The Theoretical Turn: From “Activity” to “Behavior”

The "Autumn Floods" chapter of the Zhuangzi tells this story: "Zhuangzi and Huizi were roaming on the bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, 'The minnows swim out at ease—this is the joy of the fish.' Huizi said, 'You are not a fish; how do you know the joy of the fish?' Zhuangzi said, 'You are not I; how do you know that I do not know the joy of the fish?' Huizi said, 'I am not you, so of course I do not know you; but you are certainly not a fish, so it is complete that you do not know the joy of the fish.' Zhuangzi said, 'Let us return to the root. When you said "How do you know the joy of the fish," you asked me already knowing that I knew it. I knew it from up on the Hao.'" (1)

Facing the fish in the water, Zhuangzi and Huizi take wholly different views. Zhuangzi appreciates the swimming fish in a manner of intuitive lived experience, comprehending the joy of the fish from the fish's leisurely ease; Huizi rebuts him with an objective gaze and logical inference: since you are not a fish, how can you know the joy of the fish? In fact, humans have, from the very start, two utterly different ways of viewing the world, and behind these two different ways lie hidden different symbolic activities: "behavior-language" and "speech-act." (2) One may say that these two acts (languages) jointly construct the manifold, intricate relations between human and world, produce the rich and varied culture and civilization of humankind, shape the hard-to-fathom human mind and flesh, and at the same time create soul-stirring literature and art.

Wittgenstein said that the limits of language are the limits of the world. Language presets the human's view of the world and determines the limits of the human's world; therefore any research of ours can be conducted only within the framework of language and under the illumination of language, and humans cannot cross over language to know the world. But when we push language from the domain of the speech-act forward into the domain of behavior-language, and discover the differences in the nature and function of these two acts (languages), and discover that all the various human symbolic activities take these two acts (languages) as their paradigm, then we can not only change the premises and methods of literary theory—effectively expanding the research horizon and depth and going on from where our predecessors stood—but will also provide a new foundation for the study of the humanities.

I

"Literary-Activity Theory" (3) proposed and expounded the view that the logical starting point of literary study must be placed on "activity." This is not simply altering the order of theoretical study but a changing of course in the line and method of research, a key step in turning from essentialism to constructivism. When we shift the logical starting point of research to "activity" and, setting out from there, re-examine the creative subject, the work, the reader, the environment, and the various links of literary activity, all factors undergo a substantive change: they are no longer congealed and rigid but reactivated, and, revolving around activity, are full of life and vigor. The work is constructed within literary activity, and literary activity itself—including literary creation and literary reading—becomes an unrepeatable literary "event," while the work likewise becomes an event ceaselessly re-produced and re-experienced. The creative subject and the reader are constructed within literary activity; each entry into literary activity is a baptism of mind and flesh, a sacred event undergone. All these activities, all these events, in turn unfold and are generated within a specific historical context, influenced by various historical events, and may even further brew into social events, with the various cultural powers participating in this or that way—and literature thereby may possibly lift its veil and reveal its true face.

Then, when we view literature as an activity, new problems appear: how exactly does this activity concretely unfold and generate? As an "art of language," how does language operate? Is literary language merely a simple language that is spoken and written—and why does the linear existence of language turn into a "drama of life" combining time and space? As a concept, how does language become laden with emotion, full of life and vigor, and draw the reader, intoxicated, into the lived experience of life? Moreover, as a "study of the human," how is the narrated object of literature constructed into a textured image, how does it become lifelike and moving? Is literature's connection with social life direct or indirect? How exactly do the various cultural powers act on literary activity? To find clear answers to this series of questions, we cannot speak of literature only loosely by way of literary activity but must go deeper into many more fundamental domains—language, culture, mind, social history—and among these, we cannot but first examine literary language.

