The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series,
under the Cornell East Asia Program. The arguments and viewpoints of this talk belong solely to the speaker.
We hope you enjoy.
So welcome to today's event of the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative. My name is Arnika Fuhrman,
I'm in the departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell,
and I am hosting the initiative's lecture series under the theme of the City Asia this semester.
I would like to thank the East Asia Program that houses the initiative, and especially Amala Lane for organizing this series.
I would also like to thank the departments of Asian Studies, History, and Comparative Literature,
as well as the migration initiative and the Society for the Humanities, for their generous co-sponsorship of these events.
Um at the end, before I introduce professor Barlow,
I would like to remind you, that we will have a q&a after her talk.
If you are in the room, you can just raise your hand, um and we will begin with questions by students.
If you are remote, you can only put your questions into the chat, and I will read them out with your name.
Today I am very excited to welcome my friend, colleague, and mentor, professor Tani Barlow.
She is currently the George and Nancy Rupp professor of humanities, and professor of history at Rice University.
Her research focuses on modern transnational Chinese history,
with an emphasis in late 19th and early 20th century politics, media, and consumer culture.
Her work investigates especially Chinese feminism, and the role that the notion of woman plays in history,
and her new monograph in the "In the Event of Women" was published by Duke University Press this year.
Barlow is also the author of "The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism" also from Duke University Press in 2004, among many other works.
She was inaugural director of the JAWS Center for Asian Studies from 2008-2013,
and is founding senior editor of the multiple prize-winning journal, positions: Asia critique.
Barlow is a distinguished scholar of Chinese history,
who draws on this domain to vitally revise our understandings of the colonial, of region
that is of Asia as such, of globalization, social science, literature, and even advertising.
She does so from a unique perspective that investigates the centrality of women to Chinese history, and to history writing more broadly.
In the course, she critically engages continental philosophy, and her in her recent work especially, includes the study of the visual.
While taking on the analysis of the large dimensions of coloniality and globalization and the immense scales of region,
Barlow at the same time always relies on innovative,
meticulously assembled archives, and precise historical analysis.
Since the late 1990s, her historical archives centrally include also visual materials.
Some of her work on cinema is collected in a book, appears in a book, "Cinema and Desire: The Cultural Politics of Feminist Marxist Dai Jinhua" in 2002.
Since at least the mid-2000s, Barlow then increasingly turns her analytic gaze to a rich visual archive that she terms "advertising ephemera".
In many articles and in her new book "In the Event of Women",
these posters and ads that center women as the drivers of a new modernity and eugenics,
and as new historical subjects, become a primary focus of Barlow's historical analysis.
Her lens on this early 20th century treaty port archive remains materialist but in addition,
this work brings great mobility into materialist analysis.
With reflections on the desires that animate the underpinnings of image, economy, and social transformation.
This newest book that just came out in, I think, January 2022, um makes vital theoretical contributions in that it describes a new subject women,
one that is at the center of unprecedented universal claims, rather than bound to notions of otherness.
The subject women then assumes a different relation to history, the social epistemology, and commodity culture, than what has been detailed in other social theory.
In addition, "In the Event of Women" engages with engages with fundamental questions of historiography, I'm asking the question "What is an event?"
And the question of what a proper object of historical inquiry is.
Today however, professor Barlow will speak about some very new work.
um, and her talk is titled "Instinct and Society" um, so please join me in welcoming professor Barlow.
Thank you, thank you, thank you my dear, thank you so much.
I am just so happy to be here, and I want to thank my colleague and friend Arnika Fuhrman
for issuing this invitation, and to all of you for turning out. um I am I am going to talk about um
new work, in the sense that I am at this point, really super interested in this project, and I have
a number of questions that I will lay out today. I think I know how I want to engage these problems,
but you'll see that the talk is a bit schematic. I invite you please to follow the logic of what
I have to say, and find areas that you think I may have missed a beat, where I'm making an assumption
about what I see, but I'm not conveying it to you clearly. That would be really helpful to me,
because it will expose, um both to you and to me, how my thinking is proceeding.
So that being said, I started on this project many years ago and I ended up writing two other books,
because my my interest has been for many years in the history of the social sciences. And I kept getting
veering off into other things, so in this project, I am looking at um
how uh, we look at social theory, the social sciences, the human sciences, and sociology.
