Content
Exoticism and Diversity are for Segalen,
not merely ways of experiencing the Orient, or the Exotic, but a philosophical
stance on the nature of the Self and its relationship to the world around it,
and its relationship to itself.
Segalen starts with two fundamental laws on
the back of which he proposes his ideas:
Law 1: (Schopenhauer's Law of
Representation) Every object presupposes a subject.
Law 2: (Jules De Gaultier's Law of Bovaryism)
Every being which conceives of itself necessarily conceives itself to be other
than it actually is.
The Exot is someone who is aware of the
acute difference between himself and the other, between subject and object, and
between his true nature, and his view of his own nature. This Segalen calls
'Diversity'.
Exoticism's
power is nothing other than the power to conceive otherwise. ... I conceive
otherwise, and immediately the vision is enticing. All of Exoticism lies
herein.
The
rapture of the subject conceiving its object, recognizing its own difference
from itself, sensing Diversity.
The subject perceives the object, then is
aware of diversity within the object. This awareness then reflects back on the
subject leading to an awareness of the subject's own Diversity. There are
therefore two movements: one out from the subject towards the object (going
forth, the journey into the strange) one back from the object to the subject
(the return to the homeland); both object and subject undergo a transformation:
the feeling, the sensation of Diversity.
On a
spherical surface, to leave one point is already to begin to draw closer to it!
The Exot arrives at a feeling of Diversity
through observation of surroundings which are uncommon, to which he is
unaccustomed. The importance of travel to far flung places: Exoticism includes
the colonial adventure but is not restricted to it. It's the Exot's acute awareness
of the difference between a new self in these uncommon surroundings –Oriental,
African, Exotic- and the habitual self in habitual surroundings (what Gide
calls the Epoch, the Homeland) that causes an awareness of Diversity. The Exot
therefore has an awareness of his own strong individuality, and the extent to
which this is impermeable by the outside.
Diversity is not contrast. It is subtle
gradations. It is not green versus red, but hundreds of subtle shades of green,
or hundreds of subtle shades of red.
The Exotic is not the Colonial or the Oriental
merely, although this is a starting point, but the outside generally, the ex.
Types of Exoticism:
Exoticism of Nature
Exoticism of Plants and Animals
Exoticism of Human Kinds
Impenetrability of Races
Exoticism of Moralities
Exoticism of Race
Exoticism of Sexes
Exoticism of the Divine
Exoticism of the Future and the Past
The Exotic is not only spatial, but also
temporal.
Is matter diverse or homogenous?
Exoticism and Diversity are ways to
counteract the growing influence of modernity: market capitalism, mass tourism,
feminism, democracy, which impose their own homogeneity on everything, what
Segalen calls the Kingdom of the Lukewarm, the beige paste of entropy, a
viscous mush. The world tends inexorably
towards maximum entropy. An aesthetics of Diversity is one way to counteract
this movement. An aesthetics of Diversity will allow a sense of distance, a
sense of mystery to remain in a more and more uniforming world.
Exoticism and Diversity represent the force
of individuality in a world contaminated by the herd. The difference between
the tourist and the traveller.
The decline of Exoticism thus understood.
The human:
Man is the measure of all things: but this
leads to disappointment: humility is the acceptance of disappointment
The superhuman:
An expansion of the human, a quickening,
not yet Diversity, but a movement towards it
The inhuman:
What is other than the human
..All
things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever
is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With
swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;...
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Pied
Beauty 1918
Unity
can only represent itself to itself through diversity.
Jules De Gaultier
Des
fondements de l'incertitude en matiere d'opinion 1896
Men
are not born equal, nor are they born brothers. The lion does not lie down with
the tiger, or the crow nest with the swallow. The world is created in a
diversity of phenomena and each phenomenon has its own diversity. Between
mankind there may be common truth and justice and common wisdom to lead to
amity. But between men there are divisions and love cannot be felt truly except
by like and like. Between like and unlike there can only be tolerance and absence
of enmity – which is not at all the same thing as friendship. Perhaps the truth
of this is most apparent to the Hindu who is born to understand and accept this
concept of diversity.
Paul Scott
The
Day of the Scorpion 1968
'No,
not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.'
E.M. Forster
A
Passage to India 1924
Segalen has been accused of anti-feminism and elitism,
and it's true, he does lay himself open to those charges. But one should see his
ideas as an extreme manifestation of the Aesthete's art-for-art's-sake, as an
early 20th century development of Baudelaire's dandy, of the extreme
individualism of Decadence and Symbolism, as an incarnation within a Western
context of the Dao.
Segalen's Essay
offers a way out of the homogeneity implicit in the mass consumerism of global
marketing –the obscenity of a Starbucks in the Forbidden City, for example - as
well as the sentimental political correctness of our current age ("Deep
down, aren't we all the same?"), its sheer parochialism, which purports to
be blind to essential differences, but in doing so assimilates these
differences, an assimilation which is nothing less than the exercise of the
power to decide which differences should be ignored and which should not, and
the power to impose the result of that decision on to others.
Let us
not flatter ourselves for assimilating the customs, races, nations and others
who differ from us. On the contrary, let us rejoice in our inability ever to do
so, for we thus retain the eternal pleasure of sensing Diversity.
Method
This
work is not an assertion, so much as a search. If I undertake to write it, it
is not in order to display fully formed ideas, but in order to help me think
this matter through.
