The Crux of “Theory” and “Post-Theory” and Its Treatment: A Critique of the Discourse of Western Theory

I. From “Literary Theory” to “Theory”

Since the twentieth century, with the remarkable achievements of modern science, “scientization” became a common pursuit of the humanities. In humanistic research, linguistics is the paradigm of scientization. Literature, as the “art of language,” naturally found in appropriating the linguistic research paradigm and its results—especially Saussure’s theory—an important route to acquiring its own “theoretical” character. Russian Formalism, Prague Structuralism, and the Soviet semiotic school developed against this background. From then on, literary research gradually escaped the ruts of impressionistic “feeling,” irrational “belief,” and Romantic “biography,” returning to the literary text itself and regarding it as an independent object of study possessing “structure” and “function.” On the whole, structuralist poetics already embodied this “scientizing” tendency; literary research truly became a kind of “theoretical” construction, and “literary theory” formally took the stage. Paul de Man gave a clear delimitation of “literary theory,” even excluding Anglo-American New Criticism, holding that only research using linguistic methods—of the kind begun in the 1960s by Jakobson and Roland Barthes—counts as literary theory. De Man says: “Literary theory comes into being when the approach to literary texts is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is to say historical and aesthetic, considerations—or, to put it less crudely, when the object of discussion is no longer the meaning or the value but the modalities of production and of reception of meaning and of value prior to their establishment. … The advent of theory, the break that is now so often deplored, occurs with the introduction of linguistic terminology in the metalanguage about literature.”

The results of linguistic research also profoundly influenced philosophy, psychology, cultural anthropology, history, and the humanities. As Kristeva says: “Linguistics happens to be the first among the disciplines studying human practice to be built up as an exact science, because it delimited its chosen object to the maximum. So the human sciences need only transplant the methods of linguistics to other fields. As a start, the first thing is to treat all these fields as language … Thought, once again, through the panoramic lens of language, captures the complex and varied real world.” As the “first exact science” among the disciplines of human practice, linguistics was bound to overflow its own bounds and those of literary theory, becoming a “scientific” research exemplar that penetrated other fields of human practice. This turn gave birth to the flourishing of theory; a generation of master theorists—Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida—appeared, often crossing many disciplines and exerting wide-ranging influence. The linguistic research paradigm, conceptions, views, and terminology became their indispensable theoretical background and resource: whether structuralism, post-structuralism, or deconstruction—from a closed, autonomous systemic structure, to a structure open to history, to an unstable structure following contextual change, and even to a discourse-system bound up with power—all remained rooted in the change of the linguistic research paradigm. Thus “Theory” refers specifically to the various intellectual and interpretive systems built up since the twentieth-century “linguistic turn,” taking language as the starting point or background of thought and using the linguistic paradigm, principles, views, and terminology.

“Literary theory” broke out of its literary territory into broader ground, and so turned toward “Theory”; owing to theory’s enormous explanatory power, wide influence, and penetration of the disciplines, it became the theoretical support behind every kind of criticism, the meta-criticism that interprets criticism, and thus an uppercase “Theory.” This was a process inevitably triggered by the gradual deepening of the understanding of language’s nature, structure, and function. When people found that human cognition is closely related to language, that there is a medium in the relation between human and world, that the human world is a world full of meaning, and that power covertly slips in through this linguistic medium, language thereby won an ontological priority among all the constituents of human consciousness and social life, and linguistics inevitably intervened forcefully in every discipline. Gender, body, subject, identity, class, ethnicity, media, and mass culture were all brought into the linguistic field of vision, thereby expanding theory’s territory. From another angle, literary theory’s breaking out toward culture, merging into cultural theory, was also caused by the features of its own research paradigm. When literary theory set its focus on “literariness” and “poeticness,” concentrating on linguistic structure to seek their cause; when it closely attended to linguistic structure and its signification, and noticed that the signifying process is never neutral but conceals power relations—this left a gap and provided ample reason for theory to transgress its bounds. The so-called “cultural turn” of literary theory merely expanded the object of study from literature to culture, neglecting literature; its paradigm did not bid farewell to linguistic theory but was rather a deepening and expansion of it, an ambitious “colonization.” Behind theory’s migration and expansion from “literature” to “culture” there also lies the question of the relation between language and the sign.

Culture is not necessarily built directly on the ground of language, but it cannot do without what Cassirer calls symbolic activity, for culture is itself the activity of creating meaning and must take the sign as its carrier. Especially in modern Western society, the production and transmission of signs has become a prominent phenomenon not to be ignored; hence drawing on the results of linguistics to interpret cultural phenomena became a historical necessity. Jameson says: “The deeper reason for using language as model or metaphor must be sought elsewhere than in questions of scientificity or of representing technological progress. It lies in the very nature of social life in the so-called advanced countries today. These countries present us with a picture of a world in which true nature no longer exists, while information of every kind reaches saturation; the intricate commodity network of this world can itself be seen as a typical sign system. Thus there is a very harmonious relation between treating linguistics as a method and likening our present culture to a regular, illusory nightmare.” When all manner of sign systems cover social life—reshaping, organizing, and structuring it, even reshaping humanized nature—people can no longer live, perceive, or think apart from signs.