These are all the same words for the same, or the different words for the same phenomenon.
When I figure out what I want to call it, then I'll settle down on one. But right now, I sort
of invoke these terms, because the archive that I'm working in is quite loose. People are, in all of the
periods that interest me, engaging in theorizing practices, which is to say they're speculating.
So for me, theory is a kind of philosophizing. But it's basically a way that people generalize
their experience, using the past as their guide. So I'm very much interested in how
different individuals and cohorts, uh throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries,
social scientized Chinese thought and ontologized society. Now when I say ontologize society, I mean
that, I have a theory that explains my experience as such. So I can say "I live in a society" okay fine.
People in the past didn't think that way. How did they start thinking "oh I live in society?"
Well, they got social scientized in the sense that, social sciences, the human sciences,
are powerful generalizations, that allow us to try and figure out the the um human social and
physical evolution. So we look at ourselves both as a species, but as a certain kind of species living
in what we now call a society. Now what I'm saying here is that, none of this happened by accident.
All of it is new, and so you know as a historian I can't
really write history without using the term uh society. I really can't, because
that is the receptacle for a lot of what we do, particularly in say social history, which is
the history of how people live in society. So I'm curious about how that happened, why it is that we
we assume that we can combine all of these factors into a box called society. Now I point out that
I am with a cohort consisting of david yang, tima ruskala, and schweinstein, who are theorizing the
human. And also with Howard Zhang or Chiang, who who released "The Making of the Human Sciences in China" in 2019.
So I'm really happy that I'm not out in outer space all by myself.
There are a lot of people who are thinking about this problem, and they're beginning to approach
the social or human sciences as a philosophical problem. Now what Howard does is he says that
the history of science allows for exceptionalism or exemplarism. Now what he means by that is, he's
not going to tell us about colonial time. He's not going to say "this is a colonial discourse".
He is not going to say it traveled from Europe. He is not going to talk about any of the transmigration
of ideas from anywhere to anywhere. What he says is, probably what happened among Chinese intellectuals
is both exceptional and exemplary. It's exceptional to Europe, and it's exemplary in relation to the
kind of training that many of these women and men got as they became educated intellectuals
in Chinese treaty ports. So I think that's really important, he's trying to shift the way we try to
understand the ways that ideas become global. All right. Now um, I'm calling this project the
material life of society, because um as professor Fuhrman pointed out, I'm very much grounded in
images, which have demonstrated to me that people visualized the society that they were speculating about.
So I can show you at other times what they thought the society looked like. It looked like
parks, buildings, cinema, cars, etc. etc. These are visualizations of the modern society that people wanted to have, um.
But so so it it's not as just a system of ideas, it's also the instantiation
or materialization of people's desire for a modern life in Chinese advanced treaty ports.
There are a couple of issues at stake here, and I want to underline the method,
perhaps being redundant here. Although intellectual historians write about
theories, these theories presume ourselves. That is the human in the human sciences.
Theoretical assertions in the social and human sciences are ipso facto
claims to universal truth. We cannot put ourselves outside this claim. Secondly, unlike the category
of the human, which masks the normativity about rights, society is a precursor, and in my view and
in this current argument I'm making, is the foundation for modernist thought, in general.
So yes literature, yes movies, yes media, yes building, yes yes yes yes yes. But, it's in the
human sciences that the rationale for why this is normal, and evolutionary development
gets proposed in a logical systematic way. So society is the precursor for modernist thought.
There is a reason to assert the materiality of these ideas, because we live inside what we're
conceptually developing, okay. Now I want to go to the first of the slides, and I'm not going to read
this out loud. Please read in the languages that you feel comfortable in. And I'm going to talk you through it in just a moment.
This is a statement by Li Shicen, uh who um got into a giant tangle of a fight over instinct.
Now Li Shicen was an evolutionary sociologist of a certain kind.
