I
With the spread of multimedia since the new century, the study of multimodal signs has gradually become one of the hotspots of attention in China's scholarly world; its research is chiefly concentrated in second-language teaching and in the semantic interpretation of advertising, images, and film. Although these studies have achieved not a few results, because they lack deep exploration of the various sense-activities and simply apply the speech-act paradigm to multimodal-sign activity, they cannot truly grasp the nature and functional characteristics of the different modal signs, still less the essence of the various kinds of artistic activity—so affecting the theoretical depth and the accuracy of semantic interpretation of the relevant research.
To understand the nature of multimodal signs such as the visual, auditory, and tactile, one must first explore the working mechanisms of these various senses. In fact, the human sense-organs such as vision, hearing, and touch are by no means like a mirror that directly reflects external information; they are more like a computer, which must encode incoming information before it can input and output. This is to say, the reason the human sense-organs can perceive the external world is that, in the process of seeing, hearing, and touching, they first structure the world; whatever cannot be structured cannot be taken into the body, and cannot be seen, heard, or touched—it is excluded from the threshold of sensation. This means that behind all human perception there must exist a sign-mediation exerting a structuring action, and the most original, most basic sign-mediation is precisely behavior-language and speech-act. (1) The human relies not only on these two acts (languages) for intercourse, but also relies on their structuring action to perceive the world, construct the mind, and shape the body, relying on them to think and to act. In fact, it is precisely because these two acts (languages) can structure the world and the mind that human and human can have mutual intercourse. This further reminds us that, to understand multimodal-sign activity and the various artistic activities, one must first explore these two acts (languages), namely behavior-language and speech-act.
Behavior-language—including action, posture, expression, and voice (tone, rhythm, cadence) (2)—existed already in the pre-human period. In the process by which the organism continually repeats and imitates effective behaviors, it gradually internalizes and structures behavior and so generates group-shared meaning, thereby forming behavior-language; therefore behavior-language is, in effect, “structured behavior.” Because these structured behaviors are shaped in the process of adapting to the environment, they are necessarily closely bound up with a specific environment and become a common representation of the organism's relation to the environment. Behavior-language simultaneously relates the organism's internal world and external world, sediments into the organism's experience, and integrally represents the relation of inner and outer worlds. Speech-act, in turn, is differentiated out on the basis of behavior-language; it classifies, generalizes, and abstracts experience, condensing it into discrete concepts, thereby constructing a sign-system with relative independence, and becoming a sign-activity enjoyed by the human alone.
But these two acts (languages) have utterly different natures, modes of execution, and functions: behavior-language uses “bodily information” (kinaesthesia) to establish difference—it is, in effect, bodily performance; it directly belongs to the body and is a sign-system lacking independence; while speech-act establishes difference by its “concept/sound-image,” and is thereby distanced from the body, a sign-system with relative independence. The human relates to the world by behavior; with behavior-language he structures the world and takes it into himself, fusing world and human into one and so grasping the world, and conferring on the world a human behavioral structure and life-form, anthropomorphizing and embodying the world. But because behavior-language lacks independence and cannot separate human from world, cannot construct the human's “object-world,” it also cannot construct human consciousness, and can only constitute unconscious experience. (3) It is precisely the action of behavior-language that makes it possible to set up a non-objective relation between human and world, constructing the realm of thing-and-self-as-one, of no-thing and no-self. Experience, apprehension, intuition, empathy, and instinct are built on the foundation of the functional characteristics of behavior-language. Speech-act, in turn, by virtue of its independence and differentiality, distinguishes human from world and distinguishes the myriad things from one another, thereby—while constructing the human's object-world—reflexively constituting human consciousness. (4) From this, the unified, undivided relation of human and world is split into the dualistic relation of subject and object opposed, and the objective relation between human and world is constructed. The mode of thinking we call subject-object-split, logical, and analytic is precisely founded on the functional characteristics of speech-act. It endows the human with the capacity of observational cognition, of logical inference, and of reflection. Speech-act both shapes the order of the object-world and, by its reflexivity, bestows reason upon the human. Behavior-language and speech-act are two utterly different modes of relating between human and world.
