Martial Arts and Philosophy Mediated more

1 Martial Arts and Oriental Philosophy (Mediated)1 Paul Bowman Cardiff University 1. Mediation Being invited to speak on the theme of ‘martial arts and Oriental philosophy’ gave me a unique thrill. Finally, I thought, I not only have a chance to, I will simply just have to tackle head-on something that my professional academic positioning seems always to have prevented me from tackling, namely exactly these two things: first, martial arts ‘as such’, and second, Oriental philosophy ‘as such’, and their relationship. For, working initially in the field of cultural theory, and then employed in the field of media and cultural studies, and then moving into a school of journalism, media and cultural studies, I have always found it difficult to tackle ‘head on’ or ‘directly’ either the subject that is my first love (martial arts), or its attending discourse (Oriental philosophy). This is because, being steeped in the world of cultural theory, I have become entirely unable not to notice the ways that the supposedly direct, simple, unmediated, physical, embodied truth and reality of either martial arts or Oriental philosophy is always directly or indirectly routed through nothing other than media, as well as cultural forms of representation, narrative, discourses, and fantasy constructions and ideologies. 1 BowmanP@cardiff.ac.uk This paper was written for and presented to Brighton University Philosophy Society, th January 12 2012. 2 Indeed, what many believe they know about Oriental martial arts and the relationship of these to something called Oriental philosophy (and I include myself in this group) often boils down myths that have almost invariably been provided first and foremost by ideas circulated in film and on TV. So even when I want to go directly to the heart of these things, even when I desperately want to avoid tangling with and becoming entangled by issues of representation and mediation, I keep coming up against the fact that our relation to these things (martial arts and Oriental philosophy) is inextricably entangled with issues related to media and culture. In other words, there is a sense in which I can’t deal directly with martial arts or Oriental philosophy without dealing with aspects of film, TV, and various forms of patriarchal and Orientalist fantasy, discourse and ideology. This is because our access to, our understanding (or pre-understanding) of, and our involvement (or pre-involvement) with either of these two things – martial arts and Oriental philosophy – and especially in their conjunction – is always and already informed and organised by media representations, historical discourses and filmic fantasies (Krug 2001). 2. Beginning In my case, it was films and the myths and legends they created about ‘what martial artists could do’ that first seized hold of my primary school aged soul in the 1970s, in the immediate aftermath of what cultural historians call ‘the kung fu craze’, which is said to have peaked with Bruce Lee in 1973 (Brown 1997). As such, the fantasy that seized my soul was, of course, deeply Orientalist, deeply celluloid, deeply Hollywood, 3 and in a sense deeply fake. As the caricature of a Chinese Shaolin kung fu martial arts master was wont to say to the ridiculously Orientalised white actor David Carradine in the TV series Kung Fu, ‘Ah, Grasshopper!’ And this is the problem. Or, as numerous scholars have pointed out, there is more than one cultural and ideological problem with programmes like Kung Fu (Ma 2000). Kung Fu itself was the first long running US-made and nominally Chinese martial arts-based television programme (running from 1972 to 1975). There were others which involved this strange ‘new’ thing from the East, this new ancient thing that was mostly called karate or judo, after the Japanese styles that US servicemen had first encountered after the Second World War (Krug 2001). Most notable among the first generation of programmes putatively featuring martial arts and Oriental philosophy was The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (from 1964 to 1968). But Kung Fu was the first mainstream and widely distributed programme to depict supposed Chinese characters practicing supposed Chinese martial arts with dialogue about supposed Oriental philosophy in a supposed Shaolin Temple. And it set in place – or massively introduced into circulation – the very idea of what a Chinese martial arts master and what Chinese philosophy were meant to look like. Many have pointed out that the TV show Kung Fu purported to show Eastern philosophy and Chinese martial arts, but that in actual fact the sentiments espoused in it were rather more West Coast (Californian) countercultural hippy sentiments combined with some wrestling and judo throws (Miller 2000; Preston 2007). (This speaks volumes about the process of cultural translation, I think.) The film scholar Sheng-Mei Ma (2000) also notes that whilst the pilot film of Kung Fu depicted the lead character, Caine, played by the yellowed-up white actor David Carradine, 4 expressing strong emotions and passions and having an active and strenuously pursued quest, subsequent episodes redrew him as calm, passive, pacifist, taciturn, and sedulously resigned to his lacklustre wanderings around America – a redrawing of him as a ‘type’ that ran entirely