He was a bergsonian. And what I'm doing in isolating this statement out of his famous book,
is to point out what he is doing. In order to make his argument about bergsonian versions of
evolutionary philosophy, he reaches back to the 18th century China. The Dai Zhen that he is talking
about is an 18th century, you might know this as a Confucian philosopher. We generally say a Ruist
now, to distinguish them from other kinds of Confucianism. But he was in the mainstream and
he was an innovator in the 18th century. Now what Li Shicen is doing here, is he's finding phrases
from Dai Zhen, and he's saying "look, it's compatible". So we have sheng sheng generative life, and we have
different functions. We have a theory of transformation, we have a differentiation between
generative life, I think it just means vegetation. I mean, it's alive, it has a has a pulse. And um,
forward movement, or evolutionary change, which he calls structuration.
Now, this is Li Shicen talking about an 18th century Confucian philosopher. And he's saying, hey look look,
without generative life there is no structure. But, without gener, without structure there is no generative life.
In other words, what Li Shicen is doing in the 20th century, is calling on an
18th century Ruist philosopher, and saying look no contradiction. Now I'll talk a little bit more
about this, but what I want to draw your attention to, is that often we think about the 20th century
as modern, and the 18th century as traditional. What Li Shicen is saying is, this is not about traditional and modern.
This is not a break, this is not a shock. This is not, oh I'm losing my mind
I'm you know I'm part of a failing society, because we're traditional and they're modern.
What he's saying is, this is so cool, look at this. This guy is doing something that I can appreciate, when I find it in Bergson.
You see my point here. Now, Li Shicen is still a very important
source for those of us who want to understand how European philosophy and theory get got translated
and acculturated among uh the cosmopolitan intellectuals that Li Shicen was a part of.
But he's shorthanding a very mundane social theory problem. What he's saying is that generative life
is comparable to instinctual life. We stay alive because our instincts help
us to stay alive. We have the instinct for self-preservation right, and our species.
But we also have this structuration issue going on, in his language, which in uh in evolutionary theory
is forward direction towards more sophistication. Now he has added a genealogy here.
So he's saying, well they did it in the past, so it's not that scary or interesting. But
he's also making a claim that Bergson is a superior evolutionary philosopher to the
evolutionary philosophers and sociologists that were circulating then: Mill, Huxley, Spencer, and Kant.
So Li is pointing out that there's this established notion in which subjectivity is
imminent in life, and that's what he's digging out of Bergson. Li also invokes um Wang Yangming and his
large generalizations about Liang Zhi. Now, some of what you read when you read these people is
very very familiar to debates among Ruist scholars about innate life, and noumenon and phenomenon.
Of course they don't use these terms. But there is a problem which Ruist philosophers also dealt with.
Now I'm not in a position yet to say whether Li Sihcen's exegesis of Bergsonian sociology,
and Nietzsche and historicity, pointed backward, all right. So I don't know if he's saying,
what he's saying, actually. Is he saying, oh I I need to go back to the 18th century to truly understand Bergson, I doubt that.
I think what he's saying is um, perhaps I can re-read Dai Zhen, the 18th century,
through Bergson. Or, I can illuminate the 18th century thinking of these great intellectuals,
um by reference to Nietzsche and Bergson. But the the basic thing that i want to underline
is the compatibility. So Li Shicen feels and argues, that there is a compatibility here.
He never offloaded Chinese metaphysics. This addresses an older historiography, in which we
talked about the modern and the traditional. And we also said that May Fourth intellectuals were um
iconoclastic. We have talked about May Fourth intellectuals, the first generation
of true modernist Chinese intellectuals as iconoclastic. I don't see any iconoclasm here.
This guy is not an iconoclast, he is merging different ways of thinking, okay.
Evolutionary theory, from his point of view is neither functionless, that is static,
nor is it teleological. So, unlike Darwinian social evolution, it's not necessarily going forward.
Sorry about that.
I have to remember to forward, everyone clear on this slide? Okay, all right.
Li is in the minority among theorists in the in the 1920s.
And he's important I think ultimately because he and his colleagues are postulating an alternative
evolutionary theory. It's really important for us I think to understand the social scientization
of Chinese thought in the 20th century as poly form. There are many different ways to understand
social scientization, and there were many competing theories, both indigenous and exogenous.
Chinese intellectuals were grasping the philosophical implications not just of
one specific thought local thought, but European theories that were reading, translating, adapting
negating, attacking, and explaining.
