Interview on Theorizing Bruce Lee and JKD more

A Discussion of (Theorizing) Bruce Lee & JKD Paul Bowman, interviewed by Teri Tom [www.teritom.com] 1. How did you come to study Bruce Lee from an academic standpoint? I always believed Bruce Lee was important in ways that exceeded martial arts. I am a cultural studies academic, which means that I am fairly interdisciplinary from the outset – as culture involves history, geography, film, literature, language, the body, fashion, and so much more. I kept suspecting that Bruce Lee was important, especially when it came to thinking about postmodern culture and postcolonialism: East meets West in Bruce Lee in a very explosive manner. 2. You said that there’s an academic stigma attached to studying Bruce Lee. Why do you thank that is? I think that a lot of complex cultural antagonisms and energies peaked and dissipated in the kung fu craze of the 1970s. You know, it’s like the kung fu craze was the aspect of multicultural or even postnational and certainly interethnic bonding and transformation that was taking place in the US in the early 70s. But, as is so often the way with the move to the mainstream, it all became a silly joke: think of the way the interethnic appeal of kung fu among black communities became mainstreamed and sent up in the cartoon ‘Hong Kong Phooey’ – the guy is a buffoon, a fantasist, and moreover, he is a dog, in a menial job, with a black actor providing the voice. What does that tell you about what people have come to think about kung fu? … The ironic thing is that the way everyone got to know about kung fu is through Bruce Lee. Even kids in primary school in the UK still make Bruce Lee catcalls in the playground. And yet no one actually knows that what they know about is down to Bruce Lee. This seems closely connected to the reduction of an entire culture to a stereotype – and moreover a fairly childish one (solving problems through fisticuffs). This is a classic tendency of what Edward Said called ‘orientalism’: the simultaneous championing or celebrating of an ‘other’ culture (like, ‘wow, these Chinese are amazing with their kung fu!’) and their consequent belittling through the very act of apparently celebrating (like, ‘all Chinese are kung fuers, aka, only able to communicate through childish physical actions, rather than mature discourse’). That kind of thing. It runs deep. 3. You cite Tierney’s paper on Kill Bill, Bulletproof Monk, and The Last Samurai. Indeed, I have a very hard time with martial arts movies made here because the “Asian practitioner” is always killed/defeated. You question Tierney’s shift towards blaming this on the audience. What do you think would need to change for Asian protagonists to gain acceptance? I think Tierney is right, and I also think that you are right to agree with the problematic character of the reiterated narrative of the Western appropriation of Asian arts in Western cinema. Tierney calls it orientalist and essentially racist. And it may well be. And, yes, I wonder how much has changed since Bruce Lee’s day. The racial problems dramatized in the 1993 film about Bruce Lee, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story depict Bruce breaking through Hollywood racism thanks to his success in Hong Kong and Hollywood realizing that he really was a valid and viable ‘product’ who might find a big audience in the US. But since then who has emulated this? HK actors have been used in US film. But in a very limited way. Remember: even in Enter the Dragon, the lead role is split three ways, just to make sure that no key demographic is alienated: so we have the white ‘Bond’ character, the black ghetto karate dude and Bruce Lee playing, basically, a spy for the British, and an ‘inscrutable Chinese’, with no discernable character traits or personality… I understand that this was the least popular of all of his films in HK, and that the HK audience really protested vociferously at the terrible character he was playing. In all other films Lee played a mainland country boy. For the Hollywood film, he played a stereotype, moreover a stereotype in the service of the Westerners. Deeply problematic… And what do I think would have to change? Well, I think that you may need to look outside the genre of HK or US action films to find substantial ethical or political changes in the way groups are represented! Perhaps looking for Hollywood action films to become more ethnically or ethically sensitive is (to borrow a witticism from Slavoj Žižek) like insisting on looking for your lost keys under the light of the street-light: You can’t find them, of course, but you can’t look anywhere else because you need the light to see them… But maybe we do need to look somewhere else. Hollywood will always disappoint – and as long as we know this, it will never disappoint! 