in accordance with the dominant stereotypes of the unmarried Chinese labourers well known and little respected in America up until the late 1960s.1 The key point that I want to make here is that of the primacy of these Western, Hollywood cinematic representations in erecting a sense – or, indeed, the sense – of what Asian martial arts and its philosophical discourse are meant to be ‘like’. The TV show Kung Fu constructs the main types: First, the ‘ah so’/ ‘ah Grasshopper’ mystic sage, embodying the supposedly timeless unchanging wisdom of the East. (Rey Chow calls this representational convention ‘allochronism’.) Second, the young upstart disciple or student, with a hot temper and a sense of pride. (Both of these characters abound in martial arts and action films, East and West.) And, third, the dialectical synthesis of the two: the mature, stoic, slow to anger but invincible and righteously justified adult master. Of course, the only things that separate these supposedly Oriental types from their Western counterparts is that while Western high plains drifters use revolvers and rifles to wreak vengeance, Eastern high plains drifters use their hands and feet. 3. Difference Given this, the supposed Eastern otherness here may not now seem to be all that different, after all. Yet there was one crucial difference: the difference between guns and feet; the difference between shooting someone, like Clint Eastwood, and kicking 5 someone, like Bruce Lee or Carradine’s character Caine. In psychoanalytic terms, this translation and displacement of the phallic power from the external prosthesis (the gun) into the body itself (the fists and the feet) is crucial. For it is a displacement that arguably makes Bruce Lee or Caine more desirable, more identifiable(-with), than John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. This is because, whilst one may identify with Eastwood’s lethal vengeance with Winchester rifles and .44 Magnums, this identification involves a drastic suspension of disbelief. However, it is infinitely easier to identify with the act of proficiently punching and kicking an antagonist or attacker. It’s easier to want to do that, too – or to remember doing that – or to remember wanting to do that. It is less taboo to punch than to shoot. It is less terminal. It is less serious. But it is an expression of the same wish: to be invincible, indestructible, fearless: to be in control. And the martial arts myth or promise is precisely this: through nothing more than physical discipline, dedication, devotion, and diligent training, you too can become closer to the invincible ideal depicted in these films and programmes. Again, there is much that can be said about all of this. I’ve weighed in on it in a book or two myself.2 Today, let me just reiterate my point that, like many others, my interest and involvement in something bodily (and supposedly Eastern) came directly through filmic mediation or simulation, and my interest in Oriental philosophy stemmed from this. As such, it all started absolutely from Orientalist fantasy, stereotype and reductive representations of a certain type of novel alterity. But combined with something absolutely intimate, and a universally intelligible desire. 6 By ‘Orientalism’ I am of course using Edward Said’s (1978) term for the complex of ways in which Europe and its various discourses have ‘othered’ this or that other country, culture, or people; the ways in which Europeans have constructed an-other as ‘the other’ and represented it or them as entirely other – essentially other. (The Western interest in Oriental martial arts that allegedly peaked in the 1970s – though I would dispute this – it was most noticeable then, because of its newness and novelty, that’s all – can itself be connected to a Western desire for change – for difference – a desire that first arose after and in response to the horrors of the Second World War (Watts 1957) and was confirmed in the countercultural reaction to the Vietnam War (Brown 1997; Preston 2007).) Edward Said tells us that his own starting point in his development of his theory of ‘Orientalism’ was his perception of a disjunction: the representations of the Middle East that he saw in the West did not square with his knowledge and experience of the Middle East itself.3 Ultimately, he came to argue, it is eminently possible to see that Western discourses have overwhelmingly tended to project a lot onto the other culture, to reductively misrepresent it, and to make it conform to prejudicial or fantasy stereotypes. Not all of these stereotypes are simply negative. Orientalism is not simple racism. For, in Orientalist texts, narratives and fantasies, there is always a process of splitting and doubling: so that there will be the Good other and the Bad other, the desirable other and the terrifying other, the intriguing other and the repellent other, and so on. But both forms amount to versions of the same process: the invention of an alterity, through the production of a differential, a division between (and the production or invention of) a ‘them’ and an ‘us’; and the constructing of ‘them’ as other through reductive and simplifying representations. 