In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein divides all matters into two classes: "the sayable" and "the unsayable." He says: "Whatever can be said can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (1) Later people use "the unsayable" to sum up the characteristic of art, yet they have not, like Wittgenstein, kept silent; rather, they hold that art is an utterance about the unsayable.
Then why is art said to be unsayable? And if art is unsayable, why can it itself utter? What kind of utterance is the utterance of art? And how does humanity understand the utterance of art, and how, through art, does it achieve a special kind of communication? To truly understand the mystery within, we should first probe deeply into the characteristics of the sign and of the artistic sign.
I. The Generation of Symbolic Activity
Cassirer regards symbolic activity as the fundamental characteristic distinguishing the human from animals; he holds that the whole development of human culture depends on symbolic thinking and symbolic behavior. From this, "the human no longer lives in a merely physical universe but in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this symbolic universe; they are the varied threads that weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience… He is so wrapped up in linguistic forms, artistic images, mythical symbols, and religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except through the mediation of these artificial media." (2)
Concerning the genesis of human signs, Cassirer follows Herder's view and points out that, between the human and the animal, there exists a process of development and evolution from "reaction" to "response," from "emotional language" to "propositional language." However, this view is still too superficial; we will give another simple description of this process.
Any organism must, through its own activity—that is, through "behavior"—deal with the world and thereby establish a relation. It is precisely in the process of behavior's unfolding that the organism constructs its own experience and grasps the world. Behavior is the key to the organism's being related to, adapted to, and fitted to the world. Those behaviors that can make the two sides mutually adapt and fit are continually repeated and imitated and become structured, shaping and determining the organism's experiential structure and at the same time shaping and embodying the structure of the world; therefore, the structure of behavior simultaneously reflects the organism's experiential structure and the structure of the world. (3) Humanity, by standing upright, freed the hands, effectively expanded the range and modes of activity, increased the complexity of behavior, and greatly enriched experience. To adapt to this change, it could not but classify, condense, and abstract the jumbled, manifold unconscious experience. The classification, condensation, and abstraction of experience inevitably produce ruptures among the various "experience-clusters" and form extension and intension; and so the boundary between thing and self, and the boundaries among things, appear, the linguistic concept is thereby born, and the world is thereby born. This activity of classification is not a conscious act but an unconscious process necessitated by the overload of experience; yet it precisely gave birth to the generation of the linguistic concept. From this point, language could detach from the human body and, with the aid of "vocalizing behavior" possessing a dual character, gain relative independence. (4)
Fundamentally, language is differentiation. When unconscious experience, through natural classification, condenses into relatively independent linguistic concepts, humanity is already using language to name and to make distinctions in the undivided fusion-relation of human and world, and further to make conscious distinctions among the myriad things, turning the world and the myriad things into the human's object; the world thereby becomes a clarified world, and the human thereby becomes a human in the true sense. "All the senses are only modes of perception of the mind, and only through distinguishing features can the mind form distinct ideas; together with distinguishing features there arises the inner language." (5)
The formation of the linguistic concept means the differentiation of human and world, means the generation of consciousness and of the object of consciousness. Humanity begins conscious, purposive cognitive activity and practical activity; the world becomes the human's object of cognition and object of transformation, and language becomes the indispensable mediation between human and world. This is not to say that behavior is unimportant, but that, before the generation of language, although behavior established the relation between organism and world and thereby accumulated experience for the organism, and although the structure of behavior determined the experiential structure and the world's structure, this experience still belonged to unconscious experience; nor is it to say that the organism cannot perceive the world, but that the organism's perception of the world is still below the threshold of consciousness, the world does not exist as its object of consciousness—although the organism can make an immediate reaction to the world, this reaction is only a direct instinctive echo. On one hand, the organism, through behavior, constructs unconscious experience about the world; on the other, experience prompts the organism to make a direct behavioral response to the world; behavior connects and fuses the organism and the world into one. From this angle, for the organism, behavior is not a "mediation" in the true sense. In the non-objective relation in which organism and world are fused into one, there is originally no such thing as "mediation." The appearance of the linguistic concept is grounded in the classification and condensation of unconscious experience; it rises to a certain threshold, displays a distinct object of consciousness, and at the same time constructs human consciousness. This is just as phenomenology says: consciousness is always consciousness of an object, because consciousness and the object of consciousness are generated synchronously in the process of language's generation. (6)
The relative independence of language dismantles the originally unified fusion-relation of organism and world and endows humanity with the right to free thinking. The human can not only leave the existent and engage in metaphysical thinking but, more importantly, can split everything apart, even forcibly strip the human's behavior from the body, abstract it out, and take behavior as an object of observation, of interpretation, of reflection, and of control. Agamben points out: "The human is always in continual differentiation and rupture, and is at the same time the fruit of differentiation and rupture." (7) And so human behavior comes to enjoy a mode utterly different from that of the animal; the human no longer acts merely by instinct. Human consciousness has already intervened in it, becoming a powerful supervisor and controller of behavior, and behavior is thereby deferred. On one hand, instinct and unconscious experience drive the human's behavior; on the other, consciousness sets reasons and purposes for the human's behavior and monitors it; human behavior is simultaneously influenced by these two factors. In the self-monitoring of and reflection on behavior, human reason gradually grew up. (8) The birth of the speech-act as a symbolic activity became the most important mark of the birth of humanity.
