6. Self-as-Method,
Oxford Interview, August 2018, Setting the Stage
Sometimes I like to hear and participate in a discussion. Here in the library, we don’t get many comments, and I am thinking book chapters are too long, and focus on multiple topics. For this I have joined with another “discussion-site”, WhyNotThink. The real name was Why Not Think Differently, but we all opted for the abbreviated name. That site is just in its infancy, but already has a dozen provocative posts to think about. None of them are too long, and all are focused on just a few thoughts. Much of it has to do with simplifying contexts, whereby sometimes problems seem to dissolve. (Of course that’s not saying these new contexts will be adopted.) But it is interesting to see the origin of some problems. I have been posting some key points from Self-as-Method on that site, which I think are good points to ponder.
I know most people here post comments, for instance on current-event sites. I invite you to check into WhyNotThink.
BACK TO SELF AS METHOD:
Wu Qi: Continuing the conversation we started in Beijing, there are many issues we still need to unpack. I was recently reading Politics and Letters, the New Left Review’s interview with the writer Raymond Williams (1921–1988), which is divided up quite neatly. There are parts where he only talks about his parents and his family life, in which he simply narrates what happened, and there are other parts where he talks only about his work, but that sort of style doesn’t really fit our conversation. This is not quite how you operate, because you often jump from talking about your personal life into more academic questions, and to me this approach is important in and of itself. For example, last time when you were talking about Wenzhou, the question of the local gentry came up, and when you were talking about your time at Beida, you talked about your evolution as a person, so that both personal and scholarly aspects had their place in the dialogue. This interview is meant to supplement the first one, delving more deeply into some of the major themes that already came up, so I thought I would go back to the first interview instead of seeking out new topics. This may mean that we jump around a bit from question to question instead of following the course of your life as we did last time. Is this all right with you?
Xiang Biao: That’s great. It can make the book seem more like a multi-act play, which I think can be more effective, because the final impression it delivers will not be a straight flight toward a recognized destination, and more like a superposition of images. This way people can see the links between different experiences, and more readily grasp the questions or themes, which can spark discussion. If this sort of convergence winds up being one of the main features of the book, that would please me a lot. How to problematize personal experience, or how to go from experience to a scholarly question, is already an issue in itself. We can add to what we talked about last time. I mean, there is already a fair bit of material, so we can choose what we found to be worthwhile or interesting and problematize it a bit more so that the theory stands out more clearly.
Social science should help people observe the world, or navigate the world, through analysis. It is not like the natural sciences, which solve problems by discovering the laws of nature. In fact, social science is sort of the reverse of that, in that it tells you that in fact there are no definite rules, and instead everything depends on how you understand the world, how you decide to take action. You may have a big picture of how the world works, but there is nothing you would call a law. So social science uses a scientific attitude to sift through the evidence, collect materials, and see things clearly, but ultimately what it does is give you the tools you need to create a new reality or to change reality. So social science first has to do with you, and only later with society.
Wu Qi: Recently, young people really feel the need for help and guidance from older generations, but our teachers, and the older generations in general, seem to be slowly retiring from public discourse, it is getting harder and harder for young people to find organizers, mediators, protectors, and leaders even in the small worlds of academics and culture.
Xiang Biao: My counsel is not to look for iconic leadership. Leaders who know how to mobilize, excite, and encourage people to move forward are quickly transformed into icons or symbols, after which they are easily used by other people, because once you become a symbol you are a material thing, like money. We have to resist this transformation into things and symbols, and insist that leadership be a process, a kind of practice.
This has to do with the overall system. As you just said, leadership can mean protection, but this can be dangerous. If you look at leadership in universities now, it is true that they are protecting their subordinates, but this is also how they obtain resources. The university leaders are intermediaries between the system and university scholars. This is very different from what I meant by intellectual intermediaries. Intellectual intermediaries work between scholars, and between scholars and the population in general, and blend different ideas together to shape public discussions.
These are intermediaries in a horizontal sense, not vertical. So, we should not expect leaders to protect us, nor should we expect the system to protect us. What is most important is to be able to form a community of our own. In China, whether or not you can get something done depends on how determined you are, and if you have this kind of small-scale unity, you can be enough of a pest to succeed. You should not expect any one person to shield you from problems; everyone should confront difficulties together.
Our society has a strong tendency to turn people into icons and symbols—this big university, that famous person—many people get lost in this. Young people should have the courage to ask: “What is this for?” “What is good about this university, and what does that mean to me?” Whether a person is famous or not, first check out what he says. An icon relies on everyone’s support, and once the support disappears, so does the icon. Our education has filled our minds with icons and symbols, and to move past this, we need to ask obvious questions and speak in a natural voice. This may take time.
Impressions of Oxford
Wu Qi: What are your most important impressions of Oxford?
Xiang Biao: I don’t have any real emotional investment in Oxford. For me, the best thing about Oxford is the freedom it offers, plus the fact that it is very decentralized. There is in fact no Oxford University, as many people have said, because there are all of these colleges and departments, and the relationships between them are like the vertical and horizontal lines of authority in the Chinese government system. The departments are like vertical arrangements of functional departments, like China’s civil affairs department, or the finance department, or the national defense department. The colleges are horizontal arrangements, like Beijing municipality or Zhejiang province. Every college has people from different departments in it, and all professors at the university belong to one of the colleges. The legal status of the colleges is communal, and they are owned by all members of the college. Although it will never happen, members of a college could vote to sell the buildings, and then divide up the money and go home, and the college would cease to exist.
