeling and are structured by it; therefore the various senses have a common behavioral structure and were originally interfused. Only after the birth of language, while distinguishing the objects of sensation, did language gradually bring about the division of labor among sight, hearing, touch, and the different senses. But because there still exists the same structure behind these senses, they can be "opened up or made to communicate with one another." Arnheim's "isomorphism" is also rooted in this. This at the same time confirms that all other signs are jointly generated by the primary signs. It was also from here that I entered the domain of other signs and explored music, painting, calligraphy, and so on mainly from the angle of the tension structure of the primary sign system. Mr. Gao Jianping's research on aesthetics and art, and the "language-image relation boom" led by Mr. Zhao Xianzhang, continually attracted and inspired me. For family reasons, I came into contact with music, painting, and calligraphy from childhood; what I saw and heard daily provided me with the conditions. Aesthetic and literary-artistic activity is the fruit of the deep communication and fusion of primary signs of contradictory nature, and this determines that they can only lie at the marginal, transitional cultural boundary.

The emphasis on the meaning of signs necessarily prompts attention to "normativity." The human, as a social existence, has his behavior (behavior-language) inevitably constrained by various normativities. On the Literary Act and Cognitive Semiotics divide it into three different types of normativity: the "normativity of life" embodied by instinct, which lies in the human's deep unconscious; the "social conventions" shaped by social history, jointly constructed by historical tradition and social relations, forming a social unconscious with a plural structure; and the "intellectual norms" determined by belief, which intervene in behavior through consciousness (inner language). The three interact and jointly prescribe the human's behavioral logic. This is the source of the inner logic of a character's personality. Once a character in a literary work is set by the writer, it inevitably develops according to its own inner logic and casts off the writer's subjective will. Althusser's "ideological interpellation" and Foucault's "disciplining of the body" are in essence built on the basis of social conventions. Compared with the normative force of belief over behavior, social conventions (cultural conventions) covertly and more effectively exert their ideological-disciplining function. Social conventions, as the fruit of the interaction of historical tradition and social relations, most profoundly embody particular socio-historical features. By seizing and magnifying the details of a character's behavior, one can discern the various social conventions behind the behavior, and then grasp the intricate social relations and the features of a particular social history. Writers' differing degrees of attention to the various types of normativity determine the differences of a work's school and style. Normativity is not a rule that language can sum up but a behavioral "exemplar," and the complex interaction among the three types of normativity produces the "family resemblance" phenomenon of literature and art. If one made a deeper study of the human's mental structure and behavioral normativity, it might perhaps offer new inspiration for the research and development of artificial intelligence.

Although "behavior-language" is a "forced naming" adopted out of necessity, with its aid I have transcended logocentrism and dualism, transformed the "imperceptible" unconscious experience into "experienceable" bodily behavior, expanded the territory of language, and provided a path for the silent body to speak the "unsayable," thereby opening up new territory for semiotics. And all the thinking and exploration of Cognitive Semiotics occurs at the boundary of different theoretical frameworks, especially at the boundary of the logical gulf between Chinese and Western cultural thought—it is an attempt intended to transcend this boundary. Human culture takes myriad forms, but humanity, as one and the same species, must have common deep underpinnings, and the boundary is the rift through which to spy out those deep underpinnings.

In my youth, I served ten years in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. In 1993 I began holding an administrative post. I had neither administrative experience nor interest, yet, constrained by the regard I owed my old leaders, I had no choice but to comply. Mr. Wu Xionghe and Mr. Chen Jian, former chairs of the Chinese Department of Hangzhou University, and Mr. Luo Hanchao, chair of the Chinese Department of Zhejiang University, several times wished to transfer me to Hangzhou, but for various reasons it never came about. In those years, although the school's scale, academic atmosphere, and strength were markedly enhanced, fourteen years of administrative affairs exhausted my energy; reading and writing became a luxury, and scholarship became a marginal existence—yet it was also the remedy by which I cast off vexation and sought peace of mind. All day I rushed about for the school's development, yet I was unwilling to confuse the school's administrative work with my own scholarship. Once, filling in personal information at an academic conference, I wrote "Wenzhou University Office" in the correspondence-address column, and an academic friend present laughingly asked, "Has Professor Ma been promoted?" The colleague beside me told him, "Old Ma has already stepped down!" In the years after shedding the administrative yoke and regaining freedom, I was fairly satisfied with the quality of my papers and books, and my monographs won first prizes at the 14th, 18th, and 20th Zhejiang Provincial Outstanding Achievements in Philosophy and Social Sciences. Regrettably, owing to limited energy, I left behind projects I wished to do but did not. If the study of aesthetics and literary theory is ultimately the study of the human, then this mode of existence wandering at the boundary of administration and scholarship may perhaps have let me better understand the human himself.