The Empire of Fame: Writing and the Voice in Early Medieval China

Jacques Derrida's assault on phonocentrism has altered the very ground on which one addresses the question of orality and literacy, the charged binary that controlled and continues to control contemporary debates on signification, subjectivity, and power. Derrida's by now classic reading of Lévi-Strauss's Tristes tropiques constitutes one of the inaugurating moments for his deconstructive project, in which he systematically dismantles the matrix of oppositions that structures the anthropologist's allegory of loss by writing. Derrida insists that the Nambikwara, on whom Lévi-Strauss projects the Western fantasies of originary innocence, are in fact not ignorant of the violence of difference, dislocation, and abstraction that attends upon any historical formation. And insofar as such an intersection of meaning and power is typically aligned with writing, the Nambikwara are not ignorant of a certain "writing" either, even before the advent of the anthropologist and his gospel of phonetic technology. Derrida variously calls this extended sense of writing the "trace," "arche-writing," or the gramme. It is the inscriptive logic that strides the variety of physical media to mobilize gestures and voices, rituals and institutions, indeed all acts of marking and re-marking boundaries, toward its relentless operations of text-making.

China—the "Empire of the Text" par excellence—would appear to exemplify this global operation of the gramme with almost breathtaking immediacy.¹ It is not only that this civilization, through much of its history, devoted itself to its script and its archives with perhaps unparalleled single-mindedness. Such an authority of writing was itself grounded in an expansive graphic cosmology, the universal graphism of wen (text, texture, pattern, figure) which subsumed not only writing per se but also ritual and institutional patterning of bodies and societies as well as the forms and figures of the earth, the firmament, and everything in between. Thus enmeshed in a universe that is, as such, structured like writing, writing in the restricted sense (as Derrida would call it) simply precipitates an order preexisting its advent, an immanent order that the perspicacious sages merely rendered manifest through their invention of the script and attendant graphic institutions. The blatant tautology of this tale of origin—where writing copies a world always already conceived as writing—was the symbolic matrix for early Chinese imperial visions, the unreflected ground upon which script, world, and empire reflected the uncanny likenesses of one another.

Yet what this palpable bond between graphic vision and imperial power attests to is not a grammatological utopia. Rather, it is the fact that the globality of writing is always a globalization of writing, a historical program of scripturalization and textualization that both registers and enables specific formations of power. Derrida himself was not blind to the epochal forces that shaped his own globalization of writing. As he was quick to acknowledge, Of Grammatology was conceived under the aegis of a new era of writing, one in which everything from language to life as such progressively assumes the characteristics of script, code, and text.² What has since become apparent, however, is that such a relentless globalization of writing (as well as the attendant erosion of its specificity) cannot be safeguarded within the contemplative neutrality of a scientific paradigm shift; instead, it has every bit to do with a massive and ongoing reconfiguration of societal power that pundits variously dub "informatization," "media society," "postmodernity," or "hypermodernity." Likewise, albeit against a radically different cultural and historical background, the alluring cosmology of wen was inscribed within a historically circumscribed program of power, the implacable universalism of an imperial regime in which to write was to order and vice versa.

It is a phase of this widening circle of imperial tautology that I want to document in this essay. If the Han Dynasty first articulated the ground parameters of what I will call the graphic regime, which it institutionalized in its system of canons, rituals, bureaucracy, and cosmology, the few centuries following its collapse are usually characterized as an era of the voice. Indeed, the diffuse and decentered rule of the early medieval...