Now um, one thing that I had to to um confront, and this is a real problem for me,
so if any of you are Kantians I'd like to hear from you, um it turns out that probably most
of these intellectuals when they got to social theory, they came at it through Kant, um.
I will get to to the Kantian issue, um very shortly, but remember that Chinese intellectuals
are reading Kant and Bergson side beside. So Kant for them, is not really an 18th century
thinker, he's a 20th century thinker, and he is an introduction to other kinds of
social scientized thought. Now Bergsonianism is a critique of Darwinian philosophy,
but the point I want to make here with the social fact is that, no matter how far you go
in opposite directions about evolution, there they always share something in common.
And that is what Durkheim called the social fact. Now, Durkheim made his appearance in
Chinese thought in the 1920s, um and um the the, the centrality of the social fact is people's
recognition that there is a real, it is a fact, that a set percentage of any population will commit suicide.
That is a social fact. The question of why individual people commit suicide is a mystery.
What Durkheim is doing is showing that you can measure social facts, but you cannot explain motivation.
Because a social fact is impenetrable. Immediately what we have here is a subjective and an objective.
So the society becomes the objective thing that we can study, whereas the subject is full of feelings.
This is a very clever trick, it's a new trick, it's a fantastically interesting trick.
And I think it suffuses thinking and argument, because the social fact cannot explain for human passions.
It cannot be proven by reference to our experience, or ideation, or conscious consciousness,
or even unconsciousness. So it's not at all surprising that the rise of social thinking
gives rise to Freudianism, which claims an unconscious, right. So that our motives are
beneath the social, beneath the conscious, okay. But my point here is that while social theories range
from creative evolution to anatomical determinism, all modernists over the late 19th and early 20th
century, latched onto this definitive abstraction "society" and made it into philosophy's ground base.
Now many people have noted, Douglas Howland is the best of the historians who have noticed,
that even John Stuart Mill did not have a term for society. In other words, at the same time
that Chinese were coming to terms with the social scientization of thought, sociologists in England,
France, and Germany, and the United States were doing exactly the same thing. Because as Douglas
Howland points out, society is a really complicated concept. So it's not at all
surprising that it took generations of people to figure out what they were actually talking about.
Okay now, in the paper which some of you have read, I talk a little bit about different um
different kinds of, I want to put in different layers of people who had contesting views, while I
followed the basic line of social scientization. But I do want to make clear that I'm making a
basic assumption as a historian. I am assuming assuming that all theories ontologize.
I think that philosophers and theorists are really interesting, because they can push
theory to the max. They can see the horizon of history. And for that reason, I accept their claims
that what they say is universal for all people. If all Kantians, doesn't matter where you are, what
language you're accessing Kant in, if they're all making the same claims about universality,
that's pretty darn interesting. How are we going to to figure that. So I I I sort of step away from
that problem, and say well they're all modernist, so it absolutely makes sense that all modernists
would make this kind of set of assumptions. So what would a non-modernist be?
How are we to understand what is not yet a modernist? And so I go to saint Augustine.
Who wouldn't go to saint Augustine for that? So the point that I make is, okay the point that I make is that
um, when saint Augustine was writing, he was talking about the imminence of God in his mother's mouth.
Okay we would say, Augustine was fortunate that his mother had
uh wet nurses, and when she didn't have enough milk, there were a whole bunch of other women who could
give him milk, so he survived infancy when many infants did not. We would say, that's a social fact.
You know, if you have, if you're rich your children are going to survive, that's a social fact.
That's not how Augustine saw it. And a good historian will say, let's see what Augustine thought.
Augustine believed that God was in the milk, and that it was God's way of making sure that he survived.
Now um, to me this is super important, um and it links somebody like saint Augustine
with Wang Yangming and Dai Zhen. And I think we will find very similar patterns of imminence, um and
structuration in all of these pre-modernists. Dai Zhen talks incessantly about the noumenal, um and the
relationships between Li and Qi and so on, these are very common uh notions. He goes all the way
back to the Zhou dynasty to resurrect the idea of the mingtang, that he's going to rebuild this thing.
It's a very very beautiful concept and he was a serious scholar, so when Li Shicen references Dai,
but ontologizes evolutionary society, Li's reality does not pivot around ethics,
or even, as in Augustine's case, divinity. Because noumen takes shape, that is they
evolve or in structure or form, out of life, being society. Modernists stopped making assumptions
about the real that philosophers like Augustin, Dai Zhen, and Wang Yangming had.
