Organizer: Aihe Wang, Harvard University
Chair: Robin Yates, McGill University
Discussant: Angela Zito, Columbia University
Emperorship occupied a central position in China's imperial history; its shadow is still present today. This panel will discuss emperorship in its formative stages in the first three centuries B.C. Rather than examining specific emperors as possessors of power, the panel treats emperorship as a culturally constructive political institution, which simultaneously organized possibilities for subject positioning and identity formations for people within the realm.
We hope to place emperorship within the perspective that problematizes "culture" by returning it to the social body that produces it. We reject the view of culture as separate from society, either as a set of reflections and mystifications by which society sees, mis sees and reduces itself, or as a pre existing structure of ideas or logic which social reality imitates. Emperorship in China was the outcome of a set of specific social practices that visualized it in art and style, conceptualized it in cosmology, lived it out in rituals, and materialized it in architecture and artifacts. Emperorship itself became an agent in shaping subsequent politically charged Chinese formulations of "culture". We thus claim that "culture" is constructive and intrinsic to power.
Casting an inquiry into emperorship in this way opens a new space in the field of the "political". When the emperor's body was culturally defined as a microcosm, it became the symbol of political unity-the state and the social whole called "all under Heaven". Yet this unity was nothing but a set of power relations binding competing social forces. We analyze the emperor's body as the incarnation of this relationality, which encompasses diversity only by embodying its tensions-tensions between the divine and the political aspects of imperium, between the emperor's person and the imperial apparatus, between his Yang body and his Yin subjects, and between power and moral authority.
Emperorship was thus a powerful form of constructing human subjects. It was, first of all, the conception of the sovereign that was meant to be recognized and submitted to by his subjects. Established as an utmost exemplar of the perfect human figure, the emperor epitomized the human body and human relations, morality, and emotions. This formation of emperorship transformed the ruler from the Other to the emblem of his subjects. In this way, emperorship formulated possibilities for human identity that were meant to be multiplied and emulated by persons in society. The constructive formation called "emperorship", therefore, had special consequences for the politics of body, gender, hierarchy, and subject formation.
This interdisciplinary panel draws from history, anthropology, art, and literature in terms of both material and theoretical perspectives. Martin Powers' paper discusses how visual images were employed in the formulation of emperorship. It considers the dragon and the cosmic Qi as images of mutability in late Warring States political writings, exploring ways in which abstract ideas about political power, identity and roles were instantiated in these images. Gopal Sukhu examines literal conceptions of de, "sovereign charisma", during the Warring States era and the early Han. He aims to show the tensions between the different conceptions of sovereign charisma, i.e. that espoused by the Confucian and that formulated by aristocrats, and how these tensions influenced the development of Chinese emperorship. Kenneth Dean's paper presents a flow chart of despotic desire at work in the relationship between the exemplary body of the First Emperor and the body politic of the Qin dynasty, the relationship that was fraught with contradictions and ultimately imploded, to be finally replaced by a new kind of emperorship in the Han dynasty, which transformed the body of the emperor into a principle of hierarchy. Aihe Wang analyzes the cosmological construction of emperorship in the Han dynasty, showing how the discourse of cosmology rendered emperorship a terrain of power contest. She argues that emperorship was constructed as the center of the cosmos and the pivot of the social hierarchy, a pivot through which rivaling factions contested and constrained one another.
M.J. Powers, University of Michigan
This panel offers the opportunity to re examine the imperial institution of China in its early phases in light of current developments in historical scholarship and theory. Peter Brown recently offered a compelling revision of the role of the emperor in late imperial Rome which has implications for sinology as well. According to Brown, traditional scholarship, by concentrating on the power of the emperor, runs "the risk of taking at its face value the vast 'institutionalized egoism'-the conviction that all power and political initiative should reside in the person of the emperor-which characterized the imperial office in the fourth century." Such "institutionalized egoism" is clearly detectable in the rhetoric of emperorship in China, but it could be argued that sinologists have too readily mistaken the claims of courtly rhetoric for political practice. As an alternative, much about early Chinese imperial policy could be recast in a dialectical model in which the imperial court is seen as responding to competing institutional and social forces, ranging from consort families to the multifarious challenges mounted by intellectuals both in and out of office.
A similar approach is encouraged by considerations of theory. Viewing the imperial institution as a culturally constructed discourse-as this panel proposes to do-requires that we view culture as "constructive of power and thus intrinsic to it." This enables one to address the fact that, in ancient China, the domain of culture was a major arena of political competition from early times and, moreover, an important (if unreliable) limiting factor on the exercise of imperial power. This approach also encourages a dialectical model because a discourse is always addressed to an audience, elements of which may be shared by two or more competing groups.
This paper will examine images of mutability as models for issues of "identity" in late Warring States political thought. In both East and West the thinkers of ancient times expressed some of their most elusive concepts in visual images, often drawing upon familiar forms from the craft industries. Plato's theory of ideal forms was literally modeled on the craftsman's use of the "paradigm," i.e., a standard article that served as a model for making copies. In Warring States China, Zhuangzi and his school as well as a host of bureaucratic theorists all employed imagery derived from the crafts to instantiate some of their subtler concepts. This paper considers the dragon and the cosmic Qi as images of mutability in late Warring States political writings. It explores ways in which abstract ideas about political power, identity and roles were instantiated in these images. It further examines structural similarities between literary and pictorial imagery and argues that the similarities are based upon a common epistemology whose hallmarks are detectable in verbal logic as well as in features of style. In essence, it argues that pictorial images can instantiate certain kinds of ideas-what I call an object's "generic condition"-in a manner comparable to that of a literary image. Finally the paper will consider whether it may be this mode of instantiation, in fact, which makes it possible for the literary image to support an idea.