It is their having conceptuality and relative independence that decides the fundamental difference between behavior-language and speech-act. Behavior-language, as structured behavior, is still firmly rooted in the human body, is bodily performance, cannot leave the human body and stand independent, and has no determinate boundary between body and behavior. Kristeva once spoke of the “anteriority” of bodily/limb language. She holds: “This anteriority is not the anteriority of a concept relative to some vocalization (signified-signifier), but the anteriority relative to a certain display of consciousness and thought, to indication, to action-indication. Before the sign (this anteriority being spatial and not temporal) and any signifying problem (and signifying structure), people can already think of a certain indicating practice, a certain limb action; it is not that it expresses, but that it encloses ‘subject,’ ‘object,’ and practice in one and the same space (without the dual opposition of meaning and word, signified and signifier)—we might as well enclose them in one and the same sign-text.” (3) Differing from this, the conceptualizing process of speech-act is a process of abstracting from the human body; it thereby gains relative independence. Although speech-act ultimately cannot leave the human, still maintaining embodiment, it is after all utterly different from behavior-language, always transcending the human and enjoying relative independence. It is precisely this relative independence gained through conceptualization that makes speech-act split off from, and break with, behavior-language, and makes its nature, mode of execution, and functional characteristics split off from those of behavior-language.
On one hand, the human relates to the world by his own behavior, with the structure of behavior-language structuring the world and taking it into himself, thereby grasping the world; and this mode of grasping is holistic. On the other hand, speech-act remolds the world with its own structure, and its mode of execution is intentional. Because behavior-language lacks independence, although it can grasp the world by structuring it, it cannot separate world and human, cannot construct an independent “object-world”; world and human remain undividedly one. The human relates the world and himself and fuses them into one by behavior-language, and the world thereby gains the human's directness and affectivity. The human's intuition, empathy, and bodily experience are built on the foundation of behavior-language. Likewise, the organism too perceives the world in this way; so Marx says: for the animal, the world is only the natural extension of its life. Speech-act is not so: it, by its relative independence and differentiality, constructs the world as an independent world separated from the human, constructs it as the human's “object-world”; while distinguishing human from world, it also distinguishes the myriad things, letting a world of a thousand forms and a hundred states unfold before the human.
According to the view of phenomenology, human consciousness is always consciousness of an object. Therefore, when the human uses speech-act to construct the object-world, he simultaneously constructs his own consciousness. In fact, the three—speech-act, human consciousness, and the object-world—are synchronically constructed; only thus does speech-act's first “objectifying” mode of construction clearly manifest itself. It is precisely for this reason that the myths of nearly every people endow speech-act with a creative function. As against this, behavior-language cannot construct the human's object-world, and so cannot construct human consciousness, and can only construct the unconscious. (4) This too is the reason animals have only instinct.
Since speech-act takes behavior-language as its foundation, the two acts (languages) must be mutually related and mutually cooperative. For example, when we converse or give a speech, what the speaker attends to is the content of the utterance, his consciousness concentrated on the speech-act, while behavior-language (including facial expression, hand action, bodily posture) is in an unconscious state—and yet this constitutes the indispensable context of the verbal exchange; the two acts (languages) mutually cooperate, mutually interpret, intimately coordinate, jointly achieving the exchange of meaning. Supposing in conversation we use speech-act alone, excluding all behavior-language—such as gesture, posture, expression, modulation of tone—the conversation would become extremely stiff, even unable to continue. Or supposing we deliberately attend to our own behavior-language, consciously manipulating behavior-language, it would on the contrary appear awkward, over-affected. Excessive attention to, and conscious interference with, behavior-language precisely most easily obstructs the smooth flow of speech-act. But this is precisely a fundamental difference between behavior-language and speech-act: speech-act is relatively separated from the body, and the discreteness of its concepts and the linearity and logicality of its sign-organization doom it to be unable to exhaust the meaning of behavior-language, unable to replace the behavior-language that has no determinate boundary with the body—and this is the predicament we constantly meet of “intent not fully conveyed, words not reaching the meaning.” The different characteristics of the two acts (languages) necessarily decide the complex relation in which the two both mutually communicate and yet cannot mutually exhaust.
In Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, Lakoff and Johnson propose the relation of the human's body and mind. They say: “The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.” (5) Behavior-language is itself embedded in the human body; it is both bodily performance and experiential structure and meaning-expression. From this angle, mind and intelligence are precisely embodiment. And the embodiment of speech-act is chiefly because speech-act is always related to behavior-language, rooted in the coordinating action of the two acts (languages). This coordinating action makes the human's consciousness and unconscious mutually permeate, mind and body mutually permeate, while linguistic concepts symbolically refer to the human's unconscious experience and symbolically refer to behavior-language memory. In fact, the symbol is precisely the use of language's “this” to hint at, to map, the chaotic experience of “that,” to hint at and map behavior-language memory. As for the various metaphors, the metaphorical relation between source-domain and target-domain is precisely founded on a shared behavior-language memory, sharing a common experiential structure. All our bodily experience is constructed through behavior-language, and speech-act takes it as its foundation, being a sifting, condensing, and reconstruction of this experience. Therefore the embodiment of speech-act is rooted in the fleshly character of behavior-language, and the metaphoricity of speech-act is rooted in the transformability of behavior-language structure, rooted in the relatedness of the two acts (languages). It is precisely for this reason that Lakoff says: “In the last analysis, the world we construct is rooted in our experience as beings of flesh and soul; our body interacts with the surrounding environment through physical processes such as perception and motor activity.” But what is evident is that our spiritual life transcends the boundary of present embodied experience. (6) The interaction of bodily perception and motor activity with the surrounding environment must borrow the help of behavior-language and, by way of behavior-language, structure the surrounding environment, before it can take in the human's own experience; while speech-act lets us gain a transcendence over this kind of embodied experience—it adds, with its own structure, a sifting, condensing, sorting, and elevating to the original experience, so that the human spirit is no longer limited to the boundary of present experience. When we grasp the fundamental characteristics of the two acts (languages), and then combine the concrete characteristics of different media, we can more accurately grasp the various modal sign-activities.
In all human cultural activity there is always the interweaving of these two acts (languages). Cassirer holds that culture is human symbolic-sign activity. For the human, the most original, most basic symbolic-sign activity is behavior-language and speech-act; all the various other sign-activities take these two acts (languages) as their paradigm. Culture can only be the human's alone, and not possessed by non-human things; the root cause lies in the human's simultaneously possessing the two acts (languages). It is precisely speech-act that constructs the object-world and human consciousness; this function lets the human cognize and reflect upon his own intentional object, thereby letting human behavior become a regulable behavior, become a conscious, purposeful behavior, become a self-aware, autonomous cultural behavior—and at the same time lets the human grow into a rational subject. From this, the human breaks free of nature's grip, transcends the animal world, begins his own cultural creation, and ought to adapt to nature, transform nature, and no longer passively follow nature, accommodate nature.
II
If, in general cultural activity, speech-act and behavior-language mutually cooperate, then in aesthetic and literary-artistic activity the two acts (languages) realize a deep cooperation.
Aesthetic activity is the activity of deep cooperation of behavior-language and speech-act. Leaving speech-act aside, behavior-language can, to be sure, structure the world and directly grasp it; but the world still cannot be presented in clear “object” form, and cannot constitute the human's aesthetic object. Behavior-language must borrow the help of the cooperation of speech-act before it can construct a sensuous object. It is precisely speech-act that distinguishes human from world, distinguishes the myriad things, and so provides the precondition for constructing the human's sensuous object. For example, for the bird, the beautiful feathers and pleasing song cannot become its aesthetic object, but are only an instinct by which image-information arouses difference. The human, however, simultaneously possesses the two acts (languages), and so can at last enjoy his own spiritual pursuit and aesthetic capacity. When speech-act does not go to state and refer to some real object, nor prompt the execution of some real event, but jointly, with behavior-language, constructs an imagined world, its arousal of behavior-language reaches a new depth. (7) Because the fictionality of the discursive world makes the social conventions of reality lose efficacy, it weakens and suspends the repression of social convention upon the unconscious; this not only lets the surface-level individual behavior-language memory pour out freely, but also lets the original, deep-level, long-sedimented and repressed life-experience find a vent for its eruption. This is no longer the trivial individual experience of daily life, but the original experience accumulated over the long term by the race, the undivided life-experience, in which is filled the energy of life and the wild passion. Human magnificent imagination is thus conceived in the deep fusion of the two acts (languages); the two, mutually cooperating, with their force draw the human into the imagined fictional world, into the vortex of imagery. And so, while the two acts (languages) cooperate to construct the aesthetic object, behavior-language confers the human's own vitality and affectivity upon the world, making the world brim with the coloring of human nature and a mysterious aura, thereby conferring upon the aesthetic object “a meaningful form” (Clive Bell) and “the form of life” (Susanne Langer).