With philosophy's linguistic turn, the focus of attention in Western literary-theory circles also swiftly turned to the problem of language. From Russian Formalism, Anglo-American New Criticism, structuralist and poststructuralist poetics, modern hermeneutics, and so on—all unfold their discussions around the core of language; yet what they attend to is usually mainly the semiotic character of language. When language is simply understood as a kind of sign, its discord with literary-activity theory becomes inevitable: literature is by no means a static combination of signs, nor a collection of sign-meanings, and literary study is not equivalent to the classification of narrative forms and the study of narrative grammar.

In fact, language possesses not only a semiotic character but at the same time a behavioral character. As something spoken, written, read—in short, as language situated within literary activity—it is first of all a "behavior," a speech-act. Therefore Austin's speech-act theory can inject new vigor into literary study. It should be said that speech-act theory has an inner congruence with literary-activity theory; it stresses the behavioral character of speech and further concretizes literary activity. Many scholars—Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, John R. Searle, Paul Ricoeur, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller, Sandy Petrey, Judith Butler, Hussman, and others—have respectively applied speech-act theory to literary-theoretical study and critical practice; although these various studies are still confined to local problems, they have already opened a new horizon for literary theory.

Yet literature is not a pure problem of language or speech—a point of which our ancestors were long clearly aware. Ancient Chinese literati always held an ambivalent attitude toward speech: they endowed speech with importance and sanctity, yet stressed its limitation: "writing does not fully convey speech, and speech does not fully convey meaning." (4) The speech-act has its own limit; facing the fleeting, ever-changing, hard-to-utter inexhaustible meaning, it often appears helpless and at a loss, and therefore cannot but pursue the implicitness and symbolic quality of linguistic expression, pursuing the meaning beyond words, the import beyond resonance. For ancient Chinese literati, the reason writing's merit is supreme is that it takes "tracing the Dao" (yuandao) as its goal, yet the "Dao" is not something speech can capture. Laozi said: "The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao." Gao You annotated: "The constant Dao is deeply hidden and dark and cannot be spoken." Guan Yinzi extended this, saying that "the unsayable is the Dao." (5) Then what exactly is this "meaning" that speech cannot exhaust and this "Dao" that cannot be spoken? And how is one to seek "meaning" and "Dao"? The only viable path is "establishing images to fully convey meaning" (li xiang yi jin yi). However, the "image" of which the Book of Changes (Zhouyi) speaks refers to the "hexagram-image" and "line-image," not to "imagery" or "figure"; it is a symbolization of the changeful "celestial phenomena" or "natural phenomena," and is by no means a mimicry of concrete objects. The ancients used hexagram-images and line-images to analogize and symbolize the ever-changing celestial or natural phenomena, and thereby to divine the intent of Heaven and foreknow fortune and misfortune. Words merely supplement and explain the hexagram-images and line-images; they do not "make images." So Wang Bi said: "The image arises from meaning, yet if one keeps [merely] the image, then what is kept is not its [true] image; words arise from the image, yet if one keeps [merely] the words, then what is kept is not its [true] words." (6) This is to say that what "establishing images to fully convey meaning" stresses is precisely this: speech cannot thoroughly express "meaning"; only through the symbolic hexagram-images and line-images, and by way of celestial or natural phenomena, can one reach the intent of Heaven. As for the dim and indistinct, mysterious-upon-mysterious "Dao," it can be gotten only through the formless, shapeless, imageless "Xiang-wang" (the Imageless). In the eyes of the ancient literati, beyond speech there exists another, more effective path for pursuing "meaning" and "Dao," and this path is in fact the intuition built on the foundation of behavior-language. Intuition does not rely on the speech-act, does not require the logical inference that takes the speech-act as a precondition; it reaches "meaning" and "Dao" directly from the "image," comprehending "meaning" and "Dao." And what connects and communicates the two is a special language distinct from the speech-act, namely behavior-language (action, posture, expression, sound). Or one may say that the formless, shapeless, imageless "Xiang-wang" is behavior-language. (7) It is precisely behavior-language that, in an instant, connects human and nature, fuses human and nature, restructures nature according to the structure of behavior-language and takes it into oneself, achieving the "unity of Heaven and humanity," and thereby grasping "meaning" and "Dao." Human cultural activity is built on the foundation of the mutual cooperation of the speech-act and behavior-language. Literary activity, then, uses the speech-act to summon behavior-language; the two cooperate deeply and hand in hand realize "fully conveying meaning" and "embodying the Dao."