The colleges basically are places for undergraduates to take courses. For example, my college has two or three economists, who might recruit five or six students every year, who will do individual tutorials with these professors.
For undergraduates, the tutorials are the key, and they work well. When I ask students what the best thing about tutorials is, they say it is that they cannot hide. If they understood something, they understood it, and if they didn’t, they didn’t, at which point the tutor would keep after them until they finally got it. And if there was some big thing that they just could not understand, then they would read more on that subject, either by modifying the reading lists or taking different courses. They have to turn in an essay every week, which is a lot of work.
The major point of the essays is not to convey information, but instead to learn to build an argument, so the essay is also evaluated in terms of structure, grammar, and rhetoric. Sometimes they even read the essay aloud to the professor and engage in free discussion about it. This kind of training is truly good, and students arrive at an understanding of the subject that goes way beyond the level of textbook understanding. With their professor, they discuss where this or that theory came from, why the author adopted this or that interpretation at the time, and how we should understand it now. As soon as you hear a student who has been trained this way talk, you can sense their fundamental grasp of the issue and its history. When you understand the history of knowledge, knowledge takes on another life, becoming lively and interesting, and at the same time it opens up, inviting you to change it in light of current circumstances.
Social activities and eating together are another function of the colleges. Since the colleges are transdisciplinary, the person sitting to your left may be studying math, the one to your right biology, and the one across from you studying history. You talk about everything under the sun. My understanding of the Chinese artist Xu Bing* (b. 1955) came completely from two people who were at my college, one who was working on the history of art and the other on South African literature. The one working on South African literature compared Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake with Xu Bing’s art installation “A Book from the Sky,”1 which was the first time I had ever heard of Xu Bing. And the person working on the history of art invited Xu Bing to put together an exhibition at Oxford, when I finally met him.
The atmosphere at Oxford is great, but is not necessarily on the front lines of research. I wanted a place where I could feel at ease thinking about my own little world. Had I gone to the United States, I might not have been quite at ease, because they are always trying to be on the front lines, to be number one. It’s easy to get carried away, and wind up “innovating” just to “innovate.” Many social questions are old questions, and you have to get to the bottom of old questions. Constantly making up new buzzwords is tiresome.
1 Translator’s note: “A Book from the Sky” was an art installation displaying books and other printed matter in which Xu Bing used characters that looked like Chinese characters but were instead his own inventions. At first glance, or at a distance, the installation looks familiar and “traditional,” but the impact is eventually somewhat disturbing.
Talking about language is something that matters a lot to me, particularly the corruption of language. A lot of the language academics use these days has absolutely nothing to do with social experience, and most people do not know what they are talking about, but they keep spouting the same nonsense. In this sense, Oxford has had a big impact on me, because it is seen as vulgar, in bad taste, to talk like this. Someone who knows their stuff should be able to explain complex principles in simple language, and the simpler the better. A table is a table, a bench is a bench, and a coffee table is a coffee table.
This has to do with Oxford’s empiricist philosophy. For example, Isaiah Berlin’s scholarly writings were published as essays. Oxford doesn’t like standard academic writing. They believe that even the most sophisticated scholarship should be conveyed in everyday language, avoiding technical terms as much as possible, and using concepts that are easily understood, as in Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty. His prose is descriptive, although he uses metaphors now and again, like the hedgehog and the fox. He has certain images in his head and he put words to the images. These days, many of us have no images in our heads, and we just mechanically spit out data or material.
Another thing is Oxford’s self-confidence. I can’t pull it off, but it looks like fun. Britain basically has no private universities, and Oxford and Cambridge are both public, like Beida and Tsinghua. Superficially, it looks like the government runs Oxford, but in fact, Oxford runs the government. Everybody in the government went to Oxford. Governments change all the time; universities don’t. For example, my college, St. Hugh’s, was originally a woman’s college, and Aung San Suu Kyi (b. 1945) and Theresa May (b. 1956) both graduated from there. In some of the old colleges, high-ranking politicians and people in the government come to Oxford for the weekend and talk politics with undergraduates.
Isaiah Berlin originally worked on classical philosophy, and the fact that his thought had such an impact on the world, later on, was not merely because of his contribution to philosophy, but instead was due to his detailed insights and judgments of world politics, which he explained through philosophy. His use of the idea of “two concepts of liberty” in fact was aimed at the debate between the East and the West at the beginning of the Cold War. “Negative freedom” means leaving me alone; “positive freedom” means I have a project I want to pursue. When Berlin was a student, he would go on the weekend to listen to the debates between members of parliament and the Prime Minister in the college: Should we appease Germany? Should we talk to Hitler? What should be our policy toward the Soviet Union? From Chamberlain to Churchill, all of the debates were hands-on.
The elements of Isaiah Berlin’s style, linking real debates to theories, came out of an environment like Oxford’s. In fact, the function of a university is precisely to provide a safe environment to allow you to think things through. People’s personal experiences bear this out, and Oxford is famous for its diversity of thought among its undergraduates. University gives you this kind of safe space, allowing you to wonder about things, to experience things. I don’t really agree with the idea that intellectuals should be moral exemplars or life models. I don’t think this is their mission. Especially today, when the distinction between what we call intellectuals and those who are not intellectuals is so fuzzy. If this is the case, why would you be a model just because you work at a university? I feel like the mission of people who work at universities is not to create norms, but to create exceptions. Our society needs exceptions, and those working in universities should provide them. But now it seems like all university professors in China are marching in lockstep, which turns a lot of people off. First, there is nothing particularly exalted about a university professor. Second, they are set off by the fact that they get to say things that other people don’t quite dare to say because the university gives you the position and the space to say them. So, they don’t make a lot of money, but their life and work are still quite comfortable, and their role is to dare to speak out. Of course, there are still some people like this in our universities, for instance, Beida still has a few weird old-timers. But emotionally speaking, I don’t feel I’m an Oxford person. I’m still a Wenzhou person.