Peirce once proposed the triadic structure of the sign. He said: "I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its idea; the object, in turn, indirectly determines the manner of that determination, and this manner of determination I name the interpretant of the sign. Thus there exists a triadic relation among the sign, its object, and its interpretant." (9) The appearance of language makes it possible for behavior to be split from the human (the performer), establishing an objective relation between behavior and performer, and at the same time makes an interpretation of behavior's meaning; only thus is a triadic relation constructed among behavior, the performer (that is, the object that behavior reflects and expresses), and the linguistic interpretant. Language's interpretation of behavior with a particular structure means at the same time an interpretation of the performer's unconscious experience or inner state. Behavior thereby becomes a mediation, becomes a sign, or what may be called "behavior-language." "Bodily movement is a communicative system that transmits information and can therefore be regarded as a kind of language or signifying system." (10) One may say that only after the generation of language can the human's behavior be separated from the human, gain the interpretation of language, and become behavior-language whose meaning can be cognized by consciousness. There is an extremely complex interactive relation between behavior and language: on one hand, language is grounded in the experience sedimented by behavior, the fruit of the accumulation and condensation of unconscious experience; on the other, only at the moment of language's birth can behavior be differentiated and abstracted out and gain the interpretation of language, generating behavior-language. And so humanity simultaneously possesses the two most important and most basic modes of symbolic activity: the speech-act and behavior-language. Here we also see the substantive difference between the animal and the human: the animal's behavior is only behavior—instinctive behavior directly connecting organism and world—whereas the human's behavior simultaneously becomes the human's own object and gains a relatively definite interpretation, becoming behavior-language, a symbolic activity. From this angle, the animal has no symbolic activity in the true sense. (11)
Because language is the classification, condensation, and abstraction of the unconscious experience sedimented by behavior, it has to some degree already lost the original rich, vivid content; and because behavior in fact cannot be separated from the body—there being no dividing line between behavior and body—the interpretation language makes of behavior always seems inadequate, always more or less distorting and concealing the original meaning of behavior, requiring behavior-language itself to participate jointly in interpretation and correction. "Any language can only be an elliptical expression; to understand the meaning it has in connection with direct experience, a leap of imagination is needed." (12) In fact, behavior-language has not, with the appearance of the speech-act, truly split from the body; it is still tightly combined with the body, deeply embedded in the body; nor has it thereby lost behavior's original function—it still has the ability to connect human and object, to fuse human and object. And so behavior-language, as interpreter, again heals together its own self with the behavior that is its object of interpretation, restoring the relation objectified by language back to a non-objective relation, experiencing and comprehending the interpreted behavior as the interpreter's own behavior, and thereby grasping meaning. From this angle, it is precisely behavior-language itself, rather than the speech-act, that is the best interpretant of unconscious experience. Although this grasping is still below the threshold of consciousness, it is always the verifier of linguistic interpretation; once the interpretation made by language to some degree hits or approaches the interpretation of behavior-language, there is a sudden brightening—this is the so-called "sudden enlightenment." Therefore, symbolized behavior simultaneously has two utterly different yet mutually influencing interpretants: the first, through the speech-act, observes, analyzes, and cognizes behavior as "object"; the second, with the aid of behavior-language, experiences, intuits, and comprehends behavior as "non-object."
II. Primary Signs and Secondary Signs
Humanity uses language not only to interpret its own behavior but, at the same time, to interpret all other things, and thereby to turn other things into human signs. As stated above, the human as organism first, in daily activity, deals with the world through behavior, coordinates the relation between itself and the world, shapes its own unconscious experience with the structure of behavior, and at the same time shapes the world, letting the world enjoy a life-structure and establishing an intimate isomorphic relation between organism and world. Yet, when language splits the relation of human to world and the myriad things, when the two sides are converted into an objective relation, that structural connection shaped by behavior still exists; therefore, language's interpretation of the various things at the same time covertly contains an interpretation of the human's inner experience. This establishes a triadic structure among the thing, the human, and the linguistic interpretant, and the thing becomes a sign expressing human inner experience. As long as the interpretation language makes of a thing gains social recognition and is endowed with a relatively stable meaning, the thing is transformed into a sign with social shareability. All things possess symbolic potential, only that, in the process of human activity, the human consciously excavates and utilizes this potential, or re-endows it with new meaning, thereby generating new symbolic activity. Only by being constructed and interpreted by language does an objective thing become the human's object, be distinctly perceived and endowed with meaning, display distinct features, and become possible as a sign; apart from language, no other sign could possibly exist. In this sense, language is the mother of signs.