7 Said finds a remarkable consistency in the types of things that have been projected onto the Eastern Other by European discourses throughout history: The other culture becomes represented as everything that the familiar culture is not: so, representations of the outside of Europe construct that other place and its other people as fascinating and/or terrifying, spiritual and/or animalistic, sensual and/or heartless, mysterious and/or inscrutable, wise and/or naïve, timelessly ancient and/or spontaneously scheming, traditional and/or free, state-of-nature and/or state-of-decadence, and so on. 4. Philosophy Western popular cultural handlings of Oriental martial arts have from the outset been Orientalist in this regard. The Asian martial artist is one or another stock figure who is held to be able to perform the most remarkable of physical feats, and to be able to do this with an amazing calmness, tranquillity and equanimity, and to have been able to achieve this state and execute these feats because of his or her dedication to an embodied performance of a philosophy that demands exquisite physical discipline, or a physical discipline informed by a philosophy (Bowman 2010). The specific philosophy underpinning the discipline is identified with either/or/both Taoism and/or Chan or Zen Buddhism.4 In any case, popular mythology has it that Chinese martial arts arose as such in the Shaolin Temple as a result of the physical training required to master Zen meditation. The legend has it that a monk called Bodhidharma came to China from India and devised a series of exercises to strengthen the bodies and minds of the unfit Buddhist monks so that they could endure the harrowing new discipline of Zen meditation. 8 From this conjunction of disciplines, the monks became physically formidable. And the rest is history… Or rather: legend. Like all legends, it is not to be trusted. It is a great story, but in terms of its relation to the historical dissemination or invention of martial arts, it is not reliable (Kennedy and Guo 2005). In fact, the Shaolin Temple seems to have gained its legendary status first in some quickly debunked spurious Chinese training manuals at the start of the 19th century and then in some Hong Kong and Hollywood films of the 1970s. (It was in the wake of these that China reopened the Shaolin Temple as a martial arts tourist destination in the 1980s.) A second legend – which is even more ideological/nationalistic – arose in response to the Shaolin legend. This is the legend of the soft or internal styles being invented by Taoists associated with Wutan or Wudang Mountain. The narrative has it that the soft internal styles were devised to beat the hard external styles, on the yin-yang or Tai Chi principles of soft overcoming hard and, reciprocally, soft becoming hard.5 Nevertheless, for my purposes, the dubious historical status of the legend(s) is not really relevant. This is because the story – even if entirely false – illustrates something central about the conjunction of martial arts and what we might call philosophy. For, what is most interesting about the myth of Shaolin (and Wudang), or the myth of the origin of Chinese martial arts, is the way the narratives both focus on the embodiment of a philosophy – the way it states that this ‘philosophy’ is realised only in its embodiment. And this is where things become very interesting to us today, because this is where, as it were, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in the sense that certain types of martial arts syllabi (especially the so-called ‘internal’ martial arts styles of China, and especially taijiquan) require martial arts students to relive and rework this type of origin myth in and as their daily practice.6 In other 9 words: the legend of monks learning to meditate by practicing some calisthenics and in the process becoming virtually invincible warriors is not just a dead legend from the past. In various ways it exists and operates in the present.7 5. Embodiment This is not the case for every martial artist, of course; but it is the case for many practitioners of many of the supposedly most mystical or esoteric arts. What I am talking about is illustrated concisely by the contemporary martial artist, Wong Kiew Kit, who, in one of his many books, relays the words spoken to him by his own kung fu instructor when he was a young and impatient student. As a young martial artist all he wanted to do was become a better fighter, as is to be expected. He had no interest in meditation or philosophy. However, said his teacher: if you want to be a great fighter, you must first master qigong. And if you want to master qigong, you must first plumb the depths of Zen meditation (Wong 2001). Another contemporary martial artist, Master Lam Kam Chuen, gives this account: as a young martial arts student, he too was impatient to become a great fighter. At one point, his teacher directed him to stop all martial arts training and to replace it instead by ‘standing like a tree’ for protracted periods of time. ‘Standing like a tree’ is a type of qigong. There are many types of qigong – from gentle stretching and yogalike routines, to intense breathing exercises. The specific type of qigong under discussion here, ‘standing tree’ qigong (zhan zhuang), is one in which, to all intents and purposes, all the practitioner apparently does is stand, like a tree, more or less motionless (knees bent, spine straight but relaxed, arms positioned as if cuddling a large beach