In “The Cognitive Psychological Reality of Image Schemas and Their Mutual Transformation,” Gibbs and Colston point out that “the image schema is essentially imagined and non-propositional; its action is to organize the experiential structure on the level of bodily perception and motor activity. The image schema exists in all forms of perception (perceptual modality); in our experience there must be image schemas, before sensorimotor coordination can be achieved.” (8) That the image schema is “imagined” explains that it can only be the fruit of the cooperation of speech-act and behavior-language; in essence it is no longer pure speech-act. The kindred relation between image schema and speech-act dooms the image schema to take “the experiential structure on the level of bodily action and motor activity” as its foundation, to take behavior-language memory as its foundation, and at the same time it cannot do without speech-act's reorganization and reconstruction of this experiential structure, cannot do without the cooperating action of vision, hearing, and touch, cannot do without the cooperating action of behavior-language. In the process of these two acts (languages) mutually shaping and mutually interpenetrating, the image schema is born. The originally vague, chaotic experience is organized into a clear sign-form, while the conceptualized language gains life-breath and affective form—this is both the objectifying, conceptualizing process of behavior-language and the embodying, incarnating process of speech-act.
Edward Bullough once put forward, as an aesthetic principle, the doctrine of “psychical distance,” and pointed out: “The production of distance is the result of, by a certain method, withdrawing the object from the range of our practical needs and aims and from the screen of its effects; only thus can the ‘intuition’ of the object become possible.” (9) Evidently, Bullough's “psychical distance” is closely related to Kant's “aesthetic disinterestedness.” Here, what we stress is the dual action of speech-act: speech-act distinguishes world from human, constructs the world as an “object” available for the human to view; speech-act can also suspend the self's adaptive direction toward the world, and thereby construct the unreal relation between creator and world, letting the human break free of “practical needs and aims,” letting behavior-language memory be fully aroused, letting the object shed itself from a real object and become an aesthetic object in the imagined world—and thereby laying the foundation for aesthetic intuition.
The different characteristics of speech-act and behavior-language decide the duality of aesthetic activity. On one hand, behavior-language confers life upon the world, conferring upon it humanity, spirituality, and embodiment, so that the world becomes a world of human warmth, life-rhythm, and poetic atmosphere, letting the human dwell warmly within it, immersed in it, deep in experience, undividedly one with the world. On the other hand, speech-act constructs the distance between human and world, presenting the world as the human's object-world, an aesthetic object available for viewing, for being played with, for appreciation. Speech-act not only displays the object-world's meaning, but also jointly, with behavior-language, constructs a metaphysical spiritual world. The full arousal and generation of the two acts (languages) prompts the human simultaneously to extend in the two dimensions of flesh and spirit, to extend toward both the metaphysical world and the physical world, making the human a unique existence forever open to the future and to the infinite.
Behavior-language communicates and fuses human and world; the human's intuition, empathy, and experience are built precisely on this foundation. Speech-act, in turn, always splits human and world by its distinguishing function, endowing the human with the capacity of observation, cognition, and reflection, continually improving the human's practical capacity. The two constitute a unique tension-relation, and aesthetic activity is precisely in this tension-field; it becomes the two-faced gatekeeper “Janus” possessing the two faces, concurrently holding two utterly different functions. This is what Wang Guowei called the “Apollonian spirit” and the “Dionysian spirit” mutually intersecting, what Buber called the “I–Thou” relation. Speech-act sets up for the human the viewed object, sets up the other, sets up the relation of subject and object; at the same time, behavior-language confers self-life and humanity upon object and other, makes up the gulf between the two, transforms the “I” into another “I,” cancels the “objectivity” of the object, transforms the subject-object relation into the “I–Thou” relation—and this is also a Chinese-style realm of “thing-and-self-without-distinction,” “no-thing-no-self,” “thing-and-I together transformed,” a realm of “bodily experience,” “apprehension,” and “dwelling in apprehension.” Perniola calls it “ritual thinking,” holding that ritual thinking contains a transitional state and a simultaneous experience: “In fact, the transitional seems often to place us in a temporary state, in a state of self-indeterminacy, where the static and the dynamic incomprehensibly coincide.” (10) The cooperation and gaming-relation between the two acts (languages) makes the static and the dynamic, determinacy and indeterminacy, reason and sense, spirit and body, temporality and simultaneity, finitude and infinitude mutually transit into a temporary state, and makes the two opposed characteristics incomprehensibly coincide. It must be pointed out that the Western “intersubjectivity” relation and the Chinese “no-thing-no-self” relation are similar yet different. The similar place lies in: both stress the deep cooperation and joint construction of the two acts (languages); the different place lies in: the West attends more to the action of speech-act—the human's subjectivity is constructed by speech-act; while China inclines toward the action of behavior-language—it is precisely speech-act that cancels the differentiality between human and thing, constructing the realm of thing-and-I-mixed, of no-thing-no-self.