While language constructs the triadic relation of the various signs, the behavior that originally connected human and world is thereby also constructed and converted into behavior-language, transformed into another interpretant, with which to experience and comprehend the world and the myriad things. (13) "When long ago I set out, the willows hung soft and lush; now as I come back in thought, the rain and snow fall thick and fast." (The Book of Songs, "Lesser Court Hymns: Plucking the Bracken") In the poem, the softly hanging willows and the thick-falling rain and snow convey extremely concretely and vividly the utterly different states of mind of the traveler. "The lotus blooms have shed their scent, the kingfisher leaves grown sere; the west wind stirs its sorrow amid the green waves. Together with the fair season they wither away—too painful to behold." (Li Jing, "Mountain Flowers") The bleak autumn scene precisely becomes the sign expressing the manifold sorrows of the protagonist Li Jing. It is precisely as a result of the joint construction and interpretation by behavior-language and the speech-act that an intricate, complex connection is established between human and world. "The individual in fact becomes a reference of the cosmos, and things are in a certain sense expressed as living organic functions. This is a veritable microcosm theory." (14) If we call the symbolic activity directly bred from the human's own self and parasitic on the human's own self—namely behavior-language and the speech-act—"primary signs," then the signs into which the human, through behavior-language and the speech-act, endows other things with symbolic character, and which are thereby transformed, belong to "secondary signs." Or, to put it another way: the essence of symbolization is the activity of endowing meaning; the primary sign is the human's endowing of meaning upon behavior (speech and conduct) itself, while the secondary sign is the human's using the primary sign to endow meaning upon other external things.
The abundant use of "evocation and comparison" (bi-xing) in literary works has its inner basis precisely in this: that the human's psychology and natural images, in the process of behavior's enactment, have been endowed with the structure of behavior and have established an isomorphic relation; therefore, these signs generated from natural images can be used as evocation and metaphor, with which to interpret and convey particular human emotions. Qian Zhongshu's "synaesthesia" and Arnheim's "isomorphism" likewise originate in the isomorphic relation established by behavior, in the similarity of sign-interpretation. As long as the structure is homomorphic or the interpretation is similar, different senses can be transposed into one another, and different images can be substituted for one another.
Besides this, images that depict the world and sounds that imitate the world likewise become signs by virtue of the triadic structure constructed by the linguistic interpretant; these all belong to the secondary sign system. One may say that the birth of language is the indispensable premise of sign-generation, and so Benveniste says: "Language is the interpretant of all other linguistic and non-linguistic systems." (15) It is precisely after the birth of language that signs began to proliferate massively. Language's never-ceasing function of differentiating the world and interpreting the world creates countless signs. The various sign systems thereby generated always accompany human activity, influence human activity, and even determine the different modes of human activity. From this point, human activity becomes an activity of creating meaning.
Once a sign is born, it naturally possesses an interpretive function; therefore, outside language, various signs also participate in the activity of interpreting the world and constructing the world, and so the world is symbolized and thereby displays figures either of myriad charms and graceful poses or of fiendish ferocity and cold cruelty. (16) Here, what we call "the world is symbolized" is not merely, as Baudrillard says, that the highly developed symbol-production capacity of postmodern society causes overproduced symbols to cover and conceal reality; rather, it is that reality itself is shaped by various sign systems. Only through the construction and interpretation of signs can the human perceive the world. Symbolization is the sole path by which humanity knows the world. The human is mired in the encirclement of signs; signs become the air and water the human cannot do without for a moment; even the human himself becomes a symbolic animal. "All the higher mental functions are mediated processes, and the sign is the basic tool used to master and direct these higher functions. The mediating sign is incorporated into the structure of the higher mental functions as an indispensable part—indeed, a core part—of the whole process." (17)
Although the sign itself possesses an interpretive function and can be used as a meta-sign to interpret other phenomena, yet, from the ultimate root, the ultimate interpretant always cannot do without behavior-language and the speech-act. The ultimate interpretant of all signs can only be behavior-language and the speech-act. For behavior-language and the speech-act are the primary sign system, humanity's most intimately-its-own language; all the various secondary signs are generated only with the aid of the primary signs, and the human can truly understand the various sign systems only by reducing them to its most intimately-its-own language—because interpretation "is precisely to make one's own what was at first alien." (18) Like the contact lenses we wear, we are not aware of the intervention of these two basic sign systems. That behavior-language and the speech-act serve as the ultimate interpretant of all signs also dooms humanity to possess simultaneously two utterly different modes of interpretation: lived experience, intuition, and comprehension; observation, analysis, and cognition.