ball), for protracted periods of time. The practitioner focuses on posture, 10 relaxation, breath, and the internal movement of ‘qi’. This type – and arguably every type – of qigong is often integrally connected to the martial art of taijiquan. In our own example, what happened to the young Master Lam was that after a few months of training solely in ‘standing tree’ qigong, he returned to sparring and discovered that he was considerably improved, and had improved against people who had not been practicing qigong but had been occupied exclusively with more obviously martial art training (Lam 1991). There are many similar stories to be found. Anecdotally, this is one of the two ways that standing tree qigong was ‘sold’ to me by my own tai chi instructor. First, I was simply instructed to do it, as a necessary part of the syllabus. However, there is only so much standing absolutely still for 20 minutes every day that a person can voluntarily undertake. (In fact, it is unbelievably hard to stand very still, very quiet, for very long. Even a few minutes can become agony – mental and physical torture.) Without holding some very strong belief about its benefits it is very hard to keep oneself motivated. So when my dedication inevitably began to waver, my instructor stated that if I practiced qigong I would become better at push-hands. ‘Push-hands’ is the bread and butter of taijiquan martial arts training. It is not full sparring or fighting (although it can become so), but it is more or less structured partner work in which one learns to practice and embody the principles of taijiquan as a martial art – involving posture, relaxation, sensitivity, sticking, yielding, neutralising, applying techniques and issuing force in accordance with the principles of yin and yang. So I went back to standing tree qigong and I did notice an appreciable improvement in my tai chi all round.8 11 As another anecdote, but also a segue into an important issue, I also once heard a senior practitioner of taijiquan tell someone something to the effect that qigong can either be approached as an exercise or as something more spiritual or mystical, and that, in his experience, people who believe that qigong is spiritual or mystical tend to go further into qigong training than people who regard it simply as a kind of exercise. I mention this here because it refers us back to an important point: the status of belief, or, indeed, as I would prefer, fantasy in sustaining activity.9 6. Phantasy Fantasy is a psychoanalytical term that I have a lot of time for. But if you don’t like psychoanalysis, then by all means translate ‘fantasy’ into ‘belief’ whenever I mention ‘fantasy’. Nevertheless, what I mean by fantasy here comes from Jacques Lacan via 1980s cultural theory, from Kaja Silverman at the start to Slavoj Žižek at the end, and it refers to a kind of basic or fundamental scenario that becomes the matrix or paradigm within which the world and ourselves make sense and function, in our own heads, to ourselves. So this is kind of a belief system, but it is one that we aren’t necessarily aware of, and one that governs the structure of our orientations, interpretations and perspectives. As Slavoj Žižek explains: fantasy is a hallucinatory realization of desire. … [However,] It is not the case that the subject knows in advance what he wants and then, when he cannot get it in reality, proceeds to obtain a hallucinatory satisfaction in reality. Rather, the subject originally doesn’t know what he wants, and it is the role of fantasy to tell him that, to ‘teach’ him to desire. (Žižek 2005: 304) 12 So, our fantasies, through which we imagine how the world works or how we work, can be regarded as fundamental beliefs; beliefs that are so intimate to us that we are not even aware of them. They are like little hermeneutic algorithms, and they are often very simple, very childish. According to psychoanalysis, this is because we formulated them when we were very young indeed. I want to insist upon the fundamental place of belief or fantasy in our orientations. As I said, I suspect that my interest in martial arts came from a desire – a presumably Oedipal desire to have what martial arts seemed to promise. Let’s call it invincibility. This is obviously a very boyish, masculine, macho or patriarchal desire, even if it is articulated with an enigmatic, mystical chic or sheen. It is, so to speak, where patriarchy meets chinoiserie – exactly like in the film The Matrix (1999), when Neo fights Morpheus in a vaguely East Asian looking room after he has had kung fu downloaded and installed into him for the first time. Now, as silly as it may seem, the virtually instant downloading and installation of complete kung fu knowledge and superlative ability that takes place in The Matrix is actually a rather fine representation of the dominant fantasy about martial arts. This is the fantasy of a complete and permanent transformation; the idea that after meeting the martial art you become the martial art, and that it stays with you, within you, as something you can switch on or off at your will for the rest of your life. Of course, this is as preposterous an idea as the suggestion that someone who once trained to run a marathon could at any point for the rest of their life get up one day and run a marathon again. One does not stay the