Behavior-language existed already in the pre-human; it lies hidden in the human unconscious and body. The speech-act, by contrast, can be enjoyed by humans alone; it was summed up, abstracted, and budded off from behavior-language to gain independence; it is the root of the generation of human consciousness and has become the mark of the human's being human. The difference in nature between these two acts (languages) lies in this: behavior-language can only attach to the human body, is a bodily performance, and cannot be detached from the body to stand independently—and is therefore a not-fully-developed sign system lacking independence; the speech-act, by contrast, is a sign system possessing independence and extremely fully developed, and therefore enjoys great flexibility and a strong function of differentiation. The human relates to the world through behavior, structures the world by means of behavior-language and takes it into himself, and thereby grasps the world—and the world thereby enjoys the human's corporeality and spirituality. The human also, through the speech-act and linguistic concepts, differentiates human from world and differentiates the myriad things, turning the world into the human's "object-world" and going on to know the world. The independence of the speech-act not only lets the human freely create a metaphysical world but also endows the human with the capacity for reflection, constructing the human himself as a rational subject. It is precisely the difference in nature of the two acts (languages) that endows them with utterly different modes of enactment and functional features; though the two can be mutually connected and communicate, they cannot be commensurated. For a long time, the academic debate over whether language can serve as the mark of the human had its cause precisely in the failure to discover the difference in nature and function of the two acts (languages), and the failure to recognize that the main root of these differences lies in whether they possess conceptuality and independence. It is precisely by taking this discovery as a theoretical basis that we can go on to make our own interpretation of culture, civilization, consciousness, the unconscious, and especially the mysteries of literature and literary theory.

Humans can never abandon these two acts (languages): the speech-act and behavior-language. All the other various sign-types are built on the foundation of these two acts (languages) and take them as their paradigm. Therefore one may say that all human cultural activity is the cooperation of the two acts (languages), and all literary activity, too, is the cooperation of the two acts (languages). Here, we always regard behavior-language and the speech-act as the mediation by which the human is connected with the world. The human deals with the world by constructing the two acts (languages), thereby both constructing the human's world and constructing humankind itself, constructing the human's consciousness and unconscious, constructing the human's spirit and flesh. There exists a relation of synchronous construction among human, act (language), and world.

The conceptuality and independence of the speech-act cause the split between human and nature, and culture is precisely what is used to mend this fissure. The distinctiveness of literary activity lies only in this: it is a deep collaboration and fusion between the two acts (languages), and it heals the fissure in the mind in an imaginative way. All the features of literature, including literariness and poeticity, are generated in the process of the collaboration and fusion of the two acts (languages). The dual character of literary function—both this and that—can likewise be explained only in the joint action of the two acts (languages). This bestows on us a stretch of unploughed, fertile virgin soil, where we shall reap many surprises never had before. Western scholars, confined to logocentrism and reason-centrism, often find it hard to avoid a theoretical blindness that obscures the important significance of behavior-language. Only after unconcealing and squarely re-facing behavior-language, viewing literary activity as the interaction of the two acts (languages), can we possibly provide a brand-new foundation for literary theory. The specialness of literary activity, and even of the humanities, originates in the distinctiveness of human behavior and behavior-language, in the complexity of the ways the two acts (languages) interweave and fuse with each other.