The characteristic of aesthetic activity—that it too is mutually-this-mutually-that—is rooted precisely in the different characteristics of the two acts (languages), only that different periods, different peoples, and different scholars have different inclinations in their recognition of the relation of the two. Kant distinguishes “reflective judgment” from “judgment of sense,” and excludes “judgment of sense” from aesthetic appreciation; this aesthetic view is closely related to his own cultural standpoint and aesthetic taste. Kant, unable to break free of the cultural standpoint and aesthetic taste of his nation, could not but the more attend to the spiritual dimension of aesthetic activity, attend to the value of the metaphysical meaning created by speech-act, and disparage the bodily pleasure dominated by behavior-language. Life-aesthetics, phenomenological aesthetics, and existential-ontological aesthetics, in turn, raise a doubt about Kant's aesthetics' overesteem of reason, attempting to challenge, by stressing the non-rational and stressing life-experience, the tyranny of speech-act in aesthetic activity. It was not until Shusterman put forward somaesthetics that the dominant status of behavior-language in aesthetic activity was truly restored. He attempts, with the body, to overturn language-centrism and reason-centrism, and to restore the legitimacy and primacy of behavior-language in aesthetic activity.
In Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, Shusterman criticizes Western language-centrism. He holds that the great majority of analytic philosophers and Continental philosophers advocate the “linguistic turn” and completely ignore and explicitly reject the dimension of “the art of living.” He goes on to point out: “Although the human body is, in a certain sense, the site of practice shaped by language and interpretation, it is usually also equated with a more direct, non-interpretive experience. When philosophy is so thoroughly conceived as researching reality through language, the non-language experience of the body is often passed over and mocked, though not refuted.” (11) From Wittgenstein, Shusterman absorbed such an aesthetic view: “The body is regarded as a central exemplification and symbol of something constituted as a background closely bound up with everything that can be expressed by language and art, and that is reflexive and non-language: a reflective thought or rediscovery is the inexhaustible source of all non-language meaning.” (12) Yet, having something different from Wittgenstein, Shusterman's aesthetics more prominently highlights the importance of the body; he brings to the foreground the hidden body that has long been screened in the Western aesthetic background.
Shusterman's emphasis on the body is by no means a one-sided stress on bodily instinct and unconscious behavior; rather, it advocates “body training,” advocates, through sustained training, grasping how correctly to read bodily sensation. This training is precisely the interpretation and grasp of behavior-language, hoping consciously to manipulate behavior-language to remold the human body. The interpretation of the body and its sensation requires the intervention of speech-act, only that it relinquishes the original wild-and-headstrong posture, adopting a humble attitude to peer into and explore bodily sensation, including all kinds of bodily sensation, strengthening the visibility and legitimacy of bodily sensation, in order to expand bodily sensation. And so speech-act no longer ruthlessly rides over body and behavior-language, but, leaning on reason, makes judgment of body and behavior-language—no longer wantonly cutting and twisting body and behavior-language according to reason's interference, but humbly peering into bodily sensation, including all kinds of bodily sensation, strengthening their visibility and legitimacy. It is precisely because, while extolling behavior-language, he does not disparage speech-act, that Shusterman provides a theoretical foundation for the proposal of “body politics.” For only with speech-act intervening, only when body and its sensation gain visibility, can the link of body and politics be unfolded. Shusterman says: “If a certain national-political purity's enticing image is a background of deep, latent prejudice, fanning hatred and enmity of the alien people, then a strategy for resolving the difficulty might be to make the impure and mixed nature of the body of all people—including oneself—appear vividly and visibly. Somaesthetic training can make us have such a deep, vivid consciousness of the impure mixedness the body is constituted of; it reminds us further: the boundary of the body is not absolute but porous.” (13) When people realize that the body, including their own body, is not pure and clean, that it has no closed boundary but is plural, open, and mixed, then what reason is there to cling stubbornly to nourishing alien-people prejudice and hatred? The political and ethical significance of body training lies precisely in making, through training, the human's two acts (languages) coordinate and fuse at a deeper level: when the human's body, life, and behavior-language win their own selfhood, then the ideologies that shackle body, life, and behavior-language lose their legitimacy-foundation, and, while resolving the body, will display a richer, more colorful array. Respect for different bodies will promote a true understanding and tolerance among different races and groups, finally realizing the harmony and spiritual coexistence of bodies.