Wu Qi: You don’t think of yourself as a Beida person either?
Xiang Biao: I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for Beida. I only went back once after I graduated, because I lost my diploma and had to get it replaced. We all get the Beida alumni newsletter, but after I took a look at it, I had even less urge to go back to campus. The first half is full of pretentious essays on things like “moonlight on Weiming Lake*,” and the second half lists people who got rich or became big-name officials. Neither one of these does much for me, and now when I think of Weiming Lake, I think of some vice-head of a province strolling around the lake, recharging his batteries and cooling his heels, none of which interests me in the slightest. I really don’t think of myself as a Beida person, but maybe this will change when I hit 60 and get nostalgic for my youth. I am very grateful to Beida, and objectively speaking it was enormously important to me, but I don’t identify with it emotionally.
I learned a lot at Oxford, and appreciated its democracy, its decentralization, the fact that the Vice-Chancellor of the university has little power, that each department does its own thing, and that everyone does their own thing…There is one more thing that is controversial, which is that when I arrived, salaries at Oxford were like salaries in China in the 1970s and 1980s. Our wages went up with seniority, year by year, and differences between professors’ salaries and other members of the university, such as gardeners, were slight. It was a communal system, emphasizing equality instead of difference. I like that. State-funded education and health care in Britain are the same. Doctors cannot make that much money, but there are still a lot of excellent doctors who want to work here because of their identification with the profession and their feeling that what they do makes a difference. Now things are changing, because there is a lot of pressure, and if wages don’t go up, people will go to the United States. But the fact remains that, over the past eight centuries, the Oxford “commune” did a lot of work and produced important foundational thinking.
From my point of view, this high-level “commune” is a good thing. Otherwise, it’s never-ending. When universities start handing out bonuses and cash it creates an unhealthy environment. Those that get the money always think they could have gotten more, while those who didn’t get the money are of course unhappy. It works better if everyone is the same. My father never understood this, and always said that if things are equal then nobody will work. It’s true that some people don’t work, and don’t publish. But universities, societies, and individual lives are all ecological systems, and everyone has different capacities. Some people are good teachers who don’t do research. Some people cannot publish, but they are great to talk to, which is a rich resource for everyone. Without the pressure of competition, everyone’s individual talents can be fully expressed.
It just occurred to me that Oxford did undergo a huge change, something that will surprise of a lot of Chinese people. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Oxford changed from being a teaching university to being a research university. For the preceding 800 years, Oxford was mainly a teaching institution, the dons felt that tutorials were their main duty, and research was extra, or an expression of interest, but not their primary focus. It is only in the past 20 years that getting grants and publishing have become increasingly important aspects of work. Many old faculty members object strongly to this, arguing that their primary duty is to train young minds. They ask how important it is to be smart and write lots of books as an individual. The key is in who you are training. Really remarkable people can change the course of human history by educating their students and writing two or three articles over the course of their career.
Wu Qi: If you feel a sense of distance to both Beida and Oxford based on your experiences there, why is your identification as a Wenzhou person stronger?
Xiang Biao: To tell the truth, this is also constructed, and did not occur naturally. The way I look at things, even today, is similar to how people who make cigarette lighters in Wenzhou look at things (of course if I was really running a factory, whether I would get along with the workers is an open question). I got along with the people in Zhejiang Village with no trouble at all, and while I was in Beijing, I spent most of my time with them, so if I identify with anyone, it is with the group of people in Zhejiang Village. Most of them had a middle school education and are over 50 now, so they were a bit older than I was. If my family had problems, I would seek them out first. They are always asking me how much money I make, and when I tell them, they say, “Oh my God, that little? Why don’t you come back to China?” They always worry that I’m too thin, and take me out to eat or give me fruit. They take me to buy clothes and my leather jacket was a gift from them. They are like my big brothers. I’m like the little brother who did pretty well, went off to university and came back, so big brother wants to do right by little brother, but he doesn’t really understand what little brother does. It’s that kind of relationship. They spend a lot of time playing mahjong, which I don’t play. Actually, that’s an obstacle, and if I played better mahjong, we’d be even closer. We usually go out to eat and talk about business or about mutual acquaintances, how the relationship between this person and that person is, who went bust, who is doing well, who made a fortune…For me, these kinds of talks are a way to continue my social research.
Wu Qi: Are these the kind of exchanges you are most comfortable with? This kind of social research masquerading as small talk?
Xiang Biao: Not completely. There are still ways in which we are not the same, so I can’t completely relax, and I’m always sort of in the interview mode. At the same time, they provide me with a lot of information, so it turns into a kind of chat.
I have an affinity for intellectual populism, like we see in the reforms in Russia in the 1860s. I don’t really know where this affinity comes from, but perhaps as a child, I felt that I was always in the shadow of parental authority, so I developed a rebellious attitude toward any authority-holder. This is complicated. I am surely no revolutionary, because in many cases I am cowardly, and in this sense, I am a typical petty-bourgeois populist.