III. The Artistic Sign and Its Interpretation
Science and art belong respectively to particular, different sign systems, and the difference between the two seems extremely obvious; but if we make a comparison from the angle of the characteristics of the sign, it will still help to deepen our understanding of art.
For a sign to be a sign, the interpretant is an indispensable dimension of its triadic structure. And, as Benveniste says, language must be its interpretant. But the problem is that Benveniste overlooked another interpretant, namely behavior-language. In fact, before language arose, behavior had already connected the organism with the world and was the sole way the organism grasped the world. The organism, through behavior, structured the world and brought it into itself, constructing unconscious experience and thereby grasping the world—only that, in the state of "unification" of organism and world, any "interpretation" was utterly unnecessary. And when language split human and world and set up an objective relation between them, behavior was still a force that ran through and healed the two sides; with its own structure it structured the world and, fusing the two back into one, comprehended the world; behavior thereby became a distinctive mode of interpretation, became behavior-language. If the speech-act, by objectifying the world, goes on to observe and know the world, then behavior-language heals the fissure between human and world, converts the objective relation into a non-objective relation, and with this experiences and comprehends the world. This is precisely what Heidegger calls the human's comprehending the world through "Dasein's being-in-the-world." Therefore, interpretation is not merely using language to make an oral or written interpretation; comprehension itself contains interpretation. Mead points out: "Fundamentally, meaning should not be conceived of as a state of consciousness… the response of one organism to the gesture of another in any given social act is the meaning of that gesture." (19) To make a behavioral response to a gesture is already a comprehension of the gesture's meaning, is itself interpretation. Morris says it more explicitly: "Any organism for which something is a sign may be called an interpreter. And the disposition in an interpreter to respond, because of a sign, by response-sequences of some behavior-family is called the interpretant." (20) Clearly, Mead and Morris, taking behavior (a gesture too is a kind of behavior, or the initial state of behavior) as the interpretant, have in fact already broadened the interpretant, simultaneously encompassing both the speech-act interpretant and the behavior-language interpretant—because the human's behavior itself simultaneously depends on the dual factors of instinctive impulse and conscious control and is connected to the dual interpretation of behavior-language and the speech-act. So, compared with Benveniste, the views of Mead and Morris are more reasonable.
For any symbolic activity, humanity ultimately employs two interpretants simultaneously: observation, analysis, and cognition based on the speech-act; and lived experience, intuition, and comprehension based on behavior-language. These are two coexisting, mutually intertwined, mutually influencing interpretants, only that in different interpretive activities there is a difference of emphasis, producing different interpretive structures and different interpretive results. In the course of its activity, humanity always continually comprehends, and at the same time continually cognizes, by employing these two sign systems.
In scientific interpretive activity, the speech-act obviously plays the more important role. Science does not exclude behavior-language; intuition has a role not to be ignored in scientific discovery. But science is science precisely in that it is first of all an objective activity, an observation and analysis of the object; this stresses the foundational status of the speech-act and suppresses behavior-language. The so-called "essence" of science precisely takes the class-concept as its premise; it tries to find a common characteristic among all the individual objects to which a class-concept belongs and to describe it in language and generalize and abstract it, even making a "definition." Through repeated experiment and observation, it strives for the reliability and precision of its interpretation of the world. This process of "seeking the true" is precisely what Searle calls the process of "mind-to-world" adaptation and at the same time "word-to-world" adaptation; (21) it is also the process of continually excluding and washing away the dim, hazy phantoms left by behavior-language. The whole edifice of science is built on the basis of language's function of differentiation; it most fully utilizes this function in order to divide and create the various different disciplinary fields, set research objects and categories, and construct disciplinary theoretical systems. (22)
Artistic activity is different; its main purpose lies in moving and affecting the human—not merely an intellectual being moved, but a shock to the mind, drawing the appreciator into the artistic situation, intoxicating him in it, even entering a realm of "self-forgetting" and "becoming one with things." At this moment, behavior-language plays the core interpretive role. It is precisely behavior-language that fuses the appreciator with the object of appreciation, directly bursting into the appreciator's mind and even body, deeply moving him. The appreciator, at the very moment of undergoing emotion, comprehends the true import contained in the art. Art's interpretation of the world is a personal, bodily comprehension; it does not in the least require analysis, induction, or inference; it only requires that the appreciator throw himself into it, steep himself in it, attend to it with his whole heart—and the world opens itself to you, and truth manifests itself of its own accord. Even an artist like Brecht, who greatly stresses the use of the "alienation technique" to highlight art's cognitive function, does not deny the value of Aristotelian "resonance." He says: "From a historical angle, through this method one can come closer to the human and better understand the human's essence. Today we do indeed wish to abandon this method. But this by no means signifies a thorough departure from it, nor signifies dismissing an artistic epoch as an error and entirely casting away the artistic treasury of that epoch." (23) Art, after all, is not a textbook; if art persistently lets the appreciator drift outside the work and coolly criticize and reflect, it in essence cancels its own life. Art, precisely by stressing the assimilating function of behavior-language, endows the artistic world with the human's own structure, lets the artistic world equally enjoy the structure of the human's life, and thereby arouses the resonance and sympathetic vibration of life.