In fact, the so-called “phenomenological intuition” in aesthetic activity by no means entirely excludes speech-act; rather, it tries its utmost to weaken the compulsion of speech-act, to highlight the mediation of behavior-language. The non-conceptual, non-independent, and direct character of behavior-language makes it a kind of mediation that is no mediation, or a mediation with no obstruction; this to some degree lets us break free of the distortion that speech-act brings to the world, break free of the obstruction and prejudice created by conceptualization, and strive to return to the original experience, and let the world and self be built into a kind of intuitive relation “without mediation.” Therefore, phenomenological intuition is intuition without mediation; without behavior-language, this mediation, to structure the world, the human cannot take the world into himself, cannot transform the world into his own experience, and any intuition is impossible. Phenomenological intuition must borrow the help of behavior-language, using this non-independent mediation to establish the human's direct relation with the world.
In aesthetic activity, between behavior-language and speech-act there exists a complex relation of both mutual cooperation and mutual gaming. Human culture is precisely founded on the paradigm of these two acts (languages). The unique tension-relation and inclination constituted by the two acts' (languages') different natures, modes of execution, and functional characteristics decides the characteristics of the culture and art of different periods, different peoples, and different types, and creates human civilizations of widely different forms.
III
Having discussed behavior-language and speech-act in aesthetic activity, we can now go on to discuss the various modal sign-activities and artistic problems. Fundamentally, the characteristics of the various modal sign-activities and artistic activities are rooted in the tension-structure of behavior-language and speech-act. The transformation of media and the innovation of representational technique first change the tension-relation of the two acts (languages), and thereby change vision, hearing, and touch, giving rise to changes in the characteristics of the various modal sign-activities and artistic activities.
Music, as an artistic activity of the auditory mode, is closest to the human's behavior-language (vocalization); its tone and rhythm are mutually consistent with behavior-language. (14) The difference lies in: music, according to the pentatonic or heptatonic scale, makes a division of sound and reorganizes it into a regular, rhythmic, melodic musical composition; this process is in essence a refining and abstracting of sound and a recomposing of it according to the “grammar” of music—it is grammaticalized, patterned, image-schematized, a conceptualizing process, making sound separate from the body and possess relative independence. Although this independence makes music enjoy certain characteristics and modes of execution of speech-act, it is not conceptualized; this maximally preserves the closeness of music and behavior-language. While music concurrently holds the characteristics of the two acts (languages), it most fully retains the characteristics of behavior-language; therefore music can directly invade the human heart, arouse the human's affect, pervade the human's soul, permeate the human's body. Corresponding to this extremely strong affective intercommunicative function, the interpretation of musical meaning can only be vague and indeterminate. Although different people, even different peoples, can be aroused to resonance and sympathy by music, they can hardly accurately grasp its conceptual meaning, especially with non-programmatic music. The reason music possesses a strong magic, able with its inexpressible meaning to touch the depth of human experience, is that its structural mode inclines more toward behavior-language.