Modern Western philosophy is clearly aware of this. Goodman highly succinctly summed up the developmental path of modern Western philosophy: “This mainstream of modern philosophy began with Kant’s replacement of the structure of the world by the structure of the mind, continued with C. I. Lewis’s replacement of the structure of the mind by the structure of concepts, and now goes further, replacing the structure of concepts by the structures of the many symbolic systems of science, philosophy, art, perception, and everyday discourse.” But the problem is that semiotics, owing to the breadth and confusion of its object, falls far short of linguistics in scientificity and scholarly accumulation, and so must avail itself of linguistic results. Saussure held that linguistics is the “master-pattern of semiology” and can serve as the basic model of any sign system. Roland Barthes points out: “Semiological research aims, in accordance with the program of all structuralist activity (whose aim is to construct a simulacrum of the object of study), to establish the functioning of signifying systems other than natural language. To carry out this research, one must from the start openly accept a limiting principle—the principle of relevance, itself borrowed from linguistics.” Barthes himself studied the sign systems of advertising, clothing, and automobiles by drawing on linguistic conceptions, methods, and terminology. He held that nothing escapes meaning: once an object is produced and consumed by human society, its signification appears—the object’s “semanticization”—and he called this study “object semantics.” One may say that linguistics brought a gospel not only to literature but to the whole humanities, while also becoming the arch-culprit of the widely censured linguistic centrism. All this is the chief reason theory came under criticism.

II. “Post-Theory”’s Critical Reconstruction of “Theory”

In the 1980s, a generation of theorists—Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Williams, Althusser, Lévi-Strauss—died one after another or entered old age, taking with them the golden age of theory. The passing of this era gave those who came after the opportunity and the composure to reflect on, critique, and transcend theory, and theory’s many ills came to light: a grand interest, a passion for universal problems, the meta-critical, meta-theoretical character of wishing to explain everything, and the “imperial” posture of expanding everywhere; the dualisms of center and margin, spirit and body, reason and sensibility, and the rational centrism, androcentrism, and anthropocentrism thereby left behind; theory’s absorption in language and text, which seemed to estrange it from social practice and even to degenerate into a reality-detached “self-producing model.” Especially theory’s forgetting of its own original territory—literature and the aesthetic—whereby it lost its ground. Summing up the development of contemporary literary theory, Raman Selden and others point out: “This period (roughly from the 1960s to the 1990s) we may call the ‘Theory period,’ or, as more accept, ‘The Moment of Theory’—a distinctive historical-cultural phenomenon that ends together with the by-products of post-structuralism, postmodernism, and materialist politics, a period that now seems to have been replaced by so-called ‘post-Theory.’” In fact people can no longer think apart from theory; so scholars no longer rest at attacking or simply resisting theory, but, while declaring the “end of theory,” strive to construct a “post-theory,” taking theory as a starting point for further creation, correcting its defects and transcending it. Wang Ning summarizes “post-theory” thus: “Western literary and cultural theory has entered a globalized era—a truly pluralistic-symbiotic era, an era without a mainstream, an era in which multiple discourses compete and show a character of ‘hybrid symbiosis’ and mutual dialogue.” Although post-theory has its “mosaicism,” we can still find that its paradigm overtly or covertly imitates the scholarly path from grammar and semantics to pragmatics, from language to speech. From this angle, the linguistic research paradigm remains post-theory’s implicit “meta-paradigm.” Overall, post-theory’s main strategies may be summed up as follows.

First, the rejection of theory’s universality. When theory was regarded as a universally meaningful paradigm, widely applied and even transplanted into different disciplines to interpret all manner of cultural phenomena—and thereby became an uppercase “Theory”—it inevitably floated free of concrete practice, its meaning steadily exhausted, drawing ever sterner criticism. People began to realize that any theory has its limits and applicability, that theory must change with the real context and cannot be uniform and unchanging; otherwise it loses explanatory force and vitality and degenerates into a rigid “formula.” Theory must therefore rationally set its own scope of application; it should be lowercase, plural, and concrete, proposing lowercase theories, even differing plural theories, for concrete contexts, so as to replace the uppercase “Theory.” This disdain for universality, certainty, and the “linguistic violence” they produce even drove some scholars to the other extreme of stressing criticism while denying theory. Reflecting on and critiquing theory, confirming the limits of theoretical interpretation, embedding theory in concrete contexts to be re-examined, and granting it a new identity and cultural stance in actual use—this constructs the lowercase, plural theory that is “post-theory.”

