Outside the Parenthesis (Those People Were a Kind of Solution)

And some people have just come from theborderlands,And they say there are no Chinese any more.And now what will we do without Chinese?

—C. P. Cavafy, "Waiting for the Chinese"¹

Do we know the difference between structuralism and post-structuralism? Although we may be hard put to define it, we can usually describe it, by referring to an insurgent sensibility (though structuralism had its wild men: see Barthes' Mythologies), points of doctrine (the impossibility of a transcendental signified, the absence of meta-language), or maybe some exemplary incident where the paths forked (for most American observers that would be Jacques Derrida's contribution to the great "Structuralist Clambake" of October 1966, "Structure, Sign and Play" with its critical review of Lévi-Straussian "nostalgia").² I here propose an additional marker with some diagnostic value, both for figuring out what determines post-structuralism and for separating impulses within it: the resort to Asia.

Post-structuralism and deconstruction have been thinking from the outset about China and the cultures influenced by China. It's uncertain to me, as I look over the record, whether the intersection is really that of a method coming to affect an area, or whether the area was somehow part of the method already, so that deconstruction is unable, for historical reasons, to think about anything without to some extent thinking or dreaming about "China."³ This thinking or dreaming occurs under the two broad headings of grammatology and the end of humanism. (If, that is, these are two: as we shall see, the one tends to shade into the other.) I'll begin with some representations of Chinese writing that invoke the arguments about writing, speech, time and presence—about the "logocentrism" of classical Western philosophy—familiar to us all through the early writings of Jacques Derrida:

Is not China, in our dreams, the privileged home of space? For our imaginary system, Chinese culture is the most meticulous culture, the most hierarchical, the most impervious to occurrences in time, the one most attached to the pure unfolding of distance. We imagine China as a civilization of dikes and dams under the eternal face of Heaven, spread and immobilized across the whole extent of a wall-encircled continent. Even Chinese writing does not reproduce in horizontal lines the fleeting passage of the voice, but arranges in columns the motionless and still recognizable image of things themselves.⁴

In classical China, just as the orientation of a map is established from within the map—north at the bottom of the frame, east at the left for a virtual observer, that is, as if the unfolding of the represented space came from behind the map, from a potential point both in front of and within the representation (and not like a specular projection)—so the vertical columns of writing would function, in our view, backwards, going from right to left, as if they were parallel rings in which air circulates and resounds. A Chinese classical book was not a 'book,' but rather, by its framing and even by its binding, a series of perspectives, a striation of fields, of cascades, with sub-fields and sliding transitions in anticipation of an always deferred return. Here, the verso is the recto [projected] as depth, while, for us, it is by excluding the verso that the recto becomes possible. Let us take a better look.

Writing wells up [sourd, with a pun on 'sourd,' deaf] from the inscriptional perspective because it occurs at an invisible distance and temporal remove (not in a face-to-face encounter): it invites not a seeing but a tracing, whereby the physical support is split into corridors, as if to recall the plural void where writing takes place. Writing is merely detached onto the surface; it weaves itself onto the surface, mandated by a source which is not a source towards a surface which is no longer a surface but a fiber written by its lower part held perpendicularly from its upper part (the brush is held straight up in the palm). So the ideogram takes its place...