Paris 2001 (#2)
A report on The "Tu / Image" Conference
3-5 September 2001 / Collège de France, Paris, France
Ambience
Speaking of the graves of one's ancestors, it is hard to visit Paris without being aware of the monuments to intellect with which it abounds. In the courtyard of the College de France is a statue of Champollion, solving in a way the problem of how philology can be made visually dramatic for the general public. In the immediate vicinity are many places, not all of them marked, sacred to the memory of such rogues and rebels as Villon and Galois, who not less than these more publicly enshrined types are among the defining presences in the history of the Western mind.
It was a pleasure, during and between the proceedings, to meet and sometimes to hear WSW communicants we had previously known only electronically: Guillaume Jacques, Olivier Venture, Maria Khayutina, and from the earliest days of WSWG also Michael Loewe. And to renew acquaintance with a few others, among them Carine Defoort, down for the day from Belgium, Don Harper, over from Chicago, Charles Le Blanc, visiting from the New World's greatest French-speaking city to the Old World's greatest, and Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, now herself located in Paris. )From one intermission conversation, I may parenthetically report that Michael Loewe has no additional light to shed on the enigma, recently aired on WSW, of the name Jin Midi).
Papers
The Conference proper convened in the Auditorium Guillaume Budé, named for the humanist who in 1563 planted the seed of the present Collège by advising François I to appoint six royal professors: two experts in Greek, three in Hebrew, and one - no, not in Latin, every fool knows Latin, but in mathematics.
Shifting forward four centuries to the age when Chinese is also among the languages recognized as within the province of learned persons, we come to the present Conference, Its theme (Tu, or Image) was intentionally broad, and not many of the papers were of specifically WS interest, so I need not give a full account. Those who heard Don Harper's presentation on the Tai-Yi Shvng Shwei document from Gwodyen will be glad to know that his study and translation have been published. The source given in my offprint is Junggwo Chutu Dzlyau Yenjyou #5, date of 2001 3mo 31da. Don (in my view, rightly) argues against too hasty identification of the contents of the Gwodyen MSS with what was previously known; their contribution to knowledge, and not merely their confirmation of knowledge [my formulation], should be respected.
Lothar von Falkenhausen (UCLA) had a provocative and persuasive paper on the riddle of the absence of human representation in early Chinese art (all will know of Alain Thote's important paper on the rather sudden appearance of human representation, at the beginning of the Warring States period). And this despite its presence in most other ancient art traditions, including those directly adjacent to [what later became] China, including that of India, not to mention Shu. Lothar's suggestion was that perhaps a taboo on the depiction of high personages was involved. I note here (there was no room to do so at the conference) that when human representation *does* appear, it is typically of socially low and not high figures, so if a a taboo was lifted at that time, it may have been one against depicting menials, entertainers, servants, and the like; any taboo involving high personages would seem to have remained in effect.
For such matters there was little or no time because of the predictable, but regrettable, PC response: the automatic reaction that one has no right to represent Chinese culture as deficient in any way. This PC issue, as it always does, occluded the possibility of intellectual examination of the subject. One hopes discussion will continue in another, and more favorable, medium. In some century or other.
Lai Guolong gave a suggestive interpretation of a damaged diagram on silk from Mawangdwei. He sees it as a list of relationships associated with differential mourning obligations. He noted in passing that the details of the MWD diagram support the "jin-wvn" ritual traditions of mourning over the "gu-wvn" counterparts.
Interlude
During a pause in the sessions, a formal speech of welcome was delivered to the assembled worthies (all standing) in the open area outside the auditorium, by President Jacques Chirac. Around the edges of that area, in glass cases, sat the actual objects used in making many of the classic discoveries, or measuring many of the standard constants, of the sciences. Pierre Curie's faster chemical balance. Kipp's apparatus. Nothing from philology. Of pencils once used by Guillaume Budé, never mind any touched by such more recent figures as Pelliot or Maspero, there was no trace. One of the problems with humanistic science is that it doesn't leave objects behind on which the veneration of posterity can easily focus. At best, it leaves light. Light as such is not so easy to dramatize architecturally.