Differing from music's auditory sign, painting relies on the visual sign, but its meaning is likewise built on the foundation of the two acts' (languages') paradigm. If we make a comparison of Chinese and Western painting, the inner spirit of Chinese painting is evidently closer to music. Chinese painting does not stress observing, researching, and imitating nature; although the painter has traveled over a thousand mountains and ten thousand rivers, he does not face nature to sketch from life, but does so to fill his eyes with beautiful scenery, to wash away his heart, to apprehend nature with mind, to apprehend and experience nature with the body. The “object” that this whole process pursues is the unity of human and nature; not only must the apprehended conception be grasped by borrowing the help of behavior-language, but brush-ink and line themselves display the dynamism of life, and are the natural extension of human behavior-language. In Chinese painting, brush-ink and line are by no means merely a technique; more important is that they themselves embody the life and rhythm of life. The painter uses brush-ink and line to express the conception of human-and-nature-fused, thereby conferring human life upon nature, making nature brim with poetry, becoming a home one can dwell in and roam. In the form-spirit relation, Chinese painting attends more to conveying the spirit; in pursuit of the inner spiritual import, it would rather relinquish the accuracy of outer form, realizing “departing from form, seeking likeness.” The “blank” has a special importance for Chinese painting. “Counting white as black”—that is, the deliberate management of “leaving blank” on the painting surface, stressing the mutual stimulation of white and black, with and without mutually generating—this is to say, the blank is not empty and possessing nothing, but brimming with dripping vitality, and it is precisely its “blankness” that lets the conception of the painting break free of the limited constraint of brush-ink and line and generate toward an infinite time-space. “Spirit” and “white (emptiness)” are often the place where speech-act, even behavior-language, conveys meaning; behavior-language can only borrow the help of another act (language), namely speech-act, to express; through the limited painting-language it arouses the unconscious, arouses behavior-language memory—therefore “departing from form, seeking likeness” and “counting white as black” are founded on the unique function of behavior-language. It is precisely in “spirit” and “white (emptiness)” that “the way of the human” and “the way of heaven” are fully revealed. All these explain that in the sign-structure of Chinese painting, behavior-language exerts a more fundamental action; it is precisely this that casts the uniqueness of Chinese painting.
Western art has another aspect. Ancient Greek art greatly stresses the importance of “observation” and “imitation,” and this first regards the artistic object as an “object” to be viewed, requiring the clarification of “what” the painting-object “is” and “what it is like”—in essence undergoing a “conceptualizing” process; the whole process's stress on observation, imitation, narration, and conceptualization takes the mode of execution of speech-act as its dominant paradigm. Medieval painting attends to narrativity, which the more highlights the strong position of speech-act. By the Renaissance, perspective, anatomy, and sketching from life pushed the painter's rational cognitive capacity to the extreme: “At that time, no one would doubt that, in this sense—people even gained knowledge of the human body through experiment to verify and demonstrate one's vision—all art is ‘conceptual.’” (15) Painting's stress on observation, imitation, narration, and conceptualization is precisely a stress on the dominant position of speech-act.
However, Gombrich also notices another side of painting. He discovers that primitive art and child art use a “symbolic language” and not a “natural sign”; to explain this fact, he puts forward a bold hypothesis: “There certainly exist arts not based on seeing but on knowing—specialized arts, arts working with ‘conceptual imagery.’” And he goes on to hold: “All art originates from the human heart, from our reaction to this world, and not from the visual world itself; precisely because all art is conceptual, it makes the reproduced graph become recognizable by virtue of its style.” (16) In Gombrich's eyes, “seeing” and “knowing” are distinguished; he holds that the standpoint of original art is “knowing” and not “seeing,” a conceptual “preconceived schema.” This view is evidently reasonable, and extremely incisive. But the problem lies in: how is the preconceived schema itself constructed? Gombrich attributes it to “habit” and “tradition.” Supposing we continue to ask unceasingly: how are habit and tradition constructed? How are they formed? In the last analysis, we still cannot break free of the priority of “seeing.”
We may as well make an explanation from another angle. If human “seeing” always cannot break free of the paradigm of speech-act, then, before “human seeing,” there already exists in the organism an “intuition,” an “intuition” taking behavior-language as paradigm. Behind human “seeing” there are latent two acts (languages) of different natures and modes of execution as paradigm; they jointly constrain human “seeing,” and the change in the tension-relation between the two often leads to the change of “seeing.” Only, for modern people and adults, speech-act plays a more important action, while original people and children—because speech-act has not yet fully developed—behavior-language plays a relatively important action. Behavior-language is precisely the important act (language) of the “symbolic language.” The mutually-non-communicable relation between behavior-language and speech-act dooms speech-act to summon, in symbolic form, the latent behavior-language memory, to summon the inexpressible unconscious experience. Besides this, in painting activity, behavior-language chiefly borrows the help of color and line to gain the direct expression that evades conceptualization.