Wu Qi: Ha, ha! You pinned a label on yourself.
Xiang Biao: It’s true. In 1930s Shanghai I might have been like that, a sort of crazy petty-bourgeois populist, what was known as the left-wing youth, but in fact, I would not have been a revolutionary, because I look down on or even detest authority in general. But I don’t have the feelings of the petty-bourgeoisie. Ever since I was young, I have been unsentimental. I don’t celebrate my birthday, don’t have the habit of writing letters or cards or keeping small animals. It’s a thoroughly material existence, focused on saving and not wasting…I still remember when I was in elementary school, one of my mother’s colleagues came over, and said she was buying a birthday present for her son. This made a deep impression on me, and I felt like it was something only foreigners do. When I got to Britain, I discovered that the British are equally unsentimental, and they keep a stiff upper lip no matter what happens, without making a fuss. I’m not sure what all of this has to do with what we were talking about, but it in fact helped to mold part of my academic style because I am not too sensitive to individual feelings.
A Sense of Distance and Directness
Wu Qi: This came up in Global “Body Shopping” as well. When you were explaining the reasons behind Indian tech workers’ migration abroad, you basically started from a political economy standpoint, and paid less attention to choices having to do with religion, culture, or individual feelings. In the preface to the new volume, you yourself admit that you perhaps overlooked emotional factors.
Xiang Biao: In fact, a woman friend of mine from Australia pointed this out, and said I wrote as if the tech workers were all like Dr. Spock in Star Trek, always calculating, without feelings. Last week I was reading the biography of the Oxford philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–1989), and the author wondered if Ayer perhaps had autism, because it seems he understood nothing about other people’s feelings. Maybe I have a little of this. It is strange, and I still don’t quite understand it. When I went to Oxford to study anthropology, I didn’t get along that well with the other students, because most students of anthropology have romantic feelings about people from different cultures, and really want to understand those people’s lives and feelings, but I don’t share that feeling at all. I have no romanticism.
Wu Qi: Over the course of all your years of study, reading, writing, researching, and teaching, you never completely identified with a particular group, an academic school, or an ideology?
Xiang Biao: That’s true in a sense. So how do I think, if I don’t engage with theory? This takes us back to the subject of my gentry temperament because what I always want to do is to observe and poke around, looking to see if there are any problems. The fact that I don’t feel particularly attracted to any one theory is surely not because I am unusually independent, or that I decided that I was different after thoroughly examining the theory in question. I don’t really know much about theory, and don’t care that much; my mind just doesn’t work that way. Of course, the ideal situation would be to be able to think like that, but also to link up with different schools of thought, to push theory ever further along.
Wu Qi: You talked before about your lack of mastery of the scholarly literature, and when we look at your writing, especially the preface I just mentioned or later pieces, you seem to be conscious of a certain distance from theory, in a way that scholars rarely talk about. How did this consciousness develop?
Xiang Biao: There may be two levels to this: spontaneity and self- reflection. Avoiding theoretical language means privileging direct description, describing things as they are rather than describing them through theory. I work this way because I have a spontaneous interest in directness, at least aesthetically. Looking from another angle there is nothing unique about this; ninety-five percent of people are like me and prefer directness, so the question is, why did other people later move away from directness? From my final years at Beida through my initial years at Oxford, this kind of directness did not seem to be a problem, and my Ph.D. dissertation was very direct too. After I finished my dissertation, it was maybe ten years ago that I felt that I needed to change and engage more with theory. After that, I became self-consciously direct, because I know now that I am incapable of doing anything different. Then I also became more appreciative of directness. To be direct there has to be substance. As I mentioned before, the pop music of the 1960s and 1970s was often direct, but with strong content, because without it, directness simply feels uncouth. So, what John Lennon and Bob Dylan wrote was very direct, for instance, “Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too.” These lyrics are really revolutionary and powerful. There are also examples like John Berger and Xu Bing.
I find Xu Bing’s art interesting, and his explanations are even more interesting. He uses very direct language to explain the quite complicated thinking behind his art. His explanation of how he did “A Book from the Sky” left a deep impression on me. The work is philosophical, and the feeling you get is that of tectonic plates moving. In “A Book from the Sky,” the Chinese characters look entirely familiar, but when you look at them closely, you realize that you don’t know them, and all of a sudden you feel a distance between yourself and writing, or between yourself and your cultural existence, but you can’t put your finger on what the distance actually is. In fact, Xu Bing achieved this through a direct, simple life experience. When he was a boy, his mother worked in the Beida library, so he would look at books there all day, and he later got interested in binding and engraving. He engraved all of the characters for “A Book of the Sky,” using a Song dynasty process. He says the basic idea of creating a lot of imaginary characters was sort of a joke, but to make the joke into an art form that made people think required taking it seriously, he had to engrave all the characters, one by one, with utmost seriousness. He spent an entire summer engraving the imaginary characters. And that’s all he said. He did not add complicated theory. Why is it serious and not a joke? Because only after you’ve invested labor in something does the contrast between true and false, real and fake, familiar and unfamiliar became a serious question.
Another of his works, “Phoenix,” consists of two enormous birds constructed out of things that had been discarded or abandoned at construction sites; he insisted that all of the materials be these. In his imagination, this was China: a rising phoenix, beautiful and majestic, but wounded inside, because, on the work sites, people had died, or were still waiting to be paid.