Viewed as a whole, Western modern art is full of the irrational and of the impulse to resist conceptualization; it adopts all sorts of techniques to weaken the authoritative position of the speech-act, to strengthen behavior-language, to strengthen bodily feeling. For instance, abstract art's exclusion of the figurative is a turning away from conceptualization, because the figurative contains the question "what is it," "what does it resemble"—that is, it implies conceptualization. Abstract art, by means of points, lines, planes, volumes, light, and color that are "not anything," evades conceptualization, liberates unconscious experience, awakens behavior-language memory, and stimulates inner emotion. Even though current conceptual art cannot do without theoretical thinking, it still has a limit; once it loses its shock to the human's mind and body and abandons the interpretant of behavior-language, it is doomed to wither, moving toward what Danto calls "the end of art." It is precisely because art's interpretation of the world and of the human himself gives weight to behavior-language that it can profoundly reveal the complex connection in which human and world are originally one, open the black box of the human's mind, and explore the experiential world deeply submerged in the unconscious.
Since the artistic sign simultaneously interprets the world and the human himself with the aid of behavior-language and the speech-act, and since behavior-language is its most prominent aspect bearing the characteristics of life and of the humanistic, how can we interpret art merely by virtue of the speech-act? Linguistic utterance is always like scratching an itch through a boot—it cannot hit the vital point. Although the speech-act is founded on the basis of unconscious experience and maintains a thousand-and-one connections with behavior-language, it is, after all, a generalization and abstraction of behavior-language; it can neither restore the richness and vividness of behavior-language nor return to the attachment to the body. Compared with behavior-language, the speech-act appears far more empty and pale; using only the speech-act to interpret art, we can only be shut out at the gate of the palace of art, utterly unable to enter the hall—this is precisely why art cannot be uttered. "Once separated from the body, language begins to decline, becoming false, empty, base, and weightless"; only "silence can halt or resist this tendency." (24) Art can often make an interpretation of the undivided, integral world, an interpretation of the unconscious world; it is an utterance about the unsayable, while it itself is what language cannot utter.
Even literary works constructed by language and characters are likewise hard to utter. From the history of literary development, early literature was oral literature. The "Great Preface to the Mao Songs" says: "Poetry is where the intent goes. In the heart it is intent; uttered in words, it is poetry. Emotion stirs within and takes form in words; when words are not enough, one sighs them; when sighing is not enough, one chants them at length; when chanting at length is not enough, then, unawares, the hands dance them and the feet tread them." (25) That is to say, early poetry was always accompanied by chant and dance; only with the joint participation of chant and dance (behavior-language) did poetry possess its rapturous, abundant expressive power. The textualization of literature forcibly separated poetry from dance; in order to maintain literature's expressiveness as far as possible, the poet could not but rack his brains and pluck out his whiskers over the use of language. In "Linguistics and Poetics," Jakobson expounded language's manifold functions—the referential, the poetic, the phatic, the metalingual, the emotive, the conative, and so on. In different uses of language, its dominant function changes. Literature highlights the poetic function. "The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant and crucial function, whereas in other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, secondary component. This function, by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy between signs and objects." (26) When language's referential function shrinks and the fissure between sign and object deepens, the literary work becomes relatively estranged from the real context. This estranged state cancels the various real norms' repression of unconscious experience, releases unconscious experience, and behavior-language memory is thereby awakened. (27) In fact, literary language is not merely the speech-act; it simultaneously summons behavior-language; the two are mutually induced and mutually generated. Nor does literature act merely on the human's intellect; it directly strikes the human's mind and body. What people call the poetic function of literary language is in essence the ability to summon behavior-language.