Viewed from the evolutionary history of Western painting, there exists a gaming between the paradigms of the two acts (languages) of different natures. From ancient Greece on, the mode of execution of speech-act occupied an unquestionable important position in Western art, and its power grew ever stronger in the development of painting: “The world we realize has already been filled with concepts that we package; therefore, the world we realize has a deep conceptual component of its essence.” (17) It was not until the modern period, in order to break through the established painting格局, that behavior-language won its due importance. One might almost say that modern Western art history is precisely the history of extolling behavior-language to overturn the hegemony of speech-act, the history of removing the “conceptualization” of traditional painting. The painters of the various artistic schools attempt various paths, using multiple media and technical means to disparage “conceptualization,” opening up a brand-new space of free creation for modern painting. “Impressionism” captures the fleeting; “Expressionism” emphasizes the deformation of “distorted nature”; the abandonment of beauty and harmony—in essence these are all to evade the constraint of conceptualization. Gombrich says: “If the most important thing in fine art is not the imitation of nature, but the expression of human feeling through the choice of color and line, then there is reason to put forward such a question—why not cast off all subject-matter, and let the effect of color and form alone make fine art become more pure? Music, without borrowing the help of words, can also gain great achievement; this example often gives painters and critics an enlightenment, and so arouses their fantasy of creating a pure ‘visual music.’” (18) Kandinsky's abstract painting is just like “visual music.” When Kandinsky accidentally faced the inverted canvas, and, not noticing for a moment what on earth the painting depicted, the color on the surface dazzlingly attracted him, deeply shocked him—it was precisely then that the conceptualization of “what is painted” was suspended, and behavior-language memory was fully aroused; the alluring color suddenly captured him. And again, Picasso's “Cubism” dismembers the object and reorganizes spatial relations; Gauguin esteems “Primitivism” affect; Surrealism is bent on the automatic writing and expression of unconscious dream-realm, on the longing to return to childhood—all these display a rebellion against language-centrism and reason-centrism, a return to behavior-language, and an esteem for the most authentic life-force. To break free of the entanglement of conceptualization, one must break the fence of speech-act, and enter the domain of the unconscious, awakening behavior-language memory.
Of course, this rebellion cannot possibly ultimately abandon speech-act; modern art finally cannot escape the net of “conceptual art,” and at the same time it is no longer able to return heavily to tradition. Conceptual art points its spearhead directly at “the artistic concept” itself, intending to deconstruct and reconstruct the established artistic concept, making modern art become the “metalanguage” that interprets art, become the “theory” that critiques the artistic concept. “In today's artists' eyes, the ‘boundary’ is the limitation and obstruction of art, and is also the target they concentrate their attack on.” (19) On the surface, speech-act seems to have, in artistic activity, successfully launched challenge after challenge; in essence it can only lurk under the menace of conceptualization, becoming a serious examination, debate, even battle over the boundary of art—and so the two acts (languages) begin to construct a brand-new relation in an unfamiliar way. Western scholars, out of the habit of thinking, often name the transformation of art from the traditional to the modern as “representation” to “expression”; this view is still confined to language-centrism, still stands on the standpoint of subject-object split, still ignores the importance of behavior-language in artistic activity, and so often distorts art.
Behavior-language and speech-act are the common mediation by which human and world establish connection. Whether hearing, vision, touch, even thinking, behind them all there is latent the paradigm of these two acts (languages); their characteristics, modes of execution, and functional characteristics cannot but constrain hearing, vision, touch, and thinking. It is precisely for this reason that whatever modal sign-activity and artistic activity is necessarily built on the foundation of the paradigm of behavior-language and speech-act; their characteristics change with the change of the tension-relation of the two, and at the same time change with the transformation of media and technique; and the common foundation provides infinite possibility for the various different modal sign-activities and arts to mutually couple and mutually transform. But this also tells us that, if we do not value the different natures, modes of execution, and functional characteristics of behavior-language and speech-act, and merely take the various modal sign-activities and artistic activities as “sign-objects” to analyze and interpret, we will still repress and throttle behavior-language, and our analysis and interpretation will also fall into error.
(Author's affiliation: School of Humanities, Wenzhou University)