Hayot, Eric. “Vanishing Horizons: Problems in the Comparison of China and the West.” A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, John Wiley and Sons, 2011, pp. 88-107.
Hayot gives a different perspective on comparability or incommensurability from those of Lloyd and Ames. While Lloyd argues for the importance of paying attention to the contexts of debates/arguments in different cultures and the questions the interlocutors were trying to answer, and Ames argues that the modes of argumentation differ between ancient China and classical Greece (along with the assumptions, as Lloyd also suggests), Hayot focuses on the contexts for comparison of China and the West.
Like Escobar and Dussel, Hayot focuses (first) on modernity--the European Enlightenment and colonial expansion--as the driving force for making comparisons. Like Lyon, Hayot argues that the process of making comparisons entails "a theory of comparison, of comparability, that is an act of philosophy and an act of practice" (88). The Jesuits who went to China, he writes, tried to argue that the Chinese (as Confucians) were "theological and philosophical cousins to the Catholic tradition" (92), and so they tried to show how Confucian beliefs and language presaged Christianity. After the Rites Controversy and subsequent banning of Christian missions from China by the Kangxi emperor, the next major context for comparisons between the West and China took the form of "the secular universals appropriate to the renewed disciplines of the European Enlightenment" (93). This secular universalism put non-Western cultures in a historical relation with the "modern" West (as Dussel also suggests), where the cultures that the Europeans encountered (and usually colonized) were cast as "pre-modern."
China's loss in the two Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century confirmed for the West (and for many Chinese) that it needed to modernize. But the tiyong 體用 formulation of Zhang Zhidong became emblematic for how China would use Western learning (for "use") "effectively ceded the ground of the practical or the functional to modernity and its cultural others, while retaining for China a set of values that could subtend those practices and functions" (96). Hayot argues that this approach left the "non-Western or non-modern" with "something of the status of an aesthetic object" (96), since all practicality (science, etc.) was left to the modern West. From the western perspective, argues Hayot,
the truly East Asian is therefore relegated to the realm of the pre-modern, and thus the realm of culture (including science and medicine) that developed prior to the East Asian encounter with Europe from the seventeenth century onward. Beyond the temporal and comparative boundary established by that encounter, "contamination" with the West renders suspect the nature or quality of East Asian authenticity, and reifies it as much as possible in the realm of culture--though reifying in this way is, as I have suggested, a very modern thing to do. (96-7)
[Rey Chow made a similar point about Chinese Studies as a discipline back in 1998: "Within the field of Chinese studies, ... the dead and the living are separated by what amounts to an entangled class and race boundary: High culture, that which is presumed to be ethnically pure, belongs with the inscrutable dead; low culture, that which is left over from the contaminating contacts with the foreign, belongs with those who happen to be alive and who can still, unfortunately, speak and write" (17). Her argument goes beyond what Hayot is saying here about modernist perspectives on East Asia by bringing in another boundary between "high" and "low" culture.]
Hayot moves on to discuss "the metaphor problem," where it has been posited that one feature of Chinese poetry is the absence of metaphors (see what I did there?). By lack of metaphor, Hayot writes, "When Chinese poetry compares, Yu argued, the comparisons it makes do not create new 'worlds' of meaning, or establish quasi-metaphysical equivalences between the known and the unknown" (97). He cites Yu, Stephen Owen, James J. Y. Liu, and Francois Jullien, who seem to see the lack of metaphor in Chinese poetry as "a positive feature of the Chinese aesthetic" (98). But as he says, citing Zhang Longxi, this "affirm[ation of] the two-worlds thesis of East/West comparison" suggests that the language of figures cannot be translated (98), just as some in rhetoric suggest that Chinese rhetorical terminology cannot or should not be translated. [Here Hayot seems to be arguing against something akin to what Ames and Lloyd are cautioning us about.]
Hayot's final section involves "the authenticity problem," which brings back modernity to some extent. The "authenticity problem" seems to come up partly in response to the postcolonial critiques that came after Said's Orientalism, and it concerns some of the modern Western authors' use of China or Chinese material as, it is argued, a metaphor or a figure rather than as a real reference. This is something that, Hayot argues, the West seems to be able to get away with (for example, with Pound or Brecht). Chinese writers, on the other hand, are not given the same freedom to use Western material figuratively. Here Hayot gives an example that I'm not sure works, when he argues that "Chinese figurations of the West end up looking like failures of imitation or failures of understanding – like, that is, intellectual and circumstantial failures rather than ontological ones" (102). His example is from a criticism by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang of Taiwanese modernists whose writing, she says, was more imitative and lacked "the essential modernist spirit of experimentation and innovation" (qtd. in Hayot 102). I'm not sure I understand the connection between Chang's critique of the Taiwanese modernists' use of modernist stylistic devices (she's speaking specifically of their adaptation of stream-of-consciousness) rather than references to the West. So I'm not entirely sure that the contrasting examples of "the authenticity problem" are comparable.
Finally, I'd cite Hayot's quotation of something Rey Chow wrote in 1993 that Hayot feels (in 2011) hasn't been considered enough outside of comparative literature: "How, in spite of and perhaps because of the fact that [East Asia] remained 'territorially independent,' it offers even better illustrations of how imperialism works--i.e., how imperialism as ideological domination succeeds best without physical coercion, without actually capturing the body and the land" (qtd in Hayot 103). There's been a lot of discussion about the US as an imperialist power and English as a form of linguistic imperialism. I think Xiaoye You's book, Writing in the Devil's Tongue, is one book outside of comparative literature that makes the point that at different points in modern Chinese history, Western imperialism was ideologically and linguistically dominant. [By the way, Hayot's insertion of "East Asia" doesn't seem to be considering that Taiwan and Korea were both colonized by Japan (along with Manchukuo, for that matter).]
OK--I'm sure I've left a lot out of this, but I need to get some sleep. And I think I'm actually falling behind in the readings, but I will probably take the weekend off. As usual, I'd appreciate any comments or questions about my notes!
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