I often cite McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others on the progression from oral culture to written culture to print culture (see Media, Senses, Space-Time — A Preliminary Exploration of McLuhan’s Media Ontology), but they are basically talking within the context of Western languages. The development of writing there is basically a process of “pure oral speech — ideographic writing — consonantal alphabetic writing — vocalized alphabetic writing (from Greek onward) — alphabetic writing printed with movable type.” Certain Eastern scripts can also be fitted into this genealogy and understood in that way: for example, Arabic and Sanskrit are consonantal alphabetic scripts, and thus preserve context more strongly.
However, Chinese writing has always been an exception: it cannot be subsumed under the general Western trajectory of writing. In a certain sense, it has always remained ideographic, the primordial stage of written culture immediately following pure oral speech. But at the same time, Chinese characters are highly developed. Compared with any other language, Chinese characters carry the greatest amount of cultural content that oral speech cannot carry. Are we still supposed to place them at the point closest to pure oral culture? That is obviously absurd. Moreover, highly developed Chinese characters have also been moving toward the age of printing in their own way. Although movable type printing never became popular, the number of books printed by Chinese block printing still led the world until the nineteenth century. The diffusion and popularization of printed books was by no means inferior to the impact produced in Europe when movable type printing first emerged. But can the cultural dimension opened up by Chinese characters, as well as the cultural influence produced by printing in China, be explained by the models of Western media theorists?
Clearly, McLuhan and others have opened up for us a distinctive perspective and line of thought for examining the cultural impact and significance of new media. Yet their conclusions cannot be directly applied to the analysis of Chinese characters and Chinese printed books.
In any case, the emergence of writing is after all sharply distinct from oral culture. Speech is fluid and immediate. In a purely oral culture, it is difficult for an abstract conceptual space to take shape. That is to say, when people think and discuss, they cannot retrieve an independent “concept” from some conceptual world. People are always calling forth words in some concrete, actual context: either directly pointing to an object before their eyes, or referring to something past or future in some life situation. In short, what words refer to is always within the spatiotemporal situation in which we live. Or, to put it more precisely, there is simply no such dichotomy as “words” and “objects referred to.” Perhaps oral peoples long ago learned to use certain things to refer to other things—for instance, using the number of stones to indicate the number of cattle and sheep—but “concepts” have by no means yet become something graspable that lies there before us like stones. “Naming” is like a spell full of mysterious power: it summons things, but it still does not yet have the later sense of merely assigning a label.
The emergence of writing opened up an abstract conceptual space. Because writing exists, when people encounter a certain word, they need not be in some context linked to the thing to which the word refers; instead, they may be in a context detached from the world, solitary and quiet. For example, the context in which I see the character “饭” may be completely different from the context in which anyone in an oral culture might hear the word “饭” — it is neither pointing to the bowl of rice in front of them, nor recalling some meal they ate earlier, nor anticipating some meal they will eat in the future, nor even necessarily the rice eaten by some Zhang San or Li Si next door. When I see the character “饭,” the object that this word calls up does not exist within my world of existence; within the temporal and spatial range in which I live, it has no place. And yet this word still refers to something, so the meaning of words seems to be able to detach itself from this real world of life and enter an independent and cold conceptual space. In this conceptual space, words begin to establish more complex relations among themselves. These relations are often rooted in the relations of indication and handling in real life, but they can transcend them and be reorganized and rearranged anew.
Consonantal alphabetic writing is closer to ideographic writing, in that you cannot easily identify a single word in isolation; rather, you always have to reconstruct the whole context within the entire paragraph and infer the meaning of each word. Alphabetic writing with vowels, by contrast, is no longer so strongly dependent on context: words can be regarded as self-sufficient. The structure of the text has greater independence, so much so that writing changes from a representation of speech into a relatively independent medium of expression. Reading aloud is gradually replaced by silent reading; people no longer need to reduce writing back to speech in order to understand it, and the activity of reading aloud even gradually becomes an obstacle to reading rather than a necessary step.
This prominent independent status attained by writing, whether Western alphabets or Chinese characters, had obviously already been achieved long ago. The question is what characteristics the conceptual space, or world of meaning, opened up after this independence was established actually has. The reestablishment of textual order will in turn affect how we perceive the order of the world. In McLuhan and others’ view, what Western alphabetic culture established was an Euclidean spatial structure, a linear and logical order of things. “Linear” does not mean a flowing straight line; that is a feature of speech. The world of speech is like a surging river, now clear and now muddy, with everything mingled together, carrying one another along as it bursts downstream. Things are always flowing, unable to be grasped and imprinted, yet the whole world is still stable and unchanging, and a unilateral sense of time has not yet clearly formed. This is because only when one steps outside the river and watches coldly and at a distance does one take the river of time to be a linear number line; whereas when people, together with all things, are carried along in the flow, this “flow” merely means a state of being ungraspable and lacking clear contours, not linear progress. Alphabetic culture begins to have a clear sense of time, but precisely because people have stood upon some static platform.
Alphabetic writing established “an analytical, meticulous relation of principal and subordinate”; “and” turned into “when,” “then,” “thus,” “while,” and so on. This clear nested structure and meticulous logical relation are characteristic of Western alphabetic writing. But what of the features of Chinese square characters? Chinese writing never formed clause structures full of layered organization and nested relations. But merely saying that Chinese characters are always contextualized is obviously not enough either. Speech is also contextualized, but the contexts shaped by Chinese characters are not simply reproductions of concrete situations in the world of life. Chinese characters had long since opened up a relatively independent conceptual space and long since provided a world of meaning far beyond what speech can bear. In the conceptual space of Chinese characters, the order of things and the structure of the world are also being reconstructed. And this new structure is obviously not organized mainly through Western methods such as subordination, nesting, juxtaposition, and sequential continuation. Chinese characters place greater emphasis on methods such as extension, analogy, resonance, and contrast to organize conceptual space. Take, for example, a bagua diagram: the Chinese place all kinds of concepts in different directions, with “Qian” in the northwest, “Xun” in the southeast, “Zhen” in the due east; concepts such as heaven, father, metal, and the head are placed together with Qian, while thunder, eldest son, wood, and the feet are placed together with “Zhen”… Later fengshui and geomancy even more typically attempted to organize countless concepts according to some spatiotemporal order and to establish a direct connection between the structure of concepts and the arrangement of actual things. Such a reconstruction of the order of conceptual space, like Western logic and bibliography, is a product of writing. If the West had no alphabetic writing and no printing, it would not have developed such logic and taxonomy; and if China had no Chinese characters and the emergence of certain written media, then perhaps there would likewise have been no theories of the five phases and the bagua, nor fengshui studies. And these disciplines, needless to say, all concern the worldview and patterns of thought of that culture.
The West also has a tradition of placing one group alongside another for contrast, but the Western method is closer to listing: whether Pythagoras’s odd and even numbers, or the four elements and four humors, and so on, they can more clearly be presented in list form. But the Chinese way of dividing concepts has its own characteristics—it is often a kind of disc-like, circulating, and connecting structure, and the order of concepts is always closely tied to “orientation.” Aristotle’s four elements also have directional qualities, but only along a single dimension of high and low; Chinese concepts, by contrast, are always unfolding across the four directions and the six harmonies, and are always closely linked to the directions and positions of the living environment in the world of life. This tendency is obviously closely bound up with the characteristics of Chinese characters (just imagine a geomantic compass covered with alphabetic writing?), and how profound this connection really is is a question worth exploring.
2011年5月14日
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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