4. As recently as 2001, Jet Li was in Romeo Must Die, in which the original kissing scene was nixed because the studio didn’t think an audience could handle the depiction of an Asian man romantically involved with a white woman. Apparently not much has changed since the 1960s! Bruce Lee never had a romantic scene either. Do you think things would be different now, though, had he lived? Again, yes, Hollywood racism is entrenched. Hollywood is conservative and reactionary. … Bruce Lee did have some implied sex scenes. I understand that these were largely censored (a colleague of mine is working on a definitive history of the censorship histories of Lee’s films: it’s fascinating – they were cut and recut that there are essentially different films at different times). But what is interesting is that in the early days people (even Chinese commentators) suggested that Lee was apparently gay – or certainly not interested in women. Yet, in Italy he goes with a white prostitute. In his first HK film he goes with a Thai prostitute. In a different version of this film he evidently returns to the same brothel but to a different girl the night before he goes to the big boss’s house – apparently in that warrior tradition of living life to the full in the knowledge that one is about to die. But this has all been lost or forgotten in the reduction of the films to the fighting. … Whether Lee would have gone on to make great films – films with different ranges of acting and so on, I have no idea. I am heartened to see Jacky Chan be allowed to act rather than just perform in the remake of The Karate Kid. For all else that can be said about that film, Chan is definitely the star – in a really great and heartening way. 5. You briefly mention some of the more “esoteric philosophy” and mystical aspects of the martial arts as being “long removed from the arts” since their migration to the west. Do you think if Bruce Lee had lived, he would have explored these arts as he got older? Do you think those mystical aspects will experience a resurgence in interest as more Eastern medicine is incorporated into Western medicine? Or do you think Western medicine will appropriate only certain things as the West has similarly done with the martial arts? I think it is quite clear that the Western belief in mystical arts of the East predates the Western encounter with martial arts. An orientalist belief in the ‘mysticism of the East’ prepared the ground for the manner of the Asian martial arts’ reception and adoption in the West. So people got into these arts in the hope of becoming a ninja or as amazing as a (fantasy of a) Shaolin Monk. But, at the same time, Westerners largely met judo and karate, and had a knowledge of things like boxing and wrestling, so these were the two options of understanding martial arts: either mystically or sportingly. I think that the mysticism has now congregated around things like tai chi [taijiquan], while the overwhelming tendency in other forms has been to move toward the full-contact or MMA mat. … Now, I don’t know for sure, but I tend to suspect that Lee would have tended toward the MMA world; but I feel sure that he would never have abandoned the meditational dimension. I think he was too shrewd to burn his bridges or to put all of his eggs in one basket. I know it is well documented (by Dan Inosanto, for instance) that he would put aside time to meditate, and I think that this signals something important. But I don’t know whether he would have done what many martial artists do and move toward the internal arts as he got older. Who knows? When you don’t want to kick as much you tend to want to use chin-na and leverage more. I know I do! 6. What’s your personal opinion on the removal of the more lethal aspects of the martial arts being removed in the name of sport? My first love was shotokan and then taekwondo. In the former, we were promised secret lethal knowledge when we got to black belt. I didn’t get there. In the latter we were assured that all the lethal moves had been taken out in the name of sport. Saying that though, one of the most senior martial artists I met in that realm had actually killed someone – with a jab. The unfortunate guy had been provoking the martial artist somewhat, so this trained fighter gave him a little jab to rattle and deter him, but the man fell, banged his head on the ground, and that was that for him. So I don’t think that lethal moves have been removed. A jab can kill. … I think that sport is great. But I don’t think there’s a lack of lethal martial arts around. Anyone can study systema or ninjitsu or choy lee fut or anything, and these all have lethal techniques. A groin punch or a head kick or a strangle hold or a vicious throw are all lethal moves. You don’t need to study ‘dim mak’ to be lethal. But, if you do want to do that, you can: there are books and DVDs galore now. But, yes, I tend to side with Bruce Lee: we all have two hands and two feet! 7. How do you think Bruce Lee would have felt about today’s MMA? I suspect he would have discussed it with an air of aloofness! Lee’s lack of interest in getting into any sporting ring is well known. … But I think he would have studied it, scrutinized it, critiqued it, and mastered it conceptually if not in practice himself. 