Agamben offered a deep critique of the notion of universality. He held that theoretical research should run counter to the universal viewpoint: its method and logic cannot wholly be separated from context. There is no method applicable to all fields, just as there is no logic apart from its concrete object. Setting out from Thomas Kuhn’s “scientific paradigm,” he analyzed Foucault’s “episteme” and archaeology of knowledge, and then advanced his own understanding of the theoretical “paradigm”: “A paradigm is merely a single example, a single case, which, by its repeatability, can tacitly serve as a model for scientists’ behavior and research practice. The rule of rules, as the criterion of scientificity, is thus replaced by the rule of the paradigm, and the universal logic of law by the singular logic of the exemplary. When an old paradigm is replaced by a new one incompatible with it, what Kuhn calls a scientific revolution occurs.” The “rule” is a mandatory, precise stipulation, universally applied and demanding rigid, exceptionless compliance; the “paradigm” is merely a referenceable “example,” a “model” for research practice—singular and non-universal, yet referenceable, constraining the path of thinking from behind, and even, when rules are absent, able to determine normal science. The evolution of the history of science is in fact embodied as the replacement of scientific paradigms. Agamben’s understanding of the paradigm provides us an effective tool for analyzing theory and post-theory. It is not hard to see that from structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction to post-theory, there is in fact a process of theoretical-paradigm change. If structuralism, borrowing the paradigm of “grammar,” explores universal structural rules, then post-structuralism introduces the historical dimension into structure, examining its change in historical context, even combining the methods of “historical linguistics”; deconstruction focuses on “semantics,” denying the stability of structure and pointing out that meaning itself changes with context, so that language never has a fixed signified; and post-theory prominently stresses “pragmatics,” focusing its angle on theory’s concrete use in concrete contexts. Just as “use” determines the “meaning” of language, theory’s concrete use in concrete contexts already determines theory itself, destining it to be lowercase and plural. Thus, however tangled and various post-theory may be, behind its many scholarly approaches—which constitute a “fragmentary” theoretical map—the shared research paradigm we can still see is “cognitive linguistics.”

Agamben himself greatly valued rethinking and constructing theory within concrete contexts. He expounded the “historical linguistics” meta-paradigm implicit behind Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, and in his own practice fused in “pragmatics”—that is, he examined not only the rupture and evolution of meaning across historical strata but also the distinctive usage of language in particular contexts. Closely following concrete “use” and “usage,” he re-examined the subject, right, nation, immigrant, life, and so on. In his view, “life” is not a concept of unified content; it has different uses, and so forms “bare life” and “form-of-life.” Human life always displays itself as “form-of-life”: it exists within ways of living, concerns life itself, and always preserves a certain possibility. Life can never be separated from its form; there is no possibility of stripping from it anything like bare life. Yet political power builds itself precisely upon separating the domain of bare life from the context of form-of-life, separating bare life from the common integration of life’s forms in all contexts—“thus providing for the division between bare life (the ultimate, opaque bearer of sovereignty) and the multiple forms-of-life, abstractly recoded as social-juridical identities based on bare life (voters, workers, journalists, students, but also AIDS patients, transvestites, AV actresses, the old, parents, women).” It is precisely this division that affords political power its opportunity and ample legitimacy for governance. The “refugee” problem too arises from this. Refugees, forced to leave their homeland and become stateless, lose the identity of the citizen; this “radical anonymity” means refugees no longer enjoy human rights and stand “outside human rights.” The originally inseparable, unified bare life and form-of-life split, in the refugee problem, into sharp conflict, breaking the identity of human and citizen, of birthplace and nationality. The refugee, an unaccepted “marginal figure,” splits apart the old trinity of state–nation–territory and turns it into an object of questioning, thereby becoming a “central figure” in the political history of our age. “Life,” under Agamben’s pen, is no longer an empty concept but is concretely applied in a particular historical context to make a profound interpretation of concrete life-phenomena.

Judith Butler, for her part, profoundly reflected on “queer” politics from the angle of speech-act theory. She held that discourse has performative force: it exercises power by citing institutions, laws, and conventions, so that to be named and interpellated is to be constituted. The word “queer” appeared precisely as an interpellation; it became a speech-act used to shame the subject brought into being by being named and hailed, while at the same time raising the problems of violence and antagonism, stability and mutability, within the performative. What Butler attends to is the word’s “temporality”: “How is a term marking degradation transformed into … signifying a new set of positive meanings? Is this a simple reversal of value, in which ‘queer’ signifies a past degradation, or a present or future affirmation? Does this inversion retain and repeat the abjecting history associated with the word?” She interprets how and where words repeatedly produce harm, and strives, through the “reappropriation” of the word, to enact a transformation, mining its antagonism and surmounting this traumatic history; she also notes that the word may be revised, dissolved, and rendered obsolete, conceding to the demands that resist it.