II

When we no longer imprison literary activity in language or speech but regard it as the process of the mutual collaboration, mutual generation, and deep fusion of the speech-act and behavior-language, a brand-new theoretical horizon unfolds before our eyes. If the speech-act, as if splitting heaven from earth, clarified the chaotic state of the world and constructed the world into an ordered object-world, thereby opening the endless journey of human cognition—ceaselessly interrogating heaven, earth, and human relations, seeking in the far reaches beyond the six directions and in the minute tip of an autumn hair—then behavior-language lets the human return to the primal, undifferentiated world, roam at ease in the realm of the infinite, keep company with heaven, earth, and the myriad things, embracing and fusing, vitalizing, personifying, and sanctifying the world, returning to humankind an integral, authentic world, a poetic home one can dwell in—so that Laozi's "Dao" and Heidegger's "truth" descend, gracefully and of themselves. If the speech-act racks its brains to build for humankind one metaphysical spiritual world after another, then behavior-language lets the human return to the physical body itself, to the source of life, to the seething, surging primal experience of humankind, to the distant past of racial memory, trying to fathom that deeply hidden, mysterious depth. Literary activity exists precisely in the tension-field jointly constructed by these two acts (languages); reaching to the heights of the blue empyrean and down to the Yellow Springs, it can never restrain its greed to possess both ends at once, and cannot but be always in a transitional state, wavering between the sensuous and the rational, experience and cognition, emotion and intellect, past and future, the finite and the infinite.

Speaking of the complex relation between body and language, Butler points out: on one hand, "this is neither to say that the body is merely linguistic nor that the body has nothing to do with language. It always has to do with language." On the other hand, "language and materiality are not opposed like fire and water, for language both possesses materiality and refers to materiality; and the material thing is never wholly detached from the process of signification." (8) The fact that the speech-act is generated and budded off from behavior-language determines that there exists a natural bond of connection between the two acts (languages). Austin divided the speech-act into three levels: the phonetic act, the phatic act, and the rhetic act (9); among these, the phonetic act is rooted in behavior-language and directly connected with it, just as Leonardo da Vinci said, "where there is sound, there is body." (10) The reason music possesses the enormous power to shake the soul lies precisely in its phonetic act being connected with behavior-language, and even, to a certain degree, subordinate to behavior-language; therefore music appeals not only to human consciousness but breaks into the unconscious, permeates the human body, and gives the human an inexplicable emotion. Literary activity, however, is somewhat different: it first appeals to human consciousness with the foregrounded rhetic act and linguistic concepts, while the phonetic act is often hidden in the background, playing an auxiliary role. (11) Yet it is precisely this auxiliary function that touches the human's behavior-language memory and summons behavior-language. From this angle, our ancient literati's deep exploration of poetic prosody, and Russian Formalism's study of the sound and rhythm of language, are full of significance and cannot be simply crowned with the term "formalism" and disdained. More important: when the speech-act has built a fictional world, a language kingdom transcending the real world, social convention's repression of behavior-language memory is weakened and even removed, and the human's deep unconscious is at last released. What people call literary experience and intoxication, empathy and identification, originates precisely in behavior-language being re-awakened and enacted. At the moment of the full unfolding and deep fusion of the two acts (languages), a magical, splendid, vivid literary world is born.

On the basis of absorbing the unconscious theories of Freud and Lacan, Gabriele Schwab proposed the concept of the "transitional space of literature." She holds that poetic language is the language of the transitional space, and that one of its functions is to act as the "mediator" of the unconscious, able to regulate the "discourse of the Other." "Along with the ever-strengthening momentum of linguistic rupture and semantic collapse and the phenomenon of polyphony, the transitional text leads to multiple forms of aesthetic experience—aesthetic experience beyond consciousness. They possess infinite creativity, de-differentiate the traditional order of poetic language, integrate the primary process, and thereby extend the boundary of poetic language into the domain of the unconscious." (12) Schwab correctly points out that poetic language dwells in the transitional space between consciousness and the unconscious, and that the various unconventional linguistic phenomena mediate the unconscious; but because she is confined to Lacan's view that the unconscious is the "discourse of the Other," she does not go on to discover that the unconscious is rooted in behavior-language memory and possesses a structure different from that of discourse, and therefore cannot deeply clarify the essence of the "primary process" (the unconscious process), nor clarify the true relation between poetic language and the unconscious.

