Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (review)

Christopher Bush's bracing and insightful new book reconsiders the role that China played for a series of modernist writers in the early twentieth century, and it proceeds by way of a powerfully self-conscious central argument: that nothing about China mattered more than the image of its writing, which not only provided some of the most telling signs of China's difference from the West (literally, of course), but also reflected the period's broader preoccupation with the "question of media" (xvii) at a moment marked by the proliferation of such technologies as photography, recorded sound, film, and wireless communication. Thus Bush demonstrates, through closely observed case studies of Ezra Pound, Paul Claudel, Victor Segalen, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valéry, and others that the modernist attachment to China did more than simply channel long-standing variations on orientalism through the period's "make it new" aesthetic; it also drew on the example of Chinese writing to fashion surprisingly resonant and subtle responses to the "mediatic character" of twentieth-century life. For this discovery alone, Ideographic Modernism represents a remarkable accomplishment, and it takes its place within a growing body of critical work helping to expand both the geographic boundaries and linguistic compass of modernism as it has been canonized and taught. In placing a fascination with Chinese writing at the "intersection of [modernists'] technological and ethnographic imaginaries" (xvii), Bush lets us see how the invented notion of the "ideograph"—so famously enshrined by Pound to capture the peculiar aesthetic power of a language that was more than just letters on the page—was both flagrantly exotic and altogether native to a culture confronting, at almost every turn, "the various writings of the new technological media: photography, phonography, cinematography, and so on" (xvii). Modernism, as Bush describes it, turned to China in hopes of better understanding the consequences of "language's reduction to a reified, almost technical medium" that could seem inhumanly removed from everyday communication and yet also more enchanting in the "revelation of its material being in an explosion of textures, tones, and shapes" (3). "Ideographic modernism," we might say, is what happened when the West finally realized that no languages were more foreign than its own.

But Bush wants to make China matter for modernism in ways that exceed what might be accomplished from any straightforward reading, however theoretically nuanced and attentive, of its "image" in the West. Bush decisively navigates the historical terrain of China's representation in Anglo-American and European cultures from the Renaissance forward in the book's introduction, which plays on Ernst Fenollosa's terms, exploring "the Chinese written character as a Medium"—dropping "for Poetry" from Fenollosa's original title to suggest the larger stakes of Bush's return to one of the period's most important sites of orientalist assertion. Bush explores the antecedents for modernism's devotion to the ideograph within a larger intellectual and philosophical context, rounding up some of the usual suspects (Montesquieu, Michaelis, Hegel, Herder, Mill, Weber) but then turning to the work of media theorists and historians (McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Lisa Gitelman) whose interests at first glance seem only marginally connected to the discursive practices of sinology. At one level, Bush draws these lines of thought together to make clear just what it means to declare that "orientalism, the ideograph, and media theory grew up together" (21), namely, to remind us not only that the word "ideograph" has no equivalent in Chinese but also that the Western figures who invented it were among the most determined to think through "the cognitive and cultural consequences of writing, broadly construed" (21). Bush turns to media theory, then, less as an emergent discipline that might help us to see modernist orientalism differently and more as a discipline that itself emerges—in the form of McLuhan's commitment to mediums that are messages and Kittler's technological determinism—from a network of early twentieth-century understandings of Chinese writing as uniquely shaped by its...