Second, the critique and dissolution of dualism. Although theory too remained wary of the dualisms of center and margin, reason and sensibility, spirit and body, phenomenon and essence, and of the derived logocentrism, rational centrism, androcentrism, and anthropocentrism, it nonetheless went on continually producing all manner of splits and oppositions. On one hand, post-theory continued Derrida’s line of thought, using deconstruction to critique and dissolve dualistic oppositions—cancelling the conceptual distinctions between nature and culture, human and animal, male and female, normal and abnormal—so as to efface oppositions and suspend the various centers. On the other hand, such currents as cognitive poetics, embodied mind, and philosophy in the flesh more radically replace dualism with monism, attempting more thoroughly to break down dualistic opposition and level the residual logical traces and rational order of theory. In cognitive poetics, “as the main tool of cognition, language becomes the focus of all manner of research, including developmental research,” and metaphor theory becomes an important support: “Basic conceptual metaphors are not only the basis of everyday expression but also of many poetic metaphors, and to some extent inject vitality into poetic metaphor.” Lakoff and Johnson go on to propose a philosophy in the flesh to challenge Western traditional thought. In their view, there is no Cartesian dualistic individual whose mind is detached from and independent of the body, and no Kantian person of absolute freedom and transcendent reason who discerns the moral imperative. “Reason is not, as the tradition has largely held, disembodied, but is rooted in the nature of our brain and body and in bodily experience.” In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson amply cite the embodiment of metaphor and the unconsciousness of cognition as evidence. Since reason is rooted in the body and the concept is merely a neural structure, there should be no dividing line between reason and sensibility, spirit and body; language too is no longer independent, and so rational centrism, and indeed linguistic centrism, lose their basis. At the same time, there can be no rupture between human and animal, only continuity, so that anthropocentrism is naturally dissolved, providing a theoretical basis for the new “ecocriticism.” Lakoff and Johnson’s replacement of dualism with monism indeed poses a sharp challenge to Western traditional thought and inevitably digs out the very root of the various centrisms, cancelling any possibility of power’s using the independence and difference of language to carry out dual division. Compared with phenomenology’s “intersubjectivity” and Levinas’s “alterity,” this view more thoroughly eradicates the various centers.

To a great extent, the development of cognitive linguistics is closely related to the inspiration of computer language, and its monism derives from the monism of computer language. Just as computer language depends directly on the software program, cognitive linguistics regards linguistic concepts as in fact a kind of neural structure, neither of which can exist independently of the computer or of the human brain and body. Computer language is the bond linking the computer with the external world and with the human, giving rise to the human-machine cyborg and thereby provoking “posthuman” research. This monistic view of language heals the rift between human and animal and fills the chasm between human and machine. In fact it does not stop at challenging Western traditional thought; it poses a severe challenge to humanity itself.

Third, the return to literature and the aesthetic. Theory’s forgetting of literature and the aesthetic was sternly criticized by Bloom, who scornfully dubbed theory the “School of Resentment.” When theory’s radical posture no longer enjoyed its former fashion, and people’s enthusiasm for theory steadily waned, returning to literature and the aesthetic—returning to the home base where one settles one’s life—became a natural choice for some scholars. Valentine Cunningham held that although theory, with its interpretation, activated literary texts and rekindled interest in the literary canon, it was precisely under theory’s dismemberment that texts became broken, scattered, and fractured; theory repressed the literary text, so that the text spoke with difficulty—stammering and hesitant—and lost its own distinctive capacity. He advocated taking the literary text as center, giving it priority. This emphasis on the text prompted formalism to re-emerge in a new guise and, in a two-way reflection and dialogue between formal criticism and social-historical criticism, to construct a “New Formalism.” Unlike formalism’s stress on the autonomy of form, the New Formalism values interpretive practice, introduces historical context and the reading activity into formal analysis, and attends to “the inner tension between politics and aesthetics, history and form, the textual whole and intertextuality, the cross-cultural and the cross-textual,” displaying with new vitality the interactive influence of literature and social history. In their view, the text is never for a moment isolated from the history, culture, and politics in which it participates; literature actively transforms its formal features in interaction. Literary form is therefore no longer a stable, self-sufficient structure, nor does the text possess an immanence of meaning; form is itself a social-historical product, generated in interaction with history, culture, and politics and shaped in the reading activity—at once individualized and historicized. The New Formalism attends to the shaping of the literary work in social-historical context, to the social-historical import of literary form, and to the way form is realized in the reading process, thereby constructing a “New Rhetoric.” In essence, the reason language has a rhetorical function is that language is not merely language itself but is at the same time behavior, with a real performative force. Martha Nussbaum’s “poetic justice” is precisely this distinctive rhetorical function of literature, generated in rhetorical reading and rooted in the performative force of language.