8. The JKD Concepts crowd would rather call JKD anything they want it to be, but then why even bother giving it a name? Does the name become that much more important in the wake of Bruce Lee’s death in order to preserve his work? Do you think the death of a martial arts founder tends to solidify the institutionalization of an art? Inosanto reports that in the early days he and Lee would use the acronym ‘JKD’ to mean ‘great’, ‘cool’, ‘excellent’ – as in ‘Is such-and-such JKD?’, ‘Yeah, it’s JKD!’ etc. So, from the outset, JKD was a term that was used pretty loosely. And I think that this is fine. But I think that Lee regretted naming what came to be called a style, for the reasons that he lays out in ‘Liberate Yourself’ and elsewhere. But I also think that Lee was influential over his students, and that they wanted to emulate him. So, as the man said, ‘these styles become institutes…’ The narrative Lee lays out in ‘Liberate Yourself’ applies also to what happened to his insights: genius insights become institutionalized as dogma and are religiously imitated, and so on. But at the same time, I think it is implicit that from Lee’s perspective, ultimately, the process of liberation is always possible, no matter how disciplinarily hidebound anyone or anything becomes. Liberation has to be liberation from something, so you are always indebted to that. However, in discussing this with Joseph Svinth and Thomas Green, they proposed to me that Lee’s relation to JKD was that of a scholar’s relation to a ‘research programme’: thus, for Lee, there are a set of questions to be explored according to a set of concerns, hypotheses, orientations, preferences, and so on. As I argue in my book, Lee was indebted to certain styles but tried to experiment. He was hard on advocates of styles as such, of course; which is why a lot of people are hard on those who follow and teach ‘merely’ what Bruce Lee did and taught. I used to feel the same way. But now, in my older age, I am actually becoming more of a stickler for styles than for anything else: if my instructor throws in a wing chun move or principle (say, raising the elbow higher than the wrist and shoulder when performing a block) when we are meant to be training in tai chi or choy lee fut, I act all outraged (although I am obviously joking when I do this). But nevertheless, if you haven’t got a discipline, you can’t be interdisciplined or antidisciplined. I do not simply believe Bruce Lee’s rhetoric about ‘natural style’ and ‘balance’ and all the rest of it. I think that his rhetoric was very of the zeitgeist in the late 60s and early 70s. Yet I think the point is that you unlearn something that you never knew you had and then become cramped and stilted with form until you finally grow into the style in a way that your techniques and you become natural again. Lee is right about this. 9. Some would argue that the Western appropriation of the martial arts is how we make progress. Do you see any upside to appropriation? And with all the institutionalizing of all martial arts, is there any way to really preserve the original teachings? I am always skeptical about ‘progress’, as much as I am about ‘origins’ (if ‘origins’ are meant to be ‘pure’). I tend to think that things undergo revolutions and completely transform and warp into something else. I think there are lethal fighters and competitors and hard people all the time. I think that some arts become ‘spectacles’, some people go in the opposite direction, some people make whatever it is they do into a ‘philosophical’ activity, some into a sport, some into a way to beat people up or defend themselves, and so on. Fighting is always like what we in the UK call ‘scissors, paper, stone’ or ‘rock, paper, scissors’: everything trumps something but can always be trumped by something else. Call this five elements, as they do in Xing-I if you like. But I think that all teachings are originally institutional: the teacher-student relationship is institutional in its very origin. Reciprocally, even in the most institutional of situations, creativity and insight and mutation can arise easily. You have to remember that the word ‘original’ is irreducibly ambivalent: it means the oldest and most venerable and also the newest and most novel. 10. The UNESCO survey ran into the same problem that the JKD Nucleus ran into two decades ago. They couldn’t define JKD, and on an even larger scale the UNESCO survey couldn’t define “martial arts.” You cite the inability of the martial arts to extricate themselves from myth as one of the reasons. So are we forever doomed to run in circles when it comes to classifying them? And yet, as you state, the question always will always remain, “What’s your style?” With that argument I wanted to draw attention to the fact that the way we define things is institutional. There is no simple, unmediated, un-institutional access to the truth. I class my practice of tai chi as a martial art, where many others simply would not. We operate according to different paradigms. These are all equally enabling and restricting, generative and limiting. Definitions are as much ‘decisions’ as they are statements of truth. Definitions do not simply ‘reveal’ pre-existing truths; they arguably construct situations. Classifications and reclassifications should be regarded as inevitable, necessary and helpful, but not as things that are immutable or necessarily universally correct. The problem with the UNESCO study that I mention in my book was that it was meant to be a co-authored work, researched and written by multiple scholars; but it was a complete non-starter because they all disagreed with each other about what they were even talking about when they said ‘martial arts’! I find this extremely amusing and extremely thought-provoking. It goes to show that ‘definitions’ are constructions rather than essences. 