In discussing the writing of texts, Coquet distinguishes the "enunciator" into the "formal enunciator" and the "bodily enunciator" and holds that an enunciator cannot be merely a formal enunciator—that is, merely bearing the marks of writing, like the symbols on paper; it must also have a substantive enunciator related to the formal enunciator, namely the bodily enunciator. "The space of meaning is established only through the body… its role is first to undertake what the bodily enunciator does, to know what happens within the bodily enunciator, and especially to be able to analyze what belongs only to the bodily enunciator, especially the domain of the passions." (28) Coquet's "formal enunciator" is the symbolizing process of carrying out writing with the speech-act, while the "bodily enunciator" is the unfolding of the body—that is, the unfolding of behavior-language. The two are mutually intertwined and jointly construct the literary text.
One important view of the embodied-mind theory holds that "our conceptual system is grounded in the perceptual system and the motor system. The conceptual system makes neural use of these two systems and, more importantly, is shaped by them." "Because concepts and reason both originate from and make use of the sensorimotor system, the mind cannot possibly exist independently, separated from the body." (29) Lakoff and Johnson correctly expound the close connection between the conceptual system and the sensorimotor system, the close connection between mind and body; in fact, this connection is rooted precisely in the connection between the speech-act and behavior-language. The speech-act is always entangled with behavior-language; the mind can hardly shake off the body—only that in the scientific use of language, behavior-language is suppressed, while in the literary domain it is given full play. When behavior-language becomes an important constructive force of the literary work, when the work seems to grow directly from the body, how could merely logical language interpret literature all by itself?
Sontag is a scholar who opposes the interpretation of art. She holds that scholars keen on the interpretation of art tame and control the work of art by separating the content of art from its form, reducing the work of art to its "content," and then interpreting the content. This interpretive act, in her view, is "reactionary" and "stifling," and so Sontag says: "Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Not only that—interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.'" (30) And the interpreter is like a "vampire" carrying out large-scale plunder. What Sontag says is, to be sure, reasonable; the problem is: even if art is simplified into "content," can it then be uttered? Can it be controlled? We hold that this is likewise impossible. Art ultimately always interprets the world by employing two languages simultaneously, namely behavior-language and the speech-act. Only thus can it possibly, in a distinctive way, make its own utterance about "the unsayable," and therefore the "content" of art likewise cannot be interpreted by the speech-act alone. Art is always fleeing interpretation; any interpretation that attempts to employ the speech-act alone is a castration of the work of art, all the more so of art as a holistic existence. "He who utters it loses its constancy; he who names it departs from its truth." (31) This is also the common view of ancient Chinese literati toward literature and art.
All symbolic activity has two ultimate interpretants; especially for the artistic sign, behavior-language is often the more important interpretant, and this determines that art cannot be simply uttered in words.
IV. Atmosphere, Spirit-Resonance, and the Integration of Multimodal Signs
Concerning the influence that mechanical-reproduction technology has brought to art, Benjamin put forward a profound view. He holds that the work of art was originally unique, and this characteristic embodies the historicity and authenticity of the original here and now. Upon the work of art are preserved the changes that the material structure undergoes in time, as well as the continually changing relations of ownership; and more importantly, the work belongs to a particular tradition and is closely bound up with it. Reproduction technology, however, strips the work of art from its historical context and shatters the extremely fragile core of the work of art. In the age in which the work of art is technologically reproducible, what withers is the "atmosphere" (Aura) of the work of art. Benjamin defines the atmosphere as: "the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be." (32) He points out: from the angle of historical origin, the earliest works of art originated in ritual—at first magical ritual, later religious ritual. The atmosphere-laden mode of existence of the "authentic" work of art is rooted in the ritual function and linked with ritual's cult value. The work of art, as a constituent part of ritual, equally shared in sacredness; it was itself not for people to appreciate and toy with at close range but for people to worship piously—even though close at hand, it was still unreachably far, loftily unattainable. From this arose a certain dim spiritual resonance, producing an unsayable atmosphere. However this foundation may have shifted and blurred through change, even in the most secularized form of the pursuit of beauty one can still discern it. But with the development of mechanical-reproduction technology, art is no longer a unique existence; it has thoroughly detached from the original context, its exhibition value rapidly rising and its cult value shrinking. The atmosphere of the work of art is thereby exhausted.