Now, in the interests of time, I will not talk about the discussion that's currently
going on in Chinese intellectual history, about what to do with Kant.
I will say that there's some really interesting people involved in this. And, we know for example
that Kant is is translated in the 1880s as as a introduction to scientific thinking. We know that
he's re-translated many different times in that many Chinese intellectuals use access Kant through
Japanese translations, which happened during the Meiji restoration. Um, Bergson himself references
Kant regularly, um arguing that Kant is imbued with a belief in science, in a science single and
complete, embracing the whole of the real. In other words, another statement about the social fact.
So, to wrap up this part of the discussion, modern philosophical science theory, or social science
uh, can be interjected, rejected, embraced, but it cannot be ignored. None of these
people are ignoring this, they're struggling to come to terms with it, just as I am. Um and
Okay here is Kant's embrace of the real. I can, I will happily um uh um
make this set of slides available to you if you are truly interested in this. But um
I want to shift over to
my argument about a vernacular sociology. Generally speaking and to this point in
my talk, I've talked about very great philosophers. These are rare people
who really show us something unique and new. But what totally interests and fascinates me
are the crazy people who make things up out of imagination. They read something
their spark, their imagination is sparked and they start writing about it. So this is a stream that
I've dealt with in other areas of my work, and which is connected to the notion of commercial
ephemera, because we see social scientization of object life in commercial ephemera, um.
For instance, let me take um, Richard Lynch Garner.
Okay, now this guy um had a theory about languages and evolution, and it involved apes. He
was a big fraud, a very typical Barnum and Bailey American fraud. But he he made the argument that
humans were related to apes, so if you could learn ape language, then you could
understand the origins of human human language. This guy was picked up by serious scientists in
the United States, but also by a translator who then translated this into Chinese. I don't know
how people read these ideas, but this is the grossest kind of racist evolutionary
theory that you can find. And I chose this guy because this is just flat out racism.
um and uh The man has been his his theories have been analyzed by historian Gregory Radick. The
point being, that um when it came to trying to understand evolutionary time, there was a way
in which people were indiscriminate. They adopted these ideas indiscriminately because the ideas
themselves were not that clear. They are putting these ideas through their own imaginations,
and the more earthy you are, the stranger some of these arguments become.
So, where they go is into the notion that all animal, mammal, reptile, all life,
has to be driven by instinct. There's no other way to explain the persistence of apes to men. There
must be, because a social fact is a social fact, right? You can't understand why people do things.
You can't really understand their interior life, so the default position is there is no internal life.
It's driven by instinct. Consequently, there is ape instinct, there is human instinct, there is social
instinct, and so on and so on. Now in the paper I specifically turned to Japanese social scientists.
And I do that because these are the first ones to be translated into Chinese. And they repeat
the same system of ideas, the same outlines I've already talked about, and they are translated into
Chinese um as European thought. So in the interest of time, I will not um talk about each one of them,
but I think what's important to keep in mind is that this becomes a web of science. The more people
talk and write, and the more names are called out, the more substantial this discourse becomes. So, um
I can't even pronounce some of these German names but um, Wicksell, Keynes, Pareto, Veblun, and
Schumpeter play a very large role in the fight over instinct in relation to evolution. Okay.
Another problem that this set of theories, um instinct and and society confronted, was time. If
all life is driven by instinct not emotion,
and if all time is evolutionary time, if society is an evolutionary process, um is it fast or slow?
I mean are we evolving right now? How do I know if I'm evolving or not? This
is eugenics, right. If I mate with the right person and have a eugenically sound baby,
then I'm contributing to the improvement of my race. These are arguments that people made all the
time, and they're they're pretty horrible and they led in really bad directions, but that jumps into
your mind. Like here's instinct and here's society, so how are we going to put these two things together?