“Words can go to the non-verbal through many doors; when one says that speech-sound does not resemble meaning, or that the sentence does not resemble the object in the world, one closes only the most obvious of these doors, and the most unnecessary. For words gain their power not through describing but through naming, summoning, commanding, plotting, and seducing—thereby severing the naturalness of existing things, setting human beings on their paths, separating them from one another, and combining them into different communities.” Human cognition is always interwoven with language; the relation of human to human and of human to world cannot escape this linguistic medium. Thus the “many doors” of words afford Rancière many paths for practicing “equality.” He uses the method of deconstruction to foreground difference, rupture, the marginal, contingency, and ambiguity, and also fully uses language’s naming, summoning, commanding, plotting, and seducing—with ever-changing new modes of word-use—to break the hierarchical order contained in the “institution,” change the relation between human and existing things, reshape the symbolic order of the community, transcend pre-given identities, heal mutual divisions, subvert the existing relational system among modes of living, acting, and speaking, reconstruct the social order and configuration, challenge and adjust the “distribution of the sensible,” and practice equality through continual action, asserting his “politics of literature” and “politics of aesthetics.” “What the poet must do, then, is awaken the power of language, so that through it people may have a common experience of the spiritual world—a power originally latent, hidden in any line of writing, in the appearing of things, in the unfolding of everyday life. So the poet must renew words and things, express with words the linguistic nature of things, and link the activity of life with the sensuous force of words.” For Rancière, literature and the aesthetic dwell within the discourse-act—a discourse-act that continually rebuilds the community’s own difference and changes the established social order and distribution of the sensible—so that literature and the aesthetic harbor an active political force. As for the problems of image, film, multimedia, and the body that post-theory favors, these too cannot do without semiotics and can be analyzed using the linguistic research paradigm as basis or reference.

From the brief analysis above of post-theory’s main strategies, we see that although post-theory takes a critical stance toward theory, it does not thereby reject linguistic theory; it merely draws on the paradigms of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and the new rhetoric to construct its own lowercase, plural theory on the basis of an updated linguistic paradigm. Human cognition is always entangled with language; so long as you study a problem from the single angle of epistemology, you have already fallen into the trap of language and cannot leap out of the linguistic research paradigm. We do not say that all post-theory must apply the linguistic paradigm, but that post-theory can never escape that shadow-like paradigm, always relating to linguistic theory directly or indirectly, overtly or covertly. Post-theory still inherits theory’s penchant, still favoring linguistic theory, still infatuated with the magical diversity of Wittgenstein’s “language games.”

III. The Crux of “Theory” and “Post-Theory” and Its Treatment

The intimate relation of theory, post-theory, and linguistic theory stems from the linguistic turn of Western thought. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” As a key figure of the linguistic turn, Wittgenstein’s view displays his extremely keen and profound insight. It contains at least several layers of meaning. First, human thought and cognition cannot do without the medium of language. Logic fills the world; the human can neither think what is outside language nor say what we cannot think. Thus the world the human cognizes—that is, the limits of language—constitutes the boundary of my world. Lacan’s deep research into the unconscious reached a similar conclusion: the unconscious is “structured like a language.” Second, since both the human external world and the internal world are constructed by language, or structured like a language, language inevitably becomes the most fitting interpreter of both worlds. So Benveniste says: “Language is the interpretant of all other linguistic and non-linguistic systems.” And Foucault says: “Cognition and language are strictly interwoven … language imposes itself on the individual from without and, whether the individual will or not, leads him to ideas that may be concrete or abstract, precise or almost without foundation.” Language is a system of relation-sets; when people find that “cognition and language are strictly interwoven,” then all the paths of human cognition are necessarily embodied in the path of language’s self-cognition, the cognitive paradigm necessarily corresponds to the linguistic research paradigm, and behind the replacement of theories there lies hidden the shift of the linguistic research paradigm. This faith in language makes theory and post-theory, in constructing their respective frameworks of thought, unable ever to forget language, continually citing new scholarly resources from linguistics.

Western thought, from Plato onward, had already determined this direction. When Plato thought the ontological problem of the “Idea,” he had already set the myriad things of the world as the human being’s objects of cognition. This “objective relation” between human and world also presupposed the inevitable intellectual progression from ontology to epistemology and then to linguistic theory. All thinking unfolded around the framework of the objective relation; only the focus of thought shifted—from the essence of the object, to the cognitive capacity of the cognizing subject, to the relation between consciousness and its object and the linguistic medium in cognition—and then it was discovered that all these foci and relations were already contained within the relations presupposed by language, thereby fulfilling a fate long predetermined by logic. This was, to be sure, a process of the continual deepening of human cognition; but its thinking merely followed a fixed logical track around a single circle, the theoretical vision all the while concealed. Without dismantling the cage of this set thinking-pattern, one cannot deeply critique theory and post-theory, and cannot achieve an intellectual breakthrough. To truly dispel the concealment and discover the limits of theory and post-theory, one must leap out of Western thought and adopt the standpoint of “exteriority” (outsideness) of which Bakhtin speaks. The intellectual resources of the Han people provide just such an excellent foothold.