11. It seems to me the inherent problem with the martial arts is that you must remove their lethal aspects in order to practice them—for obvious reasons! Even with a UFC match, which is still a sport, we can’t really determine who is the better fighter in the true sense of the word. Is there any way, then, to judge just how good Bruce Lee was? Bruce Lee followed Nietzsche – whether wittingly or unwittingly: there is no fighter behind the fight, no actor behind the action. This means that when two hardened fighters confront each other, the loser will always know what went wrong to have made him or her lose. This does not mean s/he is a ‘worse’ fighter. It means the fight went one way. It’s all performative and, indeed, undecidable. There is no objective measure, no yardstick residing somewhere outside of the fight. So, no, I don’t think there is any way to judge ‘how good’ someone was. It would come down to which punch landed first, which kick landed first. … This is not to say that some things cannot be predicted: a trained martial artist or fighter will be able to beat an untrained person, unless they do something really stupid. … A fight I saw when I was at school has really remained with me: the tall, athletic, mesomorph looked to be winning the fight; but then he moved backwards and tripped over an inch-high difference in ground level between the concrete and the field, and the other guy raced forward and pounded him. Who was the better fighter? To my mind the guy who was comprehensively beaten. But there you go. 12. I love that you equate Samurai martial theory with Derrida’s Gift of Death (one of my favorite books). Are there any Western academic works that do so as well? Or any Asian studies, for that matter? It seems like such an obvious comparison since as you state, both explore issues of “death, desire, responsibility, discipline, mortality and purpose.” And if there hasn’t been any academic study drawing parallels between the two, why do you think that is? There are some really great works coming out and in the pipeline which are creative in their approaches to martial arts, philosophy and even deconstruction. The connection I made using Derrida and the Hagakure was based on the fact that these are philosophies which confront the certainty of death. We all have to confront this certainty. How many ways are there to do this? 13. It’s refreshing to hear you question the “hyperbole” as you call it, bestowed on Bruce Lee, in both the philosophic and martial arts arenas. And yet you do so respectfully. That’s a fine line to toe. How has the response been to your taking Bruce off the pedestal and looking at him more objectively? You know, I thought that I would publish this book and it would sink without a trace. I really did. Yet it’s elicited the most response I’ve ever had to anything I’ve ever written. If I’d been able to predict this in advance, I would have taken much greater care over it! I would certainly have worried more and perhaps modified some of my treatment of some people – I think I was very critical of some writers, when what I could have and should have done at the same time was point out that I was only bothering to critique them in the first place because I thought their work was so suggestive and thought-provoking. But that being said, I have to say that the response has been great. I have been contacted by people from all over the world – yourself included – and this is wonderful. Academics, students and martial artists alike all seem to welcome the book in various ways. I have had Chinese professors asking to come to visit me in the UK and I am getting completely unexpected invitations to talk at all sorts of places. … Yes, I critique the hyperbole of Bruce Lee worshipers; but, if you think about it, my treatment of Bruce Lee is also hyperbolic. One critic recently called it intellectual masturbation – you know, totally over the top attention. But even that critic said that what he meant by that was something affectionate in itself – i.e., not leveled as a term of denigration or abuse. And I think that this is in one sense what it is: excessive. But, I’m with Derrida on this one: what is too much and what is not enough and what is just right? And who decides? And on what grounds? And signifying what? For whom? – As you know, this book is not a book of ‘fandom’. It is a book which seeks to take seriously an immeasurably influential and still highly controversial cultural figure, a figure who, it must be remembered, was multicultural, interethnic, multilingual, postmodern, postcolonial, deconstructive, and immensely – immensely – wonderful, captivating and endlessly enthralling to watch and to try to emulate. Paul Bowman, interviewed by Teri Tom www.teritom.com