Another thing that was really terrible for them was paleon paleontological evidence. The evidence
of dinosaurs and ape men. Those of you who are familiar with Chinese intellectual history of the
early 20th century will know that there were huge arguments over uh Peking Man, and the evolutionary
trajectory of what was alleged to be a special evolutionary creature that came out of the apes
and into being Chinese. Now in every community there was this problem. But it boiled down to,
are we evolving really slowly? In which case, how do we even measure it if it's paleontological? Or are
we doing it really quickly, in which case we need to marry well and breed as fast as we possibly can.
Okay now um, in previous work I have um talked about this in relation to Li Da the famous
Marxist theorist, and his understanding of social evolution from apes into matriarchy to patriarchy
modes of production, and so on and so on. And we're all pretty much familiar with that line of
argument. Um and my point here is, we are familiar with these lines of argument.
These are absolute truisms in the history of thought. um
So everybody's repeating this same story, but my point is, it's accreting into a normative fact. Now
I'm saying, I'm not so sure that we really resolve this issue of the instinct in the society.
I'm a little troubled by the whole framing of this problem, so what are we going to do? um
I sort of settled into a really interesting find. It was a a the reason I got interested in Li Shicen.
Was that he had a public battle with a Guy named Guo Renyuan.
Guo was a behaviorist, and he had trained at Berkeley, had a PhD in evolutionary psychology, and
did you know all kinds of studies, scientific studies, embryology, bio psychological stuff and
so on and so on. He was a proponent of Lloyd Morgan, William James, William Dougall. These are all like
you know really really well-known established faux scientists, in my view. um
And uh, many people were uncomfortable with this form of instinct theory, deeply uncomfortable.
But they had a lot of trouble contesting it, because it's quite scientific. So, you're sort of
surrounded by this miasma of theory theorizing, that suggests that this instinct theory is
quite scientific and therefore be true. That's where Li Shicen comes back into the picture.
And where he uh where he uses Nietzsche and Bergson is to say, oh golly you know I don't
think so. Because you know what, actually time is um is not measurable in human ways. That is duration
is the human understanding of time. If I live my life I live out a duration of a lifespan.
I can't not live that way, because that's what's given to me as as as a human person. So I will
live through all kinds of things, and I will experience time as duration. And then he said, look
evolution isn't a one-way track it's not a one-way track, and you can't devolve. It's not like "oh if we
don't evolve then we're going to devolve", which was a very popular theory back in the day. Okay,
he said, no it's not like you're shooting an arrow at a target. It's like a bomb explodes. That's what
evolution is like. The bomb explodes and, this is what he called creative evolution, it goes all over
the place. It will go into some dead ends, but it will also go into some whatever-comes-next stuff.
and that's how we ought to study it. We ought to study it not as instinct made me do it, but
here I am in this world I I have a brain, I have an imagination, and I'm just going to make some stuff.
That was the Bergsonian line which uh ends up um uh attracting a lot of people over to um
a different way of thinking um and including Lisa Zehou. Now I started with Li Zehou and uh those of you
who read the history of the 1980s will know his name. He was extremely influential. I was
in China for the first time in 1980s, and I knew what he was doing, I just didn't understand it.
Now I think I understand where he was going with this. He is a is a Marxian Bergsonian social
scientist. He's merging all of these things. He's going back to the Zhou dynasty. He's saying, "well
this is what Confucius was doing", and I find that utterly fascinating, because he social scientizes
Confucius. But why not? There's a way in which when I say social scientize this or that, I'm not saying
oh bad bad bad. I'm just saying, this is what we did. This is how we think about it. This is what
we're doing right now. He uh he takes the view that philosophy is an ontology of human subjectivity.
Sounds really super Bergsonian to me. But it could also be this really potent mix of fascinating
stuff that got cooked up in the early 20th century. Now um I end this paper with um with a mention of,
this is totally random. I went online, I thought, oh this debate is so not over.
And I found an article by Robert J Ludwig and Martha Welch, "Darwin's Other Dilemmas and
Theoretical Roots of Emotional Connection". We have hardcore Darwinian philosophers, social scientists.
Scientists still trying to figure out what is instinct and what is human emotion.
So what did they do? They find neonates, that is children who are born
but before they're put on their mother's breast, and they measure these children in order to figure
out what comes first, nature or culture. Now to me that is ludicrous. That is so funny that
um, I have a lot of fun with these theories because I think they're so silly.
You can't measure a neonate, but people are still trying. Thank you very much for your attention.