John R. Searle, according to the relation between discourse and world, divided speech-acts into four types: in the assertive speech-act, the word adapts to the world (word-to-world); the directive or commissive speech-act is the world adapting to the word (world-to-word); the declarative speech-act has at once a "double direction" of word adapting to world and world adapting to word; while fictional discourse and the expressive speech-act have a "null direction"—that is, "with a set of extralinguistic, non-semantic conventions, breaking and suspending the connection between word and world established by the original rules." (13) This division by Searle has extremely important scholarly value. From it we can discover: human cognitive activity is built on the foundation of the assertive speech-act and is a process of ceaselessly moving toward adaptation to the world; practical activity is coordinated with the directive and commissive speech-acts, and it is precisely this kind of speech-act that influences human behavior, organizes human practice, and propels human practice; the declarative speech-act constructs institutional facts and ceaselessly renews human civilization; and fictional discourse precisely provides the paradigm for literature and art. Fictional discourse gives up the direction of adaptation to the world, and thereby casts off the constraint upon itself and wins freedom—at the same time handing freedom over to humankind. Fictional discourse creates an independent language kingdom, a kingdom in which the human can dwell and roam at ease; at this point the various real repressions are removed, the black box of the human unconscious is opened, and behavior-language memory is awakened. It is precisely fictional discourse that promotes the deep fusion of the speech-act and behavior-language; this process is the process of imagination unfolding, and at the same time the process of the human's life opening up.

Searle's limitation lies in this: he neglected that the speech-act is ceaselessly changing, is bound up with the acting subject, and is constrained by the concrete context, with many factors jointly influencing the mode of its enactment. Therefore, although Searle's typology has its reasonableness, this division is not fixed and unchanging; a change in any one of these factors may lead to a change in the type of speech-act. For example, when we are drawn in by a literary work and throw ourselves whole-heartedly into literary reading, we forget reality and suspend the direction of mutual adaptation between word and world; we then live in this non-real world jointly constructed by the speech-act and behavior-language, deeply experiencing the virtual life unfolding in imagination. But once we set out to probe the real significance of the work, at this point we have already changed our relation to the discourse; the connection between word and world is again pushed to the foreground position, and we begin to be eager to seek the relation of adaptation between the speech-act and the world: first, how exactly the speech-act adapts to the world, to what degree it adapts to the world, and what sort of world it states—this is interpreting, from the epistemological angle, how the work reflects the world; second, how the speech-act, by influencing the reader, in turn influences the world—this is exploring the speech-act from the angle of the theory of practice, exploring how the world adapts to the speech-act, exploring the ethical value and social function of the speech-act. Language and writing are cunning as a snake; they always keep changing their colors and shift with the wavering of the human's attitude. The various changes of the speech-act, and the complex relation between the speech-act and behavior-language, determine that literary activity is always in the marginal state of both "entering into it" and "emerging from it," always displaying the two-sidedness of being neither this nor that and at once this and that. The age-old disputes over the fictionality and truthfulness, the independence and utility of literature are rooted precisely here.

III

Literary activity is closely related to behavior-language on two levels. First, the speech-act itself is connected with behavior-language and summons behavior-language. Only by mutually collaborating and fusing with behavior-language can the speech-act gain a full corporeal body and truly become a poetic language. Second, literature, as a study of the human, is mainly a study of "human behavior." A character's personality features are in essence the stylistic features of his behavior-language. Literature needs to use the speech-act to describe the human's behavior-language and its features. Whether the speech-act or behavior-language, as a shareable, communicable "sign system," must follow social convention (cultural convention); otherwise sharing and communication cannot be achieved. Hence, for literary theory, social convention (cultural convention) is an extremely important keyword.