martial artist just because one gained a black belt in one’s twenties. I still sometimes laugh out loud when I think of a student of mine who has more than once told me wryly that he ‘is’ a taekwondo 13 yellow belt, because he attained this grade many years ago. To me this joke works wonderfully on more than one level: first, the idea that ‘being’ a taekwondo yellow belt amounts to ‘being’ anything (yellow belt in taekwondo is a rank that signals a few months’ training, and an ability to execute some very basic moves and clunky drills in a very stilted manner); and second, the idea that one will always ‘be’ (or even ‘hold’) a taekwondo yellow belt, no matter how much time and non-training and nonpayment of dues elapses. Rather than this – rather than being a matter of static or essential Being – martial arts is always a matter of becoming. Like any skill, it is acquired through regular and regularized repetition, reiteration, practicing; regular performance. It is not static, neither a substance nor an essence. 7. Practice Insofar as the ‘Being’ of martial arts boils down not to simple undifferentiated duration but to reiteration (Weber 1987: xii), not to a fixed essence but to the productive effects of structured reiteration; not to an unchanging identity but to performance and performativity; it is not unreasonable to see the appropriateness of Derridean deconstruction in thinking about martial arts; or to use Derrida and – say – Foucault to think about the relationship between martial arts as disciplinary practices – disciplinary technologies – that reciprocally produce both the subject and the object. I have written about the significance of discipline as reiteration in my Bruce Lee book (Bowman 2010). 14 Others have remarked on the philosophical significance and the effects on thought processes and philosophising of the alleged absence of the verb ‘to be’ in Chinese – or at least, the absence of anything like the verb ‘to be’ as it has functioned to structure Western philosophical thought, by organising the very orientation of Western metaphysics in and as the quest to answer questions about the being of the entity. Such questions are said to be significantly absent from East Asian philosophy, and this is often said to be because of this linguistic difference – a difference that people like Heidegger elevated into something of a virtual proof of essential, absolute, uncrossable cultural difference dividing East from West, worldview from worldview, mysticism from philosophy (Heidegger 1971; and see Sandford 2003). Of course, Heidegger is terribly problematic here (Sandford 2003; Bowman 2010). Nevertheless, propelled by the force of the same sort of observation, albeit taking an almost opposite tack: during the highpoint of postmodernism and poststructuralism in the 1980s, some became inclined to draw parallels and equivalences and to claim connections between Oriental philosophy (specifically Taoism) and poststructuralism (specifically deconstruction) because of the apparently shared anti-essentialism of Taoism and deconstruction, and a shared sensitivity to process and différance (Hall 1991). Much Deleuzean thought still dwells in this territory. And this remains very interesting, even if still problematic. In any case, I myself certainly think that when I was studying cultural theory, learning about semiotics and then deconstruction, in particular, my earlier reading of texts about Taoism and Zen did help me to get a handle on it – and perhaps also vice versa. But I don’t think that the two can or should be collapsed, conflated or confused. One reason for this relates to the very real difference between what we could call 15 ‘martial arts as philosophy as embodied practice’ as distinct from (if not in opposition to) what we could call intellectual or logocentric philosophy, 10 or philosophy as thought and as put into words – even words about the limits of words. The difference here is stark: Oriental martial arts philosophy is in a sense overwhelmingly about taking the thinking out of practice; the subtraction of thought itself from practice. To take just one example: The tai chi practice of push hands – not unlike the wing chun practice of sticky hands, or training in aikido, or to a greater or lesser extent practices in other martial arts – but more – which embodies the principles of the interplay of yin and yang – could be said to regard (or show) the introduction of thinking into training (into the physical moment or process itself), as always the introduction of a problem. You can think about the training before and after: you can reflect on your practice. But thinking whilst practicing in a sense divides attention and constitutes a reduction of awareness of the physical interplay of forces. Introducing the mind in this way reduces sensitivity and responsiveness and so introduces resistance. Instead of thought, the art of taijiquan demands the refinement of a very particular sort of intelligence of the body. Comparisons have been made between tai chi push hands and tango. But this is what is trained in pushhands. Thinking as such often inhibits this intelligence to the extent that it amounts to a stepping out of the immediacy and intimacy of an ongoing physical encounter in the attempt to impose an idea or a plan onto something that should flow according to an unfolding process based on the interaction of differential and differentiating forces. In other words, tai chi martial training in a sense boils down to removing the mind – or, as they say, the ‘ego’ – from one’s repertoire of reactions. 