If you don’t look closely, all you see are two birds, and it’s not all that interesting. In terms of the form of the objects, he could have achieved the same visual effect with any other construction method. But the reason he could explain what he did in such simple, direct language was because behind the visible art is the content Xu Bin brings—his labor and his understanding of China.
John Berger is more classical, and his directness comes from his depth. The strength that you feel from his writings comes from the effort that he invests in seeing, and the earnest interest and concern he expresses, which is how he achieves his directness.
Wu Qi: When I started reading your books, I felt a strong sense of rebellion, a kind of rebellion against the mainstream theory. Maybe this comes from the same sort of effort that Berger invested in his projects.
Xiang Biao: This evolved over a long period of time. Do you mean that what I write is different from what other people write? Or that I am going against current discourse on purpose?
Wu Qi: I felt like you were completely aware that what you were doing was different.
Xiang Biao: Maybe so. But my rebellion was not a conscious expression of opposition to current discourse, I was motivated by a more general spirit of rebellion. This is a spirit of seeking self-awareness and developing one’s own voice, which is something I emphasize in my courses, the idea that all of social science is about cultivating a sense of agency. Having a sense of agency does not mean thinking “I’m fantastic” or “I’m special,” nothing like that. Instead, it has to do with being a person in the world, and your relationship with that world, what you see when you look at the world. Even if what you see is not necessarily right, you still need to be clear about your way of thinking.
Professors at Oxford were on strike last semester. When I was talking with the students about whether they should support the professors, I quoted something Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said in an interview. She said that she thought it was problematic that German students had taken to the streets to protest the Vietnam War. Her point was that you need to think clearly about what your relationship to that war is. Why did the war provoke such a strong reaction in the United States? One important reason was that at the time, people were drafted into the army, which meant that a lot of middle-class kids went off to war, which got everyone all worked up. After the war, the liberal economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) suggested making military service voluntary instead of mandatory, a way of solving employment problems. At first, this looked like a simple technical adjustment, but it wound up having a huge impact on world politics. In a volunteer army, the soldier is paid wages. It is like a militia, and this kind of army cannot be a revolutionary force.
When the draft was in place, soldiers were citizens first, and then warriors, and were in a position to discuss the idea of the war, a problem that went away when the army became voluntary. What Arendt meant was that, prior to this change, young Americans were protesting because they might have to go to war the next day, which made them think about the war and about protecting their own lives. What did this have to do with young people in Germany? I feel like this was a gutsy question to ask. Even if their opposition to the war was sincere, what material interest was in play in the case of the German youth? Only if you can give a clear answer to this question will your conduct be meaningful. The same logic applies to research, in that it is important that you be clear on your relationship with the world. So, I told the students that they could not support the strike simply because they agreed with the professors. They first needed to be clear on their own relationship with the professors and to the principles supported by the professors.
As for how to make a method out of “directness,” it means: first, there must be content; second, there must be a certain punch or impact; and third, you have to write straightforwardly. So first, you need a rich accumulation of things to say about a subject; it won’t do to make superficial, general statements. In your understanding, you need to explain how your subject matter is constituted from the inside out. In class, I make a distinction between “explaining” and “explaining away.” “Explaining away” is self-contained; the goal is to settle something once and for all. A classic example might be the “push–pull theory” in studies of population movement or the relation of supply and demand in economics: there’s supply and there’s demand, so things happen. This doesn’t explain things, but rather explains them away. A true explanation asks where does the demand really come from? It’s the same for supply—where do you get the resources? You have to look inside to see how things happen and where the conflicts are. Once you capture the inner dynamics of things, your writing will have more punch. John Berger has a book called King: A Street Story, which is about homeless people who have a dog named King, and Berger writes about the world of these homeless people through the eyes of the dog. There is a kind of mutual dependency between the people and the dog, a kind of tenderness and love. It’s sad, but the homeless are not depicted as completely helpless victims, but rather as people who build their own world, of which the dog is a part. This made me understand things differently. It is very direct, because Berger starts with the most obvious experiences of the homeless men and uses no theory at all, but the result has a powerful impact.
Third, you let your thoughts flow from the inside out, and vividly describe your feelings of discovery. Straightforward writing cannot be just a style of writing. Medical instructions are straightforward too, but they don’t have the same impact. So, you have to convey to the reader what you felt as you worked through things.
Anthropologists and Their World
Wu Qi: The three levels of “directness” you just mentioned—shouldn’t they be the whole point of anthropology as a discipline? Shouldn’t anthropology be in the business of getting deeply into a subject, discovering its inner workings, and working out an explanation? Also, in your essay “Responses and Reflections—How we Narrate the Present and Grasp History, With Further Thoughts about the Public Role of Anthropology,” you mention anthropology’s anxiety, which is that it seems to be mired in concerns about “empathy” and “understanding.” Why are we still talking about this today? Why is anthropology still “anxious?” Is everybody staying on the outside? Is no one directly confronting the question?