Social convention (cultural convention) is formed in long-term human activity; it lies at the intersection of historical tradition and social fashion, is constructed by mutual imitation within a specific group of people, and is influenced by various social-cultural forces—it is the result of the game and negotiation of various forces, always stamped with the features of a specific period, a specific society, a specific group, and engraved with the imprints of many social contradictions and conflicts; conversely, social convention (cultural convention) in turn regulates the human's behavior-language and speech-act, and thereby divides humans into different social groups and shapes and rebuilds social order and structure. What has long been called literature's reflection of reality is by no means a rigid copying of social facts, nor any "typification" of patching together a nose, a mouth, and clothes; rather, behind the behavior and discourse, and even the thoughts and feelings, (14) of the characters a work depicts, there is implied a specific social convention (cultural convention). Hence the truthfulness of literature does not depend on whether the depicted content is fact or fiction; the work's content can entirely be fictional, so long as the depicted characters' behavior and discourse accord with the convention of the society they are in and the group they belong to, and suit the specific context the work displays—then the work possesses truthfulness, its characters' conduct is reasonable, and at the same time the social convention (cultural convention) refracted through their conduct profoundly embodies this society's structural features, social order, and cultural fashion. Social convention (cultural convention) is not a legal article; it is not a coercive demand and prescription upon the human's behavior and language. The human, as an independent life-individual, is always in a certain tension with social convention (cultural convention); setting out from his own life-nature, he shares the convention in this or that way, and may even deliberately resist the convention so as to manifest his own distinctive individuality and irreplaceable life-meaning. On one hand, social convention (cultural convention) disciplines the human's behavior-language and speech-act; on the other hand, the life-individual strives to burst the bondage of convention and, from the cracks, to bloom the swaying, many-postured flower of life. The distinctiveness of literary activity lies in this: as an imagined world, although literature must face social convention (literary convention) squarely, it weakens the normative force of convention upon the reader and bestows on the reader a space of free existence. Therefore literary activity both exists within cultural power—itself permeated with ineradicable power relations—and yet harbors the potential to resist cultural power; it forever manufactures and disseminates the myth of power, yet ceaselessly punctures the myth, calling for the equal right of all living beings to exist.

Literature, as the art of language, the social convention (cultural convention) enjoyed by its speech-act is not a rigid rule or law but is itself "conventional," as Nelson Goodman put it. Different writers, each in his own way, share, alter, or resist the convention in this or that manner, directly or indirectly, and thereby produce literary forms of myriad postures, flowing and shifting. Social convention (cultural convention) is the bond linking the various modes of literary activity, and it is thus that literature is brought about as a "family-resemblance" phenomenon. The continuation, rupture, or fusion of social convention (cultural convention) often manifests as the inheritance or renewal, the division or fusion, of literary genres.

Because cultural production is built on the foundation of the two acts (languages), and literary activity likewise so, there does not exist a clear-cut boundary dividing literature from non-literature; the various different cultural phenomena originate merely in the different modes of cooperation, the different degrees of cooperation, the different tendencies, and the different media of the two acts (languages), and there exist transitional phenomena among them, fuzzy intermediate zones. The distinction of the literary from the non-literary needs cultural power (authority) to adjudicate by relying on the literary institution. Yet this is not an arbitrary subjective decision; it must address the concrete state of the cooperation of the two acts (languages) and cannot ignore social convention (cultural convention). The reason cultural authority is authority lies precisely in its possessing the capital recognized by cultural tradition: it is the spokesman of tradition. Cultural authority thus enjoys the capacity to flexibly use the literary institution and even to reconstruct the institution by means of the declarative speech-act, and the literary institution is therefore ceaselessly rewritten and altered. The establishment of the position of cultural authority is related both to cultural tradition and to cultural institutions, and is closely related to the special position an individual occupies in the process of literary production and transmission—or, as Pierre Bourdieu put it, the special position occupied in the "literary field"—and to the various cultural capitals possessed. In the process of setting up the literary institution, there exists the contest of various cultural capitals and the game and negotiation among the various cultural powers.