16 This training is that of unlearning ‘egotistical’ reactions. In very crude terms, these ‘egotistical’ reactions are what untrained people (or, should I say, men?) do, and they include the following: if pushed, they push back; if pulled, they pull away. Conversely: when pulling, if the other person pulls away, they pull harder. And so on. What tai chi training tries to inculcate, on the other hand, is essentially the opposite of this: if one is pushed, one yields to the force, allows the push to push – ideally even ‘helps’ it with a little pull in the direction that the push is pushing; or, if, whilst pulling, the other person pulls back, then the pull is abandoned and transformed into a push that no longer resists but actually complements – and subverts – the other’s pull. This is the idea of taking the other’s force and intention and direction and allowing it to run its course and subvert itself. At the end of this – after the neutralisation, disruption, breaking of the posture or balance or control of the other – there will be a technique: hit, throw, lock, punch: whatever. But the point is to seek to achieve the physical embodiment of what is referred to as the interplay of yin and yang, as illustrated by the famous symbol of the yin-yang, or what is actually in Chinese called the Tai Chi. There are many possible analogies and images that are conventionally used to illustrate this interplay of yin and yang. The first is that of bicycle peddles. To peddle a bike, one foot presses as the other releases; and this just has to happen, and that’s that: if you try to do anything differently, like push the left and the right at the same time, you get stalemate, get snarled up, and get nowhere. Another analogy is the two man saw, used for felling large trees: to use the two man saw effectively, one person must yield or push as the other issues force or pulls – precisely in time and precisely in tune, or coordinated. Both parties must be sensitive and in tune with the other, so that issuing and releasing, pushing and yielding, are entirely smooth and flowing. Another image might be swimming, or treading water: the movements, forces, 17 rhythms and beats must be just enough to respond to the forces exerted by the water: too much and you will sink; too little and you will sink. There are other images – and water features highly in many of them. 8. Water The great populariser of Oriental martial arts, Bruce Lee, was immensely fond of the water imagery: ‘Be like water’, Bruce Lee urged. Why? Because water flows around obstacles – it does not get stuck on them or try to cling to them. You can’t grab it and it doesn’t try to grab you; but it can repel you or suck you under. Water can crash and water can and will exploit any crack or crevice. The harder you hit it, the more you get hurt. And so on and so on and so on.11 I come back to Bruce Lee here deliberately: because although Bruce Lee can very easily be overlooked or ridiculed or not taken seriously, it is precisely through the enormously influential effects of popular cultural texts like Bruce Lee films that the West came to have its initial and perhaps even current consciousness or conceptions of martial arts and Oriental philosophy. That such texts are widely regarded as inferior translations or ersatz imitations or even false simulations is not my concern here today – but I would defend (and have defended, and will continue to defend) the importance and productivity of popular cultural translations of martial arts and philosophy, and many other things, no matter how ‘constructed’ (Bowman 2010a). But my time is nearly up. Some of you may still be confusedly waiting for me to get to the subject of martial arts and Oriental philosophy, and may feel disappointed or cheated that I have insisted on couching almost everything in caveats and 18 considerations of media, history, film, discourse and ideology. But I have done so in order to avoid the twin pitfalls of Orientalism and essentialism: of presenting Oriental martial arts and Oriental philosophy as if they are unchanging timeless innocent entities, transcendent of history or context. For they are not. Not at all. We may like or want to think of taijiquan and Taoism as ancient and venerable essences of Chinese culture and philosophy. Fine. They do have ancient – albeit discontinuous – histories. But, as the translations and studies of the texts and histories of taijiquan by academics such as Douglas Wile (1996) have demonstrated: taijiquan as such, and particularly in its theoretical and philosophical association with Taoism, was developed in the 19th Century by middle class Chinese intellectuals in a period of great turbulence in China – specifically, when China was militarily, economically, culturally and ideologically under threat and attack from foreign – European, Russian and Japanese – powers. As such, Wile argues, the construction and elaboration of a Taoist taijiquan as something essentially Chinese – by the Chinese, for the Chinese – must be regarded as an ideological response to the massive challenges posed to China by the West and