Resumption
It is true what they say about French women: the "little black dress" is still visibly chic; immoralized, but not invented, by Chanel. Here in the realm of study, there is something perhaps similar: the College technicians, the ones who clip microphones on lapels and manage the projection of slides, are dressed entirely in black. Is this a style matter? Or a device of inconspicuousness, as with the people who are really making things happen in a bunraku performance?
Jonathan Hay (NYU) discussed portraits of officials in Ming and Ching, and was able to show in the series a close relation to the esteem in which official service was held at the time of the painting, and the way official servants related to other areas of life. The art is not generated by freestanding art impetus, but is in intimate tandem with currents and attitudes in the world at large. This is of course much like the relationship which we find between Warring States "philosophy" and Warring States life in general (so far as it can be deduced indirectly). We see Chinese "philosophy" not as produced on a "philosophic" agenda, independent of vulgar mundane issues and capable of being discussed without notice of them, but as shaped by and responding to those vulgar mundane issues, and not really intelligible without considering them.
Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann abandoned her announced topic ("A Neglected Representation of the Ming Tang [The 'Ming Tang Wei' chapter of the Li Ji]") to add to her ICANAS presentation on the Shan/Hai Jing. Charles Le Blanc analyzed the form, indeed the "topographie textuelle," of HNZ 6. Don Harper discussed some MWD silk-MS diagrams. My own paper was on the Pentagrams of the Proto-Yi.
In response to Herman-Josef Rollicke's (Dusseldorf) paper on the Mandala Structure of the Avatamsaka-sutra, I inquired what role the secular precedent of the "mandala" image of political relations in a multi-state system in the Arthashastra may have played in the Buddhist use of the term and device. The subsequent discussion made it clear that this relationship is not about to be decisively clarified. There may thus be a use for my conclusions, outlined at Michael Witzel's Ethnogenesis 3 conference in May of this year, about the stratification and date (or rather, date span) of the Arthashastra. This is of relevence because if any of the material can be linked to the early years of the Maurya dynasty, that material is in turn roughly contemporary with the formative period of Chinese statecraft theory.
Concluding
Michael Loewe, late in the sessions, made a general critique of them: he missed "philology" from the mix. He had himself, by way of experiment, gone through the entries of the Han Palace Library catalogue, noting what distinction was there made between "tu" and other words for "diagram/image;" Michael suggested that that sort of standard care with definitions at the outset might have been a useful clarification. HQ ventures to second this defense of a discipline which, whether or not it is fashionable in a given age, remains in all ages fundamental.
I should close with a word of thanks to Franciscus Verellen and the other organizers, and to the official hosts of the conference, the College de France, the EFEO, and Reid Hall (Columbia University's outpost in Paris). The venue was elegant (though it was a relief, in a way, to find that a humble mediaeval blackboard still lurked behind the full-wall projection screen) and the intersession provisions were lavish. This traveler can only be grateful.
Aftermath
And so it was over, but these things do not end so easily. Around the corner from the Collège, just up the Rue St-Jacques but not quite as far as the still functioning school Louis-le-Grand, at which, and later at the Sorbonne across the street, Evariste Galois had begun his short if fertile career in mathematics, is a small bronze placque where once stood the Church of the Return, presided over by Guillaume Villon, the man who, for want of better, served as father to the incorrigible François Villon. The inscription ends with what, being thus officially canonized, can only become the definitive word of Villon to later ages. It was in fact addressed to later ages. It reads:
Frères humains qui après nous vivez,
N'ayez lex cuers contre nous endurcis,
Car, se pitié de nous povres avez,
Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis . . .Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absouldre!
O Brother Men, who live, though we are gone,
Let not your heart be hardened at the view,
For if you pity us you gaze upon,
God is more like to show you mercy too . . .What will be left of any of us, centuries from now? What forgiveness will we need to ask, or to have asked on our behalf? Will there be no better to be said of us than that we once met in halls consecrated by the labors of others? Such are the questions which Paris, left to itself, puts to its visitors.
28 Aug 2003 / Contact The Project / Exit to News Page