The speech-act and behavior-language are the main and most basic paths by which the human relates to the world; they respectively establish two utterly different modes of connection. In this process, the two acts (languages), on one hand, shape the human's world and structure the world; on the other hand, they at the same time reflexively shape the human himself, endowing the human mind and flesh with structure. The human's two worlds—inner and outer—are constructed precisely in the process of the generation and unfolding of the two acts (languages). In The Meaning of the Body, Johnson holds that the development of both the human's body and mind is grounded in the result of the interaction between organism and world; he says: "Our 'body' and our 'mind' evolved through the interaction of organism and environment, which provides the locus that determines what we become." (15) But Johnson neglected the most important point—namely, that the interaction between the human, this organism, and the environment cannot do without mediation, and this mediation is behavior-language and the speech-act. Therefore the overall structure of the mutual cooperation of the two acts (languages) determines the structure of the human's world and the structure of the mind, determines the framework of human cultural production and the framework of human civilization. Yet this overall structure is not of uniform specification, fixed and unchanging; in the tension-field constructed by the two acts (languages), the speech-act and behavior-language are always in a relation of contest, mutually vying for dominance, and thereby producing the colorful, flourishing cultural phenomena and the ceaselessly flowing cultural changes. This is precisely the main root of the differences among different peoples, different periods, and different cultural and literary types. The national specialness of culture, civilization, and literature depends first of all on the overall structure and tendency of the mutual combination of the two acts (languages). The difference of the speech-act and behavior-language themselves, in turn, causes the split of humankind itself—the split of spirit and flesh, the split of consciousness and the unconscious, the split of reason and sensibility. And in literature, "the word is grasped in seizing the bodily image of the subject"; (16) thus, when literary activity re-arouses the speech-act and behavior-language fully and achieves a deep fusion, it heals the human's own split state, as if undergoing rebirth through fire, again and again.

The main significance of narratology's classification and analysis of the narrative act lies in this: different narrative acts and strategies regulate the relation between reader and literary activity, regulate the mode of the interaction of the speech-act and behavior-language, and regulate the reader's position in the tension-field jointly constructed by the two acts (languages), and thereby regulate the reader's reading-attitude of either "experiencing" or "cognizing"; and the reader cannot ignore this regulation but must make certain responses and compromises—this is "reading ethics." It is precisely in the process in which behavior-language is re-aroused and the reader is immersed in experience that he not only gains, intellectually, a certain "knowing"—becoming aware of the social convention (cultural convention) implied in a specific society—but at the same time enacts a certain "doing," unconsciously establishing the normativity grounded in self-identity of which Christine M. Korsgaard speaks. In the process in which cognition and experience alternate and transit into each other, he achieves the unity of knowing and doing, achieves a personal spiritual construction, an unforgettable spiritual construction—this is what the ancients called "poetic education" (shijiao). And it is precisely in the narrative act and its social convention (cultural convention) that we discover the hidden struggle of power and the various historical factors—and so the domain of cultural poetics opens before us.

In How Institutions Think, Douglas proposed the view of "institutional forgetting." She says: "Institutions create certain shaded zones, where the things within are invisible to us and the questions within are no longer asked by anyone. At the same time, institutions make certain other places fully exposed, where the things within are examined in detail and arranged in order." (17) Since modern times, Chinese literary-theory circles have comprehensively imported Western literary theory; this, to be sure, opened a brand-new horizon for us, yet at the same time obscured the original horizon and forgot the essence within traditional culture. From this angle, our stressing that literary study must be grounded on the two acts (languages)—that is, stressing the importance of literary intuition and experience, and stressing the wholeness of literary activity—is in essence a return to the Chinese traditional spirit, a recovery of the wholeness and the doctrine of the mean (zhongyong) of traditional culture. The difference is that we shall strive to achieve a new synthesis on the basis of Chinese and Western literary theory; where the ancients kept their lips sealed, we strive to make our own interpretation, striving to unravel this eternal riddle of literature.