other imperial forces.12 By the same token, many Westerners entertain an image of China which involves large groups of people performing tai chi forms under the trees in misty parks in Beijing or Guilin. This sort of scene is thought of as timeless and ancient. However, this image does not come unchanged from the mists of an ancient and timeless history. It is, rather, familiar to us because Chairman Mao approved of tai chi and promoted it – because (a) it was non-Western and (b) it was communal.13 By the time of its arrival in the West, tai chi, packaged as the most philosophical or mystical of martial arts, still functioned ideologically, but in translation: the nationalist function 19 it had in China became a countercultural function in the West. It became tied up with chinoiserie and Orientalist fantasy. Equally, it was ‘feminized’ in many representations. So, I would suggest that martial arts and ‘Eastern’ or ‘Oriental’ philosophy are never free from other ideologies, and to treat them (supposedly ‘directly’) without bearing all of this in mind is to mistreat them. I have tried to treat them not as if they transcend context, because I think that to do this is to usher in all sorts of theoretical, methodological, philosophical and ideological problems. Instead, I have tried to show, here and elsewhere, that these things are always ensnared within and by larger cultural and ideological discourses. But at the same time as this, I want to insist that this does not mean that they are somehow fake or false or bad. When I practice push-hands, I do believe I am exploring or trying to learn to apply the philosophy or principles of Taoism, which I believe do have verifiable applicability and legitimacy within martial arts and maybe even elsewhere. And, in any case, I have also come to believe that, no matter how Orientalist one’s first encounter or pre-encounter with Oriental martial arts and Oriental philosophy, this does not close down the possibility that this might be an opening to an intercultural encounter, or to a material or perceptual transformation, in many possible registers. Indeed, for a number of reasons (most of them deliberately provocative), and despite all that I have said here against Orientalism, I fully intend in due course to make the case that the Orientalism of martial arts may even be regarded as ultimately a good thing. In fact, this is the title of a paper I am writing for a conference in the summer: 20 ‘when Orientalism is a good thing’. In it, I am going to propose that one way to make non-judgemental sense of martial arts (and other cultural practices) – practices that can so easily be written off as either ideological or immature or Orientalist or steeped in mystical mumbo jumbo – is to approach them in terms of a thinking not just of fantasy and desire, but actually of love.14 And, philosophically or otherwise, what I myself ‘do’ most with martial arts – more than anything else – is love them. References Bowman, Paul (2010), Theorizing Bruce Lee: Film-Fantasy-Fighting-Philosophy, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 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Heidegger, Martin (1971), ‘A Dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer’, On The Way To Language, New York: Harper Collins. Kennedy, Brian and Guo, Elizabeth (2005), Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey, Berkeley, Ca.: North Atlantic Books. Krug, Gary J. (2001), ‘At the Feet of the Master: Three Stages in the Appropriation of Okinawan Karate Into Anglo-American Culture’, Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies, Volume 1 Number 4, 2001 395-410, Sage Publications, 395-410. Kung Fu (1972-75) Ed Spielman, Jerry Thorpe, Herman Miller. Lam, Kam Chuen (1991), The Way of Energy: Mastering the Chinese Art of Internal Strength with Chi Kung Exercise, Gaia. Ma, Sheng-Mei (2000), The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Miller, Davis (2000), The Tao of Bruce Lee, Vintage: London. 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Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, London and New York: Continuum. Notes 1 These stereotypes started to change in the wake of changes to immigration law and specifically the allowing of immigrant Chinese workers to bring wives and families to the US (Prashad 2001), and also of course in the wake of Bruce Lee’s rewriting of the Chinese as what Rey Chow has termed (in another context, and making a different point) ‘the protestant ethnic’ (Chow 2002). 2 I have reflected on this at length in Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), and also in Beyond Bruce Lee (forthcoming). 