Laozi and Zhuangzi did not, like Western thinkers, trust language; they remained ever wary of it. They held that language cannot speak the “Dao” but on the contrary distorts and conceals it. Unlike Western philosophers, Laozi and Zhuangzi opened a path to the Dao outside language—the “great image” or “Xiangwang.” Zhuangzi especially uses various fables—the cook carving the ox, swinging the adze to raise a wind, the hunchback catching cicadas, Woodworker Qing carving the bell-stand—to expound, again and again, just how the human grasps the world and the Dao outside language. For Zhuangzi, the cook, Carpenter Shi, the hunchback, and Woodworker Qing are all attainers and knowers of the Dao. Their handy, marvelous behavior no longer rests merely at “skill” but enters the realm of the “Dao.” In these fables, the actions—carving the ox, swinging the adze, catching the cicada, carving the bell-stand—establish a correlation between the performer and the object of behavior; and the structure of the behavior and the structure of the object must accord with each other before they can be used freely, thereby realizing the fusion of performer and object into one—Zhuangzi’s “matching Heaven with Heaven.” From another angle, the structure of behavior is the experiential structure of the performer. It is precisely in the process of practice that the performer continually adjusts his mode of behavior, gradually bringing the behavioral structure into accord with the structure of the object, thereby accumulating experience, constructing his experiential structure, and acquiring a practiced skill. The structure of behavior (how to do) shapes and determines the performer’s experiential structure, shapes and embodies the structure of the object, and fuses the two into one. In this process, the behavioral structure, the performer’s experiential structure, and the structure of the object are synchronously constructed. From the fable we may therefore establish a relation of identity: an identity among the performer’s experiential structure, the behavioral structure, and the structure of the object. Through establishing this identity, the performer grasps the object and grasps the Dao—and behavior is the key.

But for these activities Zhuangzi also set a precondition, as Woodworker Qing puts it: “When I am about to make a bell-stand, I never dare to squander my energy; I must fast to still my mind. After fasting three days, I dare not harbor thoughts of congratulation, reward, rank, or salary; after five days, I dare not harbor thoughts of praise, blame, skill, or clumsiness; after seven days, I suddenly forget that I have four limbs and a body. At that time there is no court for me; my skill is concentrated and outside distractions vanish. Only then do I enter the mountain forest and observe the Heavenly nature; when the form reaches its utmost, I then see the complete bell-stand, and only then do I set my hand to it; otherwise I stop. Thus I match Heaven with Heaven—is this perhaps why the instrument seems made by spirits?” This is “the fasting of the mind” and “sitting in forgetfulness.” In modern terms, it is a state of “unconsciousness” in which one neither looks, listens, feels, nor thinks, and even self-consciousness is suspended. To look, listen, or feel necessarily involves some thing; to think necessarily involves some imagined thing. Whether the thing be real or a fictive imagined thing, the one who looks, listens, feels, or thinks is already within conscious activity, within the objective relation—and at that point language inevitably intervenes. The relation between human and world is thereby split into the relation of subject and object, no longer seamless and fused. The relation of identity can therefore only be: the identity among the unconscious-experience structure, the behavioral structure, and the structure of the object. Only when the human is in the unconscious instinctive state is his potential most fully brought into play, realizing the accord of behavior with world and the identity of human with world, thereby establishing a “non-objective relation.” This is the supreme realm of “matching Heaven with Heaven” and being “identical with the Great Thoroughfare”—that is, the realm of the fusion of thing and self, of no-thing and no-self, of the unity of Heaven and humanity. The intervention of language, of consciousness, of any cognitive activity, can only split this harmonious relation, turning the thing-self-fused non-objective relation into the thing-self-split objective relation, creating an estrangement between human and world, clouding human conscience, and concealing or distorting the Dao.

From the identity among the unconscious-experience structure, the behavioral structure, and the structure of the object (world), we may excavate several views. First, Lacan’s interpretation of the unconscious is a misinterpretation. In fact the unconscious is not like a “language structure” but is precisely a “behavioral structure.” Second, Wittgenstein’s view is debatable. The human can entirely break through the limits of language and grasp the Dao and the world directly by means of behavior; the boundary of my language cannot limit the boundary of my world. Third, since the human world may lie outside language, and this extra-linguistic world is precisely not what language can grasp—on the contrary, the interference of language must be excluded—language cannot effectively interpret everything. Benveniste’s treating language as the interpretant of all “other linguistic and non-linguistic systems” is bound to cause misinterpretation and concealment. Following the line of Laozi and Zhuangzi, it is not hard to find that, outside language, there exists another interpretive path: experience, intuition, and apprehension founded on behavior. The human can, outside language and outside the object-activities of observation, analysis, and cognition, directly fuse with the world through behavior, establish a non-objective relation, and thereby experience, intuit, and apprehend the world and grasp the Dao of nature. Therefore, to exaggerate the role of language and to insist that only linguistics is the exemplar for all disciplines studying human practice inevitably simplifies and one-sides the complex relation between human and world and causes intellectual blindness—and this is precisely the crux of theory and post-theory. Moreover, all Western thought built on the basis of the linguistic turn, treating language as the indispensable medium between human and world, or built on the basis of the objective relation, treating the world merely as the human being’s object of cognition, must in our view conceal the world to some degree. Western analytic philosophy is, to be sure, also suspicious of language; but it is more like a surgeon, trying to regulate and cure language by diagnosing it. The ancient Chinese philosophers, by contrast, did not wholly trust language but strove to seek, outside language, another path to the wisdom of grasping the world and the Dao.

