The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (review)

458 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 François Jullien. The Propensity ofThings: Toward a History ofEfficacy in China. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1995. 317 pp. Hardcover $24.95, isbn 0-942299-94-9. François Jullien is one of our most powerful interpreters of Chinese culture, and this new study, a sequel to his Procès ou création, is again a tour de force. That is, the book itselfis an object lesson in the idea that it would explain: shi ^. Shi is a technical philosophical term that brings together the meaning ofform and momentum in a single expression, invoking an image that is pervasive in Chinese culture: the life ofdie brush as it discharges its characters as a fluid line, the power of dao it. as a cultural axis that unfolds to define the human experience, the energy of the dragon as it undulates and spirals to ornament a world. Shi is at once formal, dynamic , and strategic: exploiting an achieved disposition to maximum effect. Jullien acknowledges this multivalent character of shi by sometimes translating it as "lifelines ," emphasizing its formal aspect; sometimes as "propensity," emphasizing its dynamic aspect; and sometimes as "set up," emphasizing its strategic aspect. By examining the historical evolution of shi across the cultural and historical landscape of China, Jullien is able to tease out some of die key presuppositions that have made tiiis region of humanity so very different from Western civilizations. In these cross-cultural comparisons, the devil lies in the languages. Jullien begins by challenging the appropriateness ofWestern categories that favor "a single and 'transcendent' pole rather than interdependence between two poles" (p. 17) in doing the work of interpretation. It is the "transcendent" aspect ofWestern categories—transcendent Deity, Platonic ideas, Aquinas' transcendental strongbox —that invest them with an inherent teleological commitment, and transform what would be correlative opposites into a full-blown dualism. Broadly speaking, these dualistic categories define a world that entails an initial beginning, a blueprint , a straight line, and an end. The absence of a given end is what distinguishes the Chinese conception ofhistory most clearly from any Hegelian analogue. It is the "transcendent" foundations of classical Western thinking that render artistic activity mimesis: "the reproduction or imitation of a particular kind of 'nature' at some level more 'ideal' or more 'real'" (p. 75). Given Jullien's awareness ofthe inappropriateness of a transcendence-driven, dualistic vocabulary for explicating Chinese culture, it is worrisome that on occasion he resorts to the language of "objectivity": logic, form, reason, necessity, and so on. But this recourse© 1996 by University has to be seen as part of his overall strategy, and by and large it is most effective. ofHawai ? PressTj16 alternative to using Western languages to do what they cannot—that is, to present a non-teleological worldview—is to fall back on the integrity of Chinese terms themselves and to try, with imagination, to follow their contribution Reviews 459 to the evolving culture. But Jullien cannot write his book wholly in Chinese. This dependence on domestic Chinese categories is then augmented by using a familiar Western vocabulary in an unfamiliar way: the juxtaposing ofWestern terms, as in logic and spontaneity, form and force, tool and disposition, and structure and process, where the correlating ofthese terms—playing them back and forth—produces a language that die terms when taken independentiy deny: the language ofpropensity. Jullien is thus able to use his Western vocabulary in a very Chinese way: "the terms operate through networks ofaffinities, one constantìy implying another through allusion. They interact more through contrast than in terms of the separate fields tiiey denote" (p. 77). Jullien thus begins his project in cultural archaeology with the Chinese military experience and die early development of shi as a technical term in the art of warfare. In the language ofpropensity, artistic activity is not derivative and mimetic , but is "a process of actualization" that produces "a particular configuration ofthe dynamism inherent in reality" (p. 75). As a specific example, in the "art" of warfare, the contrast between ideological assumptions and this language ofpropensity gives you the difference between a Clausewitz who understands battle in terms...