Xiang Biao: The dilemma of anthropology is fairly easy to explain, but the question you raise is bigger: why is directness still important in all academic discourse, for instance in literature? Here I want to mention specifically non-fiction writing. For me, this style of writing can be critical. I came of age in the 1980s reading famous works of reportage, which were fairly elitist judgments of history. Today’s non-fiction of course is not standing in judgment of history but is instead focused on the writer’s anxieties and dilemmas. I feel like the directness of this is valuable. Some time in the future, we should bring people together from the fields of literature, media studies, anthropology, and the world of NGOs to develop this style further. Anthropology’s problem is relatively easy to explain because its starting point as a discipline is colonialism. Westerners wanted to explain other cultures, and later on, anthropology gave birth to sociology. Human society had existed for a long time, so why did we suddenly start wondering about the structure of society a little more than a century ago? Because we had always governed ourselves through religion or customs and habits, and never focused on our own social life as an object of study. Objectifying oneself is not a natural thing to do, and the stimulus for it came from colonialism, and then from anthropology. So, one of the earliest sociology textbooks, published in 1881, was written by Charles Letourneau and was called Sociology: Based Upon Ethnography. It discussed societies from around the world, a vision that allowed them to discover differences between the West and the rest, after which they started explaining where the modern West came from. This eventually gave rise to the “tradition and modernity” framework.
After WWII, scholars started to think that this wasn’t right, and anthropology then became a tool for self-reflection and criticism of Western civilization. At the outset, there was the idea of “noble savages,” the argument that savages were loftier than we are, as they had not been sullied by industrial civilization, a romantic Western way of thinking. In the 1960s, this way of thinking came to be politicized, and the argument was that capitalism is wrong, and the “savages” are closer to nature and humanity. This way of thinking is still alive and kicking today. So, in the West, the main concern in anthropology is an academic concern, namely whether Western scholars truly can go and describe other cultures. What does “understanding” mean after all? Anthropology merged with psychology and philosophy, still seeking to explain how to understand other people and other cultures, while at the same time it reflected on Western culture. Anthropology thus became very reflexive and very refined.
But this depth and detail were not the same thing as the “penetration” I have been talking about, because the starting point for penetration is not to understand what people like and dislike, love and hate, but instead to get into a question and its internal contradictions and the emphasis is much more on how things are related. For example, for the migrant workers who were recently “cleaned out” of Beijing, how do they feel about their expulsion and about their relationship with Chinese society or their relationships with other urban residents? Other sources of knowledge can enrich your understanding, for example, their feelings about time, or their feelings about being cold in the dead of night, but understanding these feelings in and of themselves is not the goal. So, my feeling is that anthropology’s original apolitical character is in fact related to what later came to be its overly political character, the fact that it argues that everything is about power relationships, including anthropological practice itself, which meant that it could never get a clear focus on the object of its study. In fact, politics is a fairly simple thing, which basically consists of dividing up various interests among various groups, even if how this happens, in reality, is of course always complicated. But if you don’t focus on people’s positions and the process of distribution, and only look at relations of power diffused in everyday life, these are everywhere, which means that there is no way to get a clear fix on things, and anthropology winds up being not direct enough.
Wu Qi: When you meet anthropologists from China or from around the world, do you have a sense of community?
Xiang Biao: Not much.
Wu Qi: But in your writings in recent years, like your work on Hong Kong, on sociologists in the sent-down youth period, “suspension,”*1 “work holes,”*2 etc., including your media interviews, you have been making suggestions to that community, which gives the impression that you are calling for some sort of action, calling for a certain intellectual community?
Xiang Biao: In fact, I’m hoping to convey those suggestions to people in general, and if that doesn’t work, then I’ll aim for young students first. That is my goal. As for my colleagues, since I am not too familiar with what they are doing, I have a hard time getting a dialogue going. There is a problem here. If academic work is solely a dialogue between colleagues, then you are writing solely for me to comment on you. This is how a friend of mine describes the dilemma of Western anthropology: an anthropologist says something so that his colleague will have something to say back. If I had to choose between going to a conference and going to a village to do fieldwork, I would certainly get more out of going to the village.
1 Translator’s note: “‘Suspension’ is the translation of the Chinese term xuanfu, which has been widely used in public discussions in China since the mid-2010s. Suspension indicates a state of being in which people move frequently, conduct intensive labor, and pause routine life—in order to benefit fast and then quickly escape. People keep moving, with no end in sight, instead of changing their current conditions, of which they disapprove. As a result, frantic entrepreneurial energy coexists with political resignation.” See Xiang Biao, “Suspension: Seeking Agency for Change in the Hypermobile World,” Pacific Affairs: Volume 94, No. 2 June 2021, p. 233.
2 Translator’s note: “Work holes” describes a situation in which people work hard at jobs that they do not enjoy. They treat work as a hole: jump in, work intensively in order to save enough therefore to jump out of the hole as quickly as possible. See Xiang Biao. 2021. “Pocketed Proletarianization: Why There Is No Labor Politics in the ‘World’s Factory.’” In Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Non-citizenship, eds. Catherine Ramirez, Sylvanna Falcon, Juan Poblete, Steven McKay, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer. Rutgers University Press: 161–175.
Wu Qi: Have you ever wondered why it is that you don’t feel a sense of community with other scholars despite being a part of that system?
Xiang Biao: This is going to sound a little arrogant, but I feel like their division of labor is too specialized, because my strong point is not in specialization or in refining an idea. In terms of technique, I don’t have that ability. My feeling is that depth in social sciences is not something that you can grind out, but the depth comes from immersing yourself in the facts so that you understand the issue well, you grasp it firmly, you interrogate it from every angle. Of course, your logic has to be tight, and your data has to be solid—that’s when things get deep. But you don’t achieve true depth through that kind of linear accumulation of theories in words.
Wu Qi: Have you ever been criticized by a colleague for this?