In fact the human capacity to grasp the world directly through behavior comes from the organism. For the organism there exists an identity among the unconscious-experience (instinct) structure, the behavioral structure, and the structure of the world; once this identity is lacking, the organism is eliminated by nature. This human identity is rooted in the organism’s capacity to construct relations of identity, a precious gift the organism bestows on us, and it constitutes the human being’s deep unconscious. “The interaction of the organism with its surrounding environment is the direct or indirect source of all experience,” and behavior is the mediating bridge of that interaction. Human experience comes chiefly from the constructive function of behavior—both from the behavior-construction of the species and indeed the organism, and from one’s own behavior-construction. First, behavior constructed human experience; the appearance of language only, to some degree, changed and reshaped human behavior and experience.

Language itself is built on the basis of experience, being the classification, condensation, and abstraction of experience. This classification, condensation, and abstraction cause the merging within experience-groups and the rupture between groups, thereby forming “intension” and “extension,” and the linguistic “concept” is thus generated. The concept comes from prior experience yet differs from the original experience and cannot be reduced to it. At the same time, the concept must avail itself of a materialized sound or other material to gain its own body—Saussure’s “concept / sound-image,” that is, “language.” If the formation of the concept has already opened a distance from the original experience, then language’s gaining its materialized body bids farewell to the human body, separating itself from the body and constructing itself into a differentiated system of distinction; thus language is formally born and gains relative independence, externality, and social-sharedness. It is precisely these that endow language with its magical power: when the human shouts the name of a thing, he has already, by language, set that thing up as an object. The whole mystery and distinctiveness of language is rooted in this—that it projects the originally inner concept onto an external materialized existence, thereby gaining relative independence, externality, and social-sharedness, and, with the concept as medium, establishing a complex correlation between experience and materialized existence. By virtue of this, language can use its difference to distinguish the world from the human and construct the world into the human being’s object-world. Language’s relative independence, externality, and social-sharedness win it the capacity for objectification; the objective relation between human and world is built upon this distinctiveness, and language itself grows into a system of relation-sets, since all the human being’s objective relations are constructed through language’s objectifying function, thereby setting up a kaleidoscopic system of relations. The birth of language opens the presentation of the human being’s object-world and thereby reflexively constructs human consciousness. Consciousness and the object of consciousness are synchronously generated at the moment of language’s generation. That is, the experience constructed by behavior is still below the threshold of consciousness and can only be unconscious experience; when it is classified, condensed, and abstracted, rising to the threshold of consciousness, consciousness is generated, the linguistic concept takes shape, and by means of its materialized body and its independence, externality, and social-sharedness it constructs the world into the human being’s object-world. From then on, the human can at last observe, analyze, and cognize the world as object, and language becomes the medium the human must traverse to cognize it. “The realm of the mind emerges from language.” The human capacity for reflection, reason, and the metaphysical is built upon language’s independence, externality, and social-sharedness. Language both opens up the world—creating a clarified object-world and a metaphysical spiritual space—and yet creates a rift between human and world, casting over the world a linguistic mist hard to wipe away.

Language’s independence, externality, and social-sharedness not only construct the world and the myriad things into the human being’s objects, but can also distinguish objects originally indistinguishable, forcibly strip the human being’s behavior away from the human, treat behavior as the human’s object, and create a rift between the human’s unconscious experience and behavior. Behavior can thus be regarded as a representation of unconscious experience, become an interpreted object, thereby enjoy sign-features, and be called, at the same time, “behavior-language.” (Our proposing the concept of “behavior-language” does not weaken the critique of Wittgenstein, for only after the birth of language, under language’s functions of distinction and interpretation, can behavior be regarded as behavior-language; but before the birth of language, behavior had already grasped the world by itself.) In essence, behavior-language is still behavior and enjoys behavior’s own function; only, because the behavioral structure has an identity with the unconscious structure, it is endowed with a representational function and becomes a symbolic behavior representing the unconscious structure. The reason we adopt the naming “behavior-language” is to highlight the representational character of behavior, to highlight the correlation between behavior and the unconscious, and to regard behavior at the same time as a sign-activity, not merely as behavior itself. We hold that at the very moment language is born, behavior begins to appear in the guise of behavior-language. From then on, between human and world two basic relations coexist: first, the human relates to the world through behavior-language (behavior), establishing a non-objective relation to experience, intuit, and apprehend; second, the human establishes an objective relation with the world through speech-act (language) to observe, analyze, and cognize. Between human and world there thus coexist two most basic modes of sign-activity—behavior-language and speech-act—with different functional features (the capacity of identification and the capacity of objectification); thereby two utterly different relations are established (the thing-self-fused non-objective relation and the thing-self-opposed objective relation); two different paths of grasping the world are formed (experience, intuition, apprehension, and observation, analysis, cognition); the human unconscious and consciousness are respectively constructed; and two different modes of behavior are formed (the sensuous mode and the rational mode). These are two indispensable, mutually coordinating, mutually penetrating, mutually influencing modes of human sign-activity, and the human world is jointly constructed by the two. For just this reason, we hold that the malady of theory, post-theory, and indeed Western mainstream thought lies in valuing only one of these dimensions while neglecting the other, extremely important one. Our treatment is to restore both dimensions and rebuild their relation of cooperation.