Gopal Sukhu, City University of New York
The Chinese word de is sometimes translated by the English word "charisma." Unlike the English word, de is classified into a number of varieties: e.g., the de of the sovereign, the de of the subject, the de of the handsome, etc. It is the de of the sovereign that preoccupied the thinking of many political theorists during the Warring States era and the early Han dynasty since that quality was thought central to the functioning of the imperial and, for some, even the cosmic order. The sign of the presence of this form of charismatic power was the recognition of the sovereign as such, which is to say a desire to submit to him, on the part of the huddling subjects. Many thought that this species of charismatic power could be in a sense manufactured through ritual, that the first purpose of ritual was the creation of the will to submit to the sovereign, and that the formal purpose of ritual, communication with spirits, was secondary at best. There were also those like the philosopher Xunzi (4th century B.C.) who doubted that ritual had any supramundane efficacy at all, preferring to think of the ritual invocation of divinity, if taken literally, as a necessary deception of gullible masses. Confucian conceptions of ritual and the supramundane, though not always as extreme as Xunzi's, tended mostly in that direction.
The literal conception of divinity, however, did not weaken in direct proportion to the altitude one occupied in the social hierarchy. Many aristocrats, including emperors, were interested in direct contact with divine beings. With that interest came a conception of sovereignty, and charisma, very much at variance with that espoused by the classical Confucian. My paper will examine the nature of these early conceptions of sovereign charisma and show how the tensions between them influenced the foundation and development of the Chinese emperorship.
Kenneth Dean, McGill University
What do the First Emperor of China and Ronald Reagan have in common? This is the question addressed in First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi, New York: Autonomedia, 1992). To raise such a question is to recognize the survival of archaic functions in contemporary leaders. The search for an answer must begin with an examination of the relationship between the body of the ruler, and the constructed subjectivities of his subjects. As Ernst Kantorowicz pointed out in his study of medieval political theology, every king has at least two bodies-one, the physical, limited body, the other, the glorious, omnipotent body-politic. First and Last Emperors provides a theoretical model of the exemplary body of the ruler, a non-corporeal, kinetic body-without-image consisting of trajectories through space, gestures, voice, echoes. It is this body, in its concrete, limited, historical actualization, that performs strange operations of induction upon the multiple, particular bodies of its subjects. It is this same abstract body that is driven by contradictory desires for transcendence and immanence to bizarre convolutions, doublings, fragmentations, and disappearances.
In this paper, the metamorphoses undergone by the body of the First Emperor of China are mapped as a flow chart of the material force of desire actualizing in history the irruption of the mega machine of the State. The discussion focuses on the techniques of incorporation of gridded, standardized units-or "individuals" into the body/mind of the emperor. This process was actualized in many concrete technologies such as the standardization of language, weights, and measures, the formation of the 5 member mutual spying cell, the reorganization of society along the model of a military garrison, the direct transfer of the libidinal energy of the populace from self-preservation to a predatory, military attack mode. However, an inherent contradiction between transcendence and immanence, between conquest and control, generates a force of abolition within the desire of the Emperor. The First Empire is a suicide state. The ideal transformation of centripetal lines of inflow of labor and agricultural products into a centrifugal pulse or line of military conquest cannot be sustained forever. At the center of the Empire, the black hole of the Emperor's desire, a sinkhole of anti-production opens up, swallowing more and more energy into the doubling of the empire into a miniature microcosm-a replica Empire within which the Emperor will disappear to fight his ultimate enemy, death.
The paper will also discuss the nature of the transition to the steady state Imperial system achieved in the Han. I will discuss the consolidation of the Imperial system in the Han by examining the dispersal of the body of the despot into a hierarchically charged ritual field. Acting as a despotic signifier underlying the implicit hierarchy of the entire ritual system, the Han Emperor no longer sought to physically incorporate the bodies of his subjects into his projected, all consuming body. Rather, the emperor's body dispersed throughout the social field, providing a principle of hierarchy to all one on one ritual relations. As conduct was increasingly gridded onto points on a three dimensional chart of ritual actions, the Emperor became the space between those points, or the fourth dimension.
Aihe Wang, Harvard University
The ideological claim that China's emperor had absolute power and authority has not only become a "hegemonic ideology" of imperial China, but has also been reinforced by Eurocentric world histories portraying an oriental despotism. This paper is an attempt to return this vision of emperorship to the actions of constructing it. It analyzes the cosmological construction of emperorship in the Han dynasty, asking how emperorship was built into the core of Han cosmology and became a terrain of power contests. The prime source of evidence for this analysis is "Wuxing Zhi" (The Treatise of Wuxing) of Hanshu.
"Wuxing Zhi" is one the most comprehensive representations of Han cosmological discourse. Far from being a coherent theory of a single author, it represents a complex political discourse that was formulated and disputed by major theorists of the Han empire, including Dong Zhongshu, Liu Xiang, Liu Xin, Jing Fang, Ban Gu, and many others. With divergent political theories, they uniformly appealed to the moral authority of cosmology, what they called "the Way of Heaven and Man", in the construction of emperorship.
These theorists conceptualized the Han empire as a human realization of cosmic unity, dynamism, and hierarchy, with the emperor as its embodiment-the one person who unites Heaven and Man. But this symbolic promotion of the emperor simultaneously designated him the active agent responsible for the total cosmic social order, and the pivot of the hierarchy through which rivaling factions battled and constrained one another. As "Wuxing Zhi" records, hundreds of cases of catastrophe and disorder in the human and natural worlds were interpreted as omens caused by an imbalance in the social hierarchy and an interruption of the cosmic order-all due to the emperor's wrong-doing.
The paper thus argues that emperorship was an essential institution for the formation of the Han empire that bonded rivaling compositions of power into a body of dialectic and hierarchical relations.
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