Xiang Biao: No, because I have never been a threat to anyone. I’m not worth criticism, and I’m not being modest, that is just the fact of the matter. People should go do something else, or criticize someone who is more important.
Wu Qi: My impression is that you welcome criticism, and in the essay we already mentioned, “Responses and Reflections,” you were excited to have someone criticize you on a specific point.
Xiang Biao: That’s right, it had to do with my response. That criticism was excellent, it was from a student who said that in terms of style, my essay was uneven—the first part and the second part were different in their angle of analysis and in writing style—because I was looking at facts from a macro-historical perspective instead of starting with the facts themselves, which made my position less firm and consistent. I completely agree. There was another person doing cultural studies at Lingnan University, and his criticism was that my essay was “blindly falling into the mythology of the Party-State,” and he had a point, too. These were both very specific. Since I think I’m not worthy of criticism, when I get some it’s great, it’s a kind of praise.
Wu Qi: I have also noticed that when young people ask naïve or immature questions, you still answer them. Is this from a sense of responsibility, or is it something else?
Xiang Biao: With young people, it is not at all a sense of responsibility, but rather that I am curious. I don’t find their questions naïve at all. We all have different life experiences, family backgrounds, genders, and ages, which means that we naturally look at things differently. One student wrote me a letter saying that I was always saying “you’re right” when responding to a question, which none of her friends ever said. This was really interesting. She was quite young and sensitive to the smallest detail. I had never noticed that I said that all the time. This may be because academics have the habit of discussing on the basis of affirmations, so in conferences we are always saying “you’re right” whether or not the person is actually right. So even that observation was stimulating.
Non-Fiction Writing
Wu Qi: You mentioned non-fiction writing before, as well as your interest in reading reportage literature when you were young. The directness and the willingness to discuss issues found in that type of writing had an important impact on you, and a fairly positive one. And it is true that recently, young people have become interested in non-fiction writing, a lot of it online, as in the case of Fan Yusu, whom we have already mentioned. But I have noticed some changes in this recent wave of writing, even if the directness is still there. It may be nothing more than changes in style, or in language, a desire to express themselves in more modern terms, but the richness, the punch of it is slipping away. There is a tendency to tell one person’s story completely from their perspective, without explaining why they chose that story, why it is worth talking about. Or they might talk about some collective event, and weave together eight or ten distinct pieces of information, the way journalists do, presenting everything as objective facts that cannot be disputed. You mentioned a kind of gravity when you talked about the gentry’s concern for the future, for ethical judgments, but this is completely absent in today’s non-fiction writing, and in fact, largely absent from much of contemporary society.
Xiang Biao: This is interesting, and I would like to add a bit from my perspective. If you include your own vision in writing, it will add a sense of gravity, but even more importantly, it will give the text a soul, so that it is no longer a mechanical exercise, but something informed by vision and soul. Vision and soul will also help to determine what weight to give to various aspects of your work. In the example you just mentioned, it would be very difficult to write out the perspectives of eight people, and it would be even more difficult to put them in one text. How about giving it a soul? One way of doing this is to consciously explain the positions of these eight people; the eight individuals represent eight positions. A certain position is closer to the heart of the matter, another is more peripheral, and so on. We should give them different weighted values. The weighting is not a matter of a theoretical judgment but is instead an empirical assessment—it’s descriptive. Social science is primarily about description. Describing things clearly is the greatest contribution. Because what the world needs you to do is to provide clear descriptions of complex things.
We should also add technique to the mix because it really matters— things are done through techniques. These days people talk about the materiality of knowledge, saying that craftsmanship is interesting. This is good. We should emphasize craftsmanship, emphasize concrete, material, and clear observations of our surroundings. We should not jump into lofty abstraction too quickly.
Wu Qi: I wonder if you could be a bit more specific about the idea of weighted value, or maybe give an example to illustrate it? Because an issue has many aspects, there is judgment involved in deciding which aspect is most important. So how do you decide when you are assigning weighted values?
Xiang Biao: Of course, this will be influenced by the author’s value judgments, but for me, the ideal situation is to use empirical observation. Take the example of peasants who deposit complaint petitions.1 Do they do this because they are angry that village land has been occupied, or are they thinking that if they make some noise, the problem will be resolved quickly, or maybe they know that once they file the petition the county will give them some money, or is it a way to bargain over the amount of money? It may be that there are several factors, but we will use empirical observation to assign different weights, and figure out if finally, it is a moral political action or a utilitarian calculation. Another example. The Beijing government is now (2018) closing down wholesale markets in Zhejiang Village, and the process of how the government will compensate individual stall-owners in the markets is extremely complex.
1 Translator’s note: Filing complaint petitions (shangfang *) is one of the few ways to legally express grievances, especially in rural China.
We won’t be able to give a clear account unless we know how to weigh the different aspects of the process. Local governments received money from the central authorities to compensate those merchants whose stalls would be removed. Merchant representatives negotiated with the local government as they suspected that the local government did not pass on the compensations from the center in its entirety. This was meant to be a grass-roots, democratic process. But what happened was that once someone was elected as a representative, they would tell the government that for a certain amount of money, they would help keep other merchants from making trouble. And when the merchants found out about this, they tried to prevent the representative from playing this kind of trick. How do you understand this representative?
Was he always like this? Or did he become this way in the course of negotiations, or was somebody putting pressure on him? When I talk about weighted variables, I mean that you have to pay attention to the complexity, and then separate the principal from the secondary contradictions. You don’t deduce this from a set of principles, but instead from paying attention to these concrete details. You basically develop this ability through experience, gradually learning how to do it.