Benjamin's view of combining art and ritual to interpret "atmosphere" is extremely acute, but we may make a few supplementary remarks. The most important characteristic of magical ritual is precisely that it fully mobilizes the human's behavior-language. Differing from the mode of enactment and the function of differentiation of the speech-act, behavior-language mainly connects and fuses human and world; in this process, the human bestows its own behavioral structure upon the world and the myriad things, letting the world and the myriad things simultaneously enjoy the structure of life and possess spirituality, the world thereby becoming a world of gods and spirits. Magical ritual is a ceremony by which the human intends to borrow the power of gods and spirits to drive off calamity and pray for blessing for himself; its foundation is precisely behavior-language. With the development of humanity's cognitive ability, the gods and spirits were disenchanted—this is a process in which the speech-act continually exercised its function of differentiation; yet the assimilating ability of behavior-language still existed, letting the human throw himself anew into the world, fuse into one with the world, and experience the endless atmosphere left behind by the gods and spirits. In fact, "atmosphere" is precisely the interpretation the human makes of the world by employing behavior-language; this interpretation strengthens the intimate relation between human and world, bestows the structure of life upon the world, transforms the world into a spiritual home suffused with atmosphere, while the human himself becomes a poetic existence. The "spirit-resonance" and "lingering flavor" of which ancient Chinese literati spoke likewise rely on behavior-language: with the aid of behavior-language's constructive and interpretive role, they realize the running-through of human and world, and, in steeping and immersion, experience the poetic and savor that unsayable spirit-resonance and flavor. In the minds of ancient Chinese literati, the meaning-beyond-words such as spirit-resonance and lingering flavor is precisely where the value of art and poetry lies.
Mechanical-reproduction technology not only strips the work of art from the original context and changes its unique existence; more importantly, it inserts a "mediation"—the machine—between human and world. If, when the writer or artist faces the world, behavior-language is fully mobilized and intuition is fully exercised, so that he deeply experiences and feels the world and merges what he gains from experience and feeling into his conception and creation, becoming the main source of the work's distinctive atmosphere—then the relation between the machine and the world is forever a relation of thing to thing, in which atmosphere simply cannot be generated. Behavior-language lets the writer and artist build with the world a symbiotic relation of life linked to life and interprets this experience with behavior-language; whereas mechanical-reproduction technology can only form an objective relation, a cold, rigid relation, not a relation of life fitting with life, and so fundamentally severs the intervention of behavior-language. Therefore it can only exhibit one fragmented world after another, a world that has lost its atmosphere. (33)
However, in the art of film there exists a kind of "re-enchantment." Film employs sound, light, color, and montage editing, as well as auxiliary means such as swooping and rising, interruption and isolation, extension and compression, enlargement and reduction, to create a special viewing-feeling, hurling one picture after another straight at the audience, bombarding the audience's visual unconscious, and thereby producing the "shock" effect of film. "Shock" and "atmosphere" are fruits of two utterly different modes of interpretation. Atmosphere is the primary thing the writer or artist brings into the work, the mind-experience of the writer or artist, their distinctive comprehension of the world; it requires the appreciator to ponder and savor it with full concentration and quiet mind, to seek out and re-create from the work this faintly-appearing, scarcely-there breath. Shock, by contrast, is film's striking of the audience's mind at rapid speed, an instantly produced effect, even a paralysis and abrupt halt of mental activity. "We may as well compare the screen on which a film is projected with the canvas on which a painting is displayed. The latter invites the appreciator to quiet contemplation; before the canvas, the appreciator can let his spirit roam the eight extremities. But before the film picture, he cannot do so. One picture has not yet been seen clearly before it has already passed; it is impossible to stare at it and examine it closely… When viewing the film picture, the human's associative activity is immediately interrupted by the change of pictures. From this arises the shock effect (Chokwirkung) of film." (34) Therefore shock too may be regarded as a kind of interpretation—namely, the helpless interpretation made after both behavior-language and the speech-act simultaneously lose their grasping ability.
All signs ultimately have two interpretants: behavior-language and the speech-act. These two coexist in the interpretive process, jointly determine the mode of interpretation—either lived experience, intuition, and comprehension, or observation, analysis, and cognition—and, because of the different emphases of behavior-language and the speech-act, possess different interpretive structures. This two-dimensional interpretive structure endows symbolic activity with enormous flexibility; through structural adjustment of the two opposing sides, it can provide the possibility of mutual integration among signs of different modalities.