3 A good discussion of this by Said himself can be found in the film called ‘On Orientalism’, which can be found on YouTube and other locations. The YouTube clip is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwCOSkXR_Cw 4 As an aside: the martial arts of nations, cultures, ethnicities or traditions other than China and Japan have rarely if ever been placed on such a pedestal or accorded such dubious prestige as those of China and Japan. Of course, such prestige is arguably often of the sort that Said might remind us remains Orientalist – just as giving women ‘prestige’ by placing them on a pedestal and venerating them remains sexist or misogynist. But anyway: consider the fact that the ancient martial arts of India and Kerala, or those of Africa or New Zealand, to mention just a few possible examples – have not been fetishized in the West in anything like the same manner as the martial arts of China and Japan. The martial arts of India, Africa, the Americas, Australia, etc., have certainly never been widely depicted as ‘the ultimate’. China’s and Japan’s have often been depicted as ‘the ultimate’. Why is this? Perhaps because, unlike China and Japan, these other cultures themselves have never been depicted, in Western discourses, as the ‘ultimate’ others of the West. And perhaps this is because, again unlike China and Japan, these other cultures were fairly comprehensively colonised and hence subject to a colonial discourse of inferiority – involving constructing them as inferior in order to justify their colonisation and exploitation – in ways that China and Japan were not… Perhaps; or perhaps not: This is just a conjecture, for now. 5 I suggest that this myth is nationalistic because the narrative is exclusively Chinese: there is no external influence, no monk from India; thus this is a myth about something internal to China arising autochthonously. 6 Moreover, this is also the time and place, or scenario, in which something that could be called ideological phantasy works to sustain and nourish this activity itself and also thereby enable a transformation of the body. 23 7 In many ways the connection between a kind of philosophy or religion or ontology or psychological disposition and martial arts training does not reside solely in the past. With martial arts it is not just the case that once upon a time this martial art was connected to a kind of philosophy or religion. (This kind of discourse does exist, and martial artists will often pontificate about the superior martial artists of the past who were superior precisely because they dedicated their lives to Taoism and Zen, and so on.) But it is not simply the case that the words of a philosophy may or may not inform or surround the practice of a martial art. It is also the case that the ‘philosophico-mystical’ infuses many martial disciplines in pragmatic and ongoing ways. 8 And I do still do it, but now mainly because I injured my ankle very seriously a few years ago, and find that this particular activity warms my ankle and whole body up extremely well for any subsequent exercise. I can no nd longer jump around to warm up; and standing absolutely still seems to be not even a 2 best but actually a better warm up. 9 Fantasies are both social and psychic, frustrating the possibility of a simple or sharp distinction between objective and subjective, and indeed between the inside and the outside of the subject. Fantasies supplement the subject: they are an element from outside that is also at the heart of the inside (Derrida, 1981; 1998). According to Butler, fantasies are dynamically linked with what she calls ‘social norms’, values and practices that ‘are variously lived as psychic reality’ (2000: 154). Crucial here is the word ‘variously’. For, identity is always performative: one is not born a subject, one becomes one, and there is no essential ‘being’ behind this doing, effecting, and becoming. In Butler’s words: ‘Norms are not only embodied *…+, but embodiment is itself a mode of interpretation, not always conscious, which subjects normativity itself to an iterable temporality’ (Butler, 2000: 152). Reciprocally, therefore: ‘Norms are not static entities, but [are] incorporated and interpreted features of existence that are sustained by the idealizations furnished by fantasy’ (152). 10 I will include deconstruction in this, even if deconstruction explores the limits and margins of logocentricity. 11 Bruce Lee also gives a great speech in a once-deleted scene from Enter the Dragon – the film which perhaps more than any other put both the notion and the model (the paradigm) of kung fu and Oriental philosophy on the global popular cultural map. Lee is addressed by his teacher: Teacher: Hmm. I see your talents have gone beyond the mere physical level. Your skills are now at the point of spiritual insight. I have several questions. What is the highest technique you hope to achieve? Lee: To have no technique. Teacher: Very good. What are your thoughts when facing an opponent? Lee: There is no opponent. Teacher: And why is that? Lee: Because the word ‘I’ does not exist. Teacher: So. Continue. Lee: A good fight should be like a small play, but played seriously. A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready. Not thinking, yet not dreaming: ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I contract; when he contracts, I expand; and when there is an opportunity, I do not hit: [he raises his fist, but does not look at it] it hits all by itself. 24 12 If we simply think of these things through the optics provided by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, or the recent remake of The Karate Kid, then we are guilty of the essentialist Orientalism that I tried to problematize earlier. 13 Of course, Maoism cracked down on the solitary and immanently religious practices of qigong – and the cult of Falun Gong is still undergoing repression in China. 14 For this I will be reading martial arts through the paradigm offered by Rey Chow in her 1998 reading of M. Butterfly (Chow 1998).