The Essay
is underpinned by two complementary gestures: the gesture towards futurity, and
the palinode.
First, the gesture of pure potentiality.
The Essay does not exist. Not only is
it unfinished but it only exists in note forms, in fragments written over a 14
year period in various different notebooks, on random scraps of paper, in
letters, and collated for the first time after Segalen's early death. These scraps
project a potential, future Essay.
The discourse is everywhere characterised by future tenses, by imperatives, by
notes to the self of what the Essay
will be like, should be like. Write a
book on Exoticism, the text begins. Begin
with the sensation of Exoticism...As for my project... it is to be an Essay on
Exoticism, an Aesthetics of Diversity. ...I will surely write that Essay on
Exoticism, an Aesthetics of Diversity.
(In this the Essay resembles Dostoevsky's Legend
of the Grand Inquisitor, which also does not exist except as a precis, a summary
of a work that Ivan hopes to write one day.)
Second, the palinode, which is a gesture of
retraction. In 1902 Segalen published an article in the Mercure de France: Les
Synesthesies et l'Ecole symboliste. If synesthesia represents a blurring of
the senses and the arts – a drive towards homogeneity – then the Exotic
represents the opposite movement – a drive towards differentiation, Diversity.
Segalen conceived his Essay on Exoticism
as a palinode to the essay on synesthesia: Palinode
of my synesthesias.
But, how can one retract what is already
written? To write is to preserve indelibly. The palinode does not erase, it
only complements, contrasts, argues. The original statement and its retraction
exist side by side. The palinode is a kind of failure, because its desire to
retract, to erase can never be fulfilled. Language cannot erase, it cannot
retract: Segalen calls this the treason
of language. The palinodial is represented in the text by the desire to
empty his vocabulary of previous associations: Throw overboard everything mis-used or rancid contained in the word
'exoticism'. Strip it of all its cheap finery: palm tree and camel, tropical
helmet, black skins and yellow sun....'Exoticism' is now so bloated that it is
about to explode, to burst, to empty itself of its contents. ...After giving it
a thorough delousing I wanted to try to restore to it –along with its initial
value – all the primacy it once possessed.... I want first to cleanse that
word: inhumanity, that is cruelty, crudeness, the contrary of humanity
understood as goodness...
The Essay
shares with all of Segalen's masterpieces a playful attitude to the paradox of
simultaneous being and not-being: it exists and yet it does not. Segalen notes
that the first part of his non-existent Essay
will deal with negation, of describing what it is not: I must remove from the word 'Diversity' and especially from the word
'Exotic' all the too-positive notions with which they were laden up to now. I
must vacate the premises and then dust them off in order to attempt not the
filling up of the wineskin,... but the puncturing of the wineskin itself, so
that no one will speak of it again.
There's also a certain irony in the fact
that everywhere Segalen reminds himself, admonishes himself, not to use
quotations from previous writers, and then quotes extensively from de Gaultier,
de Guerin, Clouard, Quinton, Claudel and Gide. The text is a Mosaic of bits.
Allied to these gestures is the notion of
chance, or rather the French concept of par
hasard, with its resonances of the hazard of chance. It is as a result of
chance –or is it?- that the Essay takes the form that it does
because Segalen died before he could put his scraps and notations into a final,
more fixed form. But, if he had lived longer, would he have done so, would he
have made a final arrangement? Or would he have left it as an open text like
this, a Mosaic? This is a much more attractive idea because, in its present
form, the text frustrates a linear reading: it categorically refuses any kind
of development. Sentences which appear later in the book are quoted in earlier
parts, stumping causality and the notion of an ordered sequence of ideas. For Segalen,
philosophy was about the play of ideas, not the ideas themselves, which were
often merely derivative. As it stands now incomplete, fragmentary, the form of
the text mirrors perfectly the play of ideas.
Form
is that artificial and miraculous thing that is art's reason for being.
The ordering principle – such as it is - of
the text in its current form seems to be based on a remark of de Gaultier –
whose spirit hangs over the whole endeavour, it must be said-, to the effect
that the wise man knows his principle of certainty is nothing more than an
initial desire for something, which is then developed; that a belief is nothing
more than an unrestrained enthusiasm for something: his desire is the centre of the universe. Segalen is aware that his
principle of certainty - Exoticism and Diversity- is based on his enthusiasm for
seeing the world as he does, for seeing its Diversity. To order the ideas, to
place the fragments into some final order, to develop them, would be to impose
a homogeneity on them. The lesson to be learned
is not known in advance, and because of this, the reader must be left free to
orient her own way through the text according to her own desires, recreating or
repeating the process Segalen himself went through in writing it: It is in order to be able to determine its
true state in the world with certainty that I present and attempt to link my
thoughts in this particular way. I will then be free to allow my desire to
orient the answer. All of this is a
manifestation of Daoism, which refutes an ordering of the things of the world.
See
the world, then put forth one's vision of the world.
Par
hasard, this 2002 English edition of the Essay, published by Duke University Press,
has the first two pages missing, and also pages 16 and 17, which are just blank
empty pages. However, the footnotes at the back refer to things outside the
book but which have their origin on these blank pages, origins which can not be
known (except by reference to another edition), but which can only be guessed
at or pieced together from the matter the footnotes refer to. Perhaps this is
the only form of retraction possible: the misprint, the blank page. I can't
help feeling that Segalen would have seen in this example of what he calls creative error the ultimate palinode.
And
he rejoices in his diversity.
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