For instance, Chinese painting, calligraphy, and poetry have always had a kinship relation. On the surface, the distinctive formal constitution of the Chinese character links painting, calligraphy, and poetry together and becomes the hinge connecting the three. On one hand, painting and calligraphy are originally of the same source; the brush-and-ink lines that both jointly use can originally create an extremely harmonious sense of the picture. On the other, the character is the carrier of poetry, and this extremely naturally introduces the poetic conception of poetry into the picture. From a deeper level, the brush-and-ink line is in fact the extension of behavior-language; the structure of the brush-and-ink line is the structure of life itself, displaying the vigorous mode of life, as well as the power and bearing of life; and because it is itself rooted in behavior-language, its meaning is relatively vague and indeterminate, and the mode of feeling gives weight to lived experience and intuition. Although the carrier of poetry is language and characters, yet, because ancient Chinese poetry gives weight to evocation-and-comparison and to meaning-beyond-words, it likewise highlights the important status of behavior-language in interpretation; its mode of interpretation excludes cognition and stresses comprehension, and meaning pursues the implicit. Whether painting, calligraphy, or poetry, because their interpretants have a similar structure—that is, the emphases of both behavior-language and the speech-act are the same, and the modes of interpretation are similar—they can therefore very easily integrate with one another and further mutually elucidate and mutually generate, jointly creating a living-space into which the appreciator can throw himself, a realm overflowing with the poetic. One may say that Chinese culture's emphasis on, and distinctive understanding of, "the Dao" and "qi" precisely determines the national literature's and national art's emphasis on lived experience, intuition, and comprehension, its emphasis on the non-objective integral relation, and its emphasis on behavior-language, thereby laying the foundation for the fusion of painting, calligraphy, and poetry.
For painting, calligraphy, and poetry, the more implicit and dim the respective meaning of each, the more occasions for mutual generation, the greater the room for mutual interpretation, and the stronger the meaning-deriving power. Generally speaking, for signs of different modalities, if the overall structure of their respective interpretants—that is, the structural relation between behavior-language and the speech-act as interpretants—differs greatly, they are often hard to integrate, because the differences in structure cause the modes of interpretation to be mutually contradictory and often damage the holistic reception of the art. If the interpretant gives too much weight to the speech-act, this too brings difficulty to integration. Comparatively, the meaning of the speech-act is relatively definite; to forcibly carry out integration may well cause meanings to cancel and deconstruct one another rather than mutually generate and mutually enrich one another. This requires that signs of different modalities make a definite functional distinction—either dominant or auxiliary—in order to construct a "polyphonic" work.
Eco greatly stresses the openness of the meaning of the work of art. He says: "A work of art is a form complete in itself, closed in its complete, carefully considered organizational form. Yet at the same time it is open, capable of being viewed and interpreted in thousands of different ways, impossible to have only one reading, impossible to have no alternative variations. In this way, every appreciation of the work is an interpretation, an execution, because each time it is appreciated, it is reborn with a particular perspective." (35) The meaning of any work of art is open; even if a thousand interpretations are made, they still cannot exhaust it. The reason lies not only in the different pre-understandings of different appreciators, or their different contexts, or even, as Kristeva says, the existence of "intertextuality," but also in the fact that changes of context influence the appreciator's attitude and mode of entering the work, so that behavior-language and the speech-act as interpretants are mobilized to different degrees and thereby make utterly different interpretations. The tension-field constituted by the conflict between the two interpretants of behavior-language and the speech-act often endows the work of art with inexhaustible flavor.
Zhao Yiheng once proposed the concept of the "interpretive vortex." He says: when "the two sets of meta-language give no ground to each other, act at the same time, the two meanings are equally valid, and it can never be determined," this conflict produces an "interpretive vortex." He cites the star face of the performer in a historical drama: although we can recognize the performer, this does not hinder the viewing, "because the meta-language vortex we read out has already become our cultural program, become a convention; the audience's interpretation of the performance always straddles the performed and the being-performed. The two cannot cancel each other… the ambiguity between the represented and the performed, the vortex between the two interpretations, is precisely where the charm of the performing art lies." (36) Zhao Yiheng's using cultural program and convention to interpret the mutual compatibility of different meta-languages is reasonable, but one may make a further exposition. From the root, these two sets of meta-language are precisely behavior-language and the speech-act. If the differentiating function of the speech-act creates the objective relation, opening up the distance between appreciator and performer and letting the appreciator soberly realize the difference between the historical figure and the performer, then behavior-language fuses the appreciator with the historical figure, fuses him with the historical situation, and converts the objective relation back into a non-objective relation. This self-forgetting state leaves him no leisure to distinguish role from actor, and makes it impossible for him to distinguish role from actor; he lives directly in the historical situation and himself becomes the historical figure, and all distance collapses in an instant. A feeling of being personally on the scene deeply moves him. This is a profound feeling that no words can express; once one intends to interpret it with words, in a flash it vanishes and dissipates.
The complex constitution of the artistic sign's interpretant requires that we maintain a cautious attitude toward interpretation. To be sure, we cannot interpret apart from the speech-act, but every interpretation sets a limit for itself and cannot cross the hedge of language itself. We can only use it to hint, to inspire, to approach, and to transcend in a roundabout way—or directly adopt Ricoeur's suggestion: "Understanding no longer appears as a simple mode of cognition but as a mode of being, a way in which being relates to beings." (37)