Nietzsche was a Western scholar who discovered the double relation between human and world. He proposed the Dionysian and the Apollonian, holding that these display two different relations between human and world; art contains both at once, coexisting yet with differing emphasis. Martin Buber likewise recognized two basic relational models between human and world: one is “I–It,” the objective relation, a daily relation; the other is “I–Thou,” the non-objective primordial relation, to which the aesthetic and the religious belong. Buber points out: “Man holds a double attitude, and so the world appears to him as a double world.” Worringer, for his part, proposed “empathy” and “abstraction” to explain two sharply different relations between human and nature. Regrettably, Nietzsche, Buber, and Worringer all rested merely at phenomenal description, without further offering a reasonable interpretation, without discovering the different styles of sign-activity behind these two relations, without discovering that it is precisely the difference in the mode of sign-activity that leads to different human ways of grasping the world, and without discovering their connection with human consciousness and the unconscious. Western scholars do often attend to ecstasy, lived experience, and intuition; but this “irrational” current was never fully developed, the thought was not deepened, and it even tended to the other extreme of denying epistemology, and so was pushed aside by mainstream thought.

At this point we may also critique cognitive linguistics, cognitive poetics, embodied mind, and philosophy in the flesh. Their common basis is to stress the embodiment of language, deny language’s relative independence, replace dualism with monism, and critique the various centrisms, thereby challenging Western thought. But the problem is that, in denying language’s relative independence, they in fact cancel language’s most fundamental feature—the capacity for objectification. For only because language has relative independence can it, by its difference, separate the world from the human and set the world up as the human’s object. Once language loses its independence, it can no longer construct the human’s object-world, and the human is bound to fall back into chaos and ignorance; human consciousness, reason, and spirit thereby lose their basis, and the human descends to the level of other organisms, even to the level of the machine—the human is no longer human. Language’s relative independence, externality, and social-sharedness enable humanity continually to create and accumulate public knowledge and culture transcending any individual, and to combine inner wisdom with outer knowledge and culture, lifting humanity above the other animals. The monism above, though it dissolves the various dualistic oppositions and centers, does so at the cost of losing the very features of the human, and must ultimately tend toward the absurd. When Lakoff and Johnson say, “what we call a ‘concept’ is in fact a neural structure that lets us mentally portray categories and carry out inference,” they have already placed themselves at the edge of danger. They sharply challenge Western thought, yet they themselves fall into another error. The embodiment of language does not belong directly to the body, still less is it fused with the body; rather it is related to the body by way of behavior-language. The embodied language of cognitive linguistics is in essence similar to computer language and quite close in nature to what we call behavior-language—only it is an articulated behavior-language. Our view is this: the human being’s behavior-language is a special “sign,” or “quasi-sign,” that has no boundary line with the body, is deeply embedded in the body, is itself bodily behavior, and lacks independence; therefore it can only structure the world and take it into the self, construct the unconscious, and establish the unified relation between human and world. Speech-act, by its relative independence, constructs the human’s object-world and at the same time constructs human consciousness, establishing a dualistic objective relation between human and world. These are two mutually influencing, mutually coordinating sign-activities. The relation between human and world is therefore at once monistic and dualistic, the two mutually penetrating and mutually converting, and constituting an irreducible tension field.

Our view also differs from speech-act theory. Although speech-act theory relates language to behavior, points out the behavioral character of speech, and regards the speech-act as the unfolding of three levels—the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts—fundamentally it cannot touch the deep unconscious. When behavior is connected with language to become a speech-act, behavior has in fact already lost its true form and become something subordinate to, parasitic on, and obedient to language. This language-controlled behavior is a conscious “behavioral performance,” an object language can interpret—not a behavior directly linked to and representing the unconscious. The behavior-language we speak of refers chiefly to behavior that represents the unconscious; it is a “quasi-sign” activity distinct from the speech-act. Though the two are mutually related and mutually cooperating, they are relatively independent and incommensurable. Speech-act therefore cannot replace behavior-language, cannot fully interpret it, and will conceal and distort it. To treat theory and post-theory, to overcome the limitations of Western thought, and to explore and interpret the various humanistic phenomena reasonably and fittingly—so as to build a fitting research paradigm for the disciplines studying human practice—it is necessary to construct a new cultural poetics and hermeneutics. Human cultural activity is the sign-activity of creating meaning. Although the styles of sign are extremely rich, all sign-activity is founded on behavior-language and speech-act and can be interpreted through the two-dimensional tension relation constructed by their synergy. Our “New Poetics” and “New Hermeneutics,” therefore, set out from the synergy of behavior-language and speech-act to describe how the two jointly participate in cultural practice, to explore the inner mechanism of their interaction, and to attempt to reveal the mystery of culture and grasp the meaning of culture fittingly.