Wu Qi: A little while ago you said that the problem with anthropology is easy to explain, but if we consider knowledge production in general, problems are still there. For example, journalists usually talk about interview techniques and the spatial arrangement of their texts, just like professors talk about how to publish their papers and measure their impact. It’s a matter of techniques and practice. However, if our discussions stay at this level, we are a long way away from the original purpose of these professions. We may wind up with technically skilled journalists or scholars, but what will they have discovered? What problems will they have solved? It seems to me that there are fewer discussions within these occupations about ideas and values, and that the general public is not interested in those technical discussions.
Xiang Biao: This finally has a lot to do with what you are concerned with. But what caused the loss of concern may be the lack of robust means to specify what the concern is. The question is how to produce concrete outputs driven by concerns, for which technical issues are important—the two aren’t mutually exclusive. I feel like one of the negative inheritances of the 1980s was the people’s concerns were blown out of proportion, while they did not take methodology seriously. Then the concerns became empty. Gentry naturally know how to solve this problem, because their interests and their concerns are focused on something close at hand.
Sometimes you have to let go when you specify your concerns. I think you should combine your concerns with a sense of curiosity, and with a tolerance for contradictions and ambiguities. You cannot allow yourself to think that anything with contradictions or ambiguities is less good, because life is full of them, so you need to be excited about ambiguities.
Large concerns of course are part of lofty ideals, but in practice, you often have to put ideals aside and explore the reasons for the existence of what is not ideal. You must pursue your concerns step by step, so I always stress operationalization. The online news portal HK01 once interviewed me, and the title they gave the interview was “The Anthropologist who Makes Cigarette Lighters,” because I’m from Wenzhou, which is known for making cigarette lighters. For people in Wenzhou, the most important thing is to produce something. The basic idea is that all of your theories and thinking should be connected to “making something.” When you make something, you are limited by all kinds of material conditions, and our agency and freedom are limited. So, what we can do is let the given material forces play a bigger role. For example, a group of Wenzhou peasants made money at the end of the 1970s by making meal tickets. They knew the college entrance exam was going to be restored, so they started making plastic meal tickets.2 When they started, raw materials were a big challenge as they were expensive. They got leftover bits of plastic from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Shanghai. The SOEs were simply throwing these away, but they were perfect for making meal tickets. All this could lead to deep theoretical analysis, as this touches on the relations between SOEs and market exchange, between SOEs and rural industry, and the question of mixed property ownership, etc. But these theoretical meanings became visible only in the process of “doing.” You won’t be able to see these subtle, but at the same time quite important, facts if you stick to your concerns and do not make open-ended observations.
Wu Qi: If we extend this idea of “doing,” does it mean something for anthropology? Or more broadly, for contemporary intellectuals and their attitude toward society, or for their work methods?
2 Translator’s note: Plastic meal tickets were used instead of cash in university dining halls.
Xiang Biao: I think it should. One of the most important changes in China now, especially after the expansion of college enrollment in the late 1990s, is that with the increase in family investment in education, and the changes in information technology and social media, the distinction between intellectuals and non-intellectuals has become blurred among young people. The boundary between doing and thinking is almost gone. This is a really good thing, and we should break down the distinction as much as possible, because everyone is an intellectual.
In light of this, what should people like us do? Since other people don’t have the time to organize information systematically, we should put information together to form a picture of reality. Another important thing is to seek out hope and capacity in what other people are doing. Social change after all is a social process, moved by social forces, and one of the few things intellectuals can do is to mobilize people. Mobilization means that the strength is with other people, and all you are doing is helping them to realize the strength that they have, which means bringing latent hope and capacity to the surface. In the language of the Communist Party, this is called “guiding” work. Its assumption is that the ability, the hope, and the future already exist in society, but you have to dig for them. This means that looking for contradictions and searching for capacity are one and the same thing. Seeing contradictions means understanding both sides of an issue, and the conflict between these two sides is what drives change.
For many thoughtful young people who are not professional intellectuals, their own doing is the subject of their thinking. They should think through their relation to society, which I summarized somewhere as “accepting fate without giving up.”* Since Sartre, we have all understood that existence precedes essence, which means that your nature is not fixed, and your actions decide what kind of person you are. No one is born a woman; you become a woman through social processes. Looking at life this way is liberating. But the problem with the current situation is that everyone feels they are completely free to do anything. They want to get famous, have a family, make money, pursuing all of this through their freedom. They overlook an important question, which is “Who are you?” Everyone has their history, their family background, and their educational experience. The entire social order accords everyone a place, which is difficult to change, and you need to understand clearly who you are. “Accepting fate” means understanding who you are in terms of your history and your place in the social structure. Women are molded into becoming women by social processes before they know it, and it is no simple matter to reverse it. The social and historical forces that are molding you are much stronger than any individual effort. A child from a poor family can become rich, but simply rejecting your fate as a poor person will not solve the problem, and in fact, we know that this kind of thinking leads to many psychological and social problems. So, the key is to grasp clearly where you are in society, understanding why it is still so hard to be a woman or to be poor. Then, how should you be a woman? How should you be poor? How do you keep pushing back against the forces of society and history without throwing in the towel? China’s LGBT community has set a good example. They know that their lives will not be easy, but they have embraced that life. They are not praying for their lives to change but instead continuing to fight and push back against the way things are.
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