丰子恺的画（六）：大教室

Terry Eagleton's talk of Spivak/ 大唐与后殖民主义

大唐那会儿，怎么没有扶桑、新罗或安南的文人写一篇类似的文章来解气呢？

在中华帝国文武鼎盛的时候，“白环西献，楛矢东来，夜郎滇池，解辫请职，朝鲜昌海，蹶角受化”，有许多扶桑、新罗、安南人留学长安。就如同当今来自天竺的 Spivak 是先留学再执教美利坚一样，历史上的他们虽然与大汉不同文不同种，却都想在长安讨口饭吃。虽然是“长安居，大不易”，那些来自扶桑、新罗、安南的留学生到底是舍不得长安的，况且日子久了，也有成“腕儿”的可能。

Eagleton 这篇文章，快人快语，对美利坚这座“长安”城和里面的外来腕儿们并不另眼相看。不过 Eagleton 有这样做的本钱：他是“大”英帝国的人，与大美利坚同文同种，却又偏隔着海。

Terry Eagleton/ In the Gaudy Supermarket

A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak · Harvard, 448 pp, £30.95

...

It might just be, of course, that the point of a wretched sentence like 'the in-choate in-fans ab-original para-subject cannot be theorised as functionally completely frozen in a world where teleology is schematised into geo-graphy' is to subvert the bogus transparency of Western Reason. Or it might be that discussing public matters in this hermetically private idiom is more a symptom of that Reason than a solution to it. Like most questions of style, Spivak's obscurantism is not just a question of style. Its duff ear for tone and rhythm, its careless way with verbal texture, its theoretical soundbites ('Derrida has staged the homo-eroticity of European philosophy in the left-hand column of Glas'), spring quite as much from the commodified language of the US as they do from some devious attempt to undermine it. A sentence which begins 'At 26, graphing himself into the seat of Aufhebung, Marx sees the necessity for this critical enterprise' combines the vocabulary of Hegel with the syntax of Hello! Spivak's language, lurching as it does from the high-toned to the streetwise, belongs to a culture where there is less and less middle ground between the portentous and the homespun, the rhetorical and the racy. One whiff of irony or humour would prove fatal to its self-regarding solemnity. In the course of this book, Spivak writes with great theoretical brilliance on Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Mahasweta Devi; but she pays almost no attention to their language, form or style. Like the old-fashioned literary scholarship it despises, the most avant-garde literary theory turns out to be a form of good old-fashioned content analysis.

...

What some might call dialectical thinking is for others a pathological inability to stick to the point. The line between post-colonial hybridity and Post-Modern anything-goes-ism is embarrassingly thin. As feminist, deconstructionist, post-Marxist and post-colonialist together, Spivak seems reluctant to be left out of any theoretical game in town. Multiplying one's options is an admirable theoretical posture, as well as a familiar bit of US market philosophy. For Spivak to impose a coherent narrative on her materials, even if her title spuriously suggests one, would be the sin of teleology, which banishes certain topics just as imperialism sidelines certain peoples. But if cultural theorists these days can bound briskly from allegory to the Internet, in a kind of intellectual version of Attention Deficit Disorder, it is partly because they are free from the inevitably constricting claims of a major political project. Lateral thinking is thus not altogether easy to distinguish from loss of political purpose.

...

If she rightly distinguishes between ethnic minority and colonised nation, she fails to drive home the point that a good deal of post-colonialism has been a kind of 'exported' version of the US's own grievous ethnic problems, and thus yet another instance of God's Own Country, one of the most insular on earth, defining the rest of the world in terms of itself. For this exportation to get under way, certain imports known as Third World intellectuals are necessary to act as its agents; yet though Spivak has reason to know this better than most, she never pauses long enough in this book to unpack its implications. To do so would require some systematic critique; but systematic critique is for her more part of the problem than the solution, as it is for all those privileged enough not to stand in need of rigorous knowledge. These individuals used to be known as the gentry, and are nowadays known as post-structuralists. If she can be splendidly scathing about 'white boys talking post-coloniality', or the alliance between cultural studies, liberal multiculturalism and transnational capitalism, these wholesome morsels surface only to vanish again into the thick stew of her text.

...

There are some kinds of criticism - Orwell's would do as an example - which are a good deal more politically radical than their bluffly commonsensical style would suggest. For all his dyspepsia about shockheaded Marxists, not to speak of his apparent willingness to shop Communists to the state, Orwell's politics are much more far-reaching than his conventionally-minded prose would suggest. With much post-colonial writing, the situation is just the reverse. Its flamboyant theoretical avant-gardism conceals a rather modest political agenda. Where it ventures political proposals at all, which is rare enough, they hardly have the revolutionary élan of its scandalous speculations on desire or the death of Man or the end of History. This is a feature shared by Derrida, Foucault and others like them, who veer between a cult of theoretical 'madness' or 'monstrosity' and a more restrained, reformist sort of politics, retreating from the one front to the other depending on the direction of the critical fire.

...

Deconstruction can indeed be a politically destabilising manoeuvre, but devotees like Gayatri Spivak ought to acknowledge its displacing effect, too. Like much cultural theory, it can allow one to speak darkly of subversion while leaving one's actual politics only slightly to the left of Edward Kennedy's. For some post-colonial theorists, for example, the concept of emancipation is embarrassingly old-hat. For some American feminists, socialism is as alien a territory as Alpha Centauri.

...

Marxism, for Spivak if not for its founder, is a speculation rather than a programme, and can only have violent consequences if used for 'predictive social engineering'. Like the thought of strangling your flat-mate, in other words, it is all very well as long as you don't act on it. The current system of power can be ceaselessly 'interrupted', deferred or 'pushed away', but to try to get beyond it altogether is the most credulous form of utopianism.

...

copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007

“十可惜”

“十可惜說”出現在日本元祿十二年(1699﹐康熙38年)的《事林廣記》刻本裡﹐在丁集卷五的“勸學門”下。這個日本古版本的字很清晰﹐但是很多字的右下角有日文的假名音讀標記﹐是為了方便古代日人閱讀。由於是日人翻刻﹐漢字也時有因變形而難認的情形。

類書《事林廣記》的內容也真是五花八門﹐儼然一個囊括萬有的宋元“維基百科”（wikipedia）。作為大型民間類書﹐它求廣度而不求深度﹐雖然那時沒有“點擊率”一說﹐但同理是希望以內容的廣泛與通俗來在市井民間求得讀者。《事林廣記》的現有三個海內外版本﹐內容差別不小﹐詳細情況不贅述了。我手頭的中華書局本子收了兩種﹐就是這個日本版本和元朝的鄭氏積誠堂版本。我也細翻了鄭氏積誠堂版本﹐在那裡面找不到“十可惜說”﹐更沒有“勸學門”。

日本元祿刻本裡﹐繁簡字也常常混用。為了方便﹐我這裡統一抄成繁體字﹐並加以句讀。原文輯錄如下﹕

十可惜說

予常自訟。少年不學。寡聞淺識。悵悵何之。今老矣。無所用於世。然知不學之過。亦可以救其失。嘗於里閈間見諸後生各盛飾其衣巾。為闤闠之游。因語之曰。先生相與言則以仁與義。市井相與言則以財與利。當此妙齡。自荒干嬉。古人輕尺璧重寸陰。言君子當競辰來之遲去之速。棄而不學。重可惜也。亦聞昌黎先生有此日足可以惜之篇。因為十可惜之說以告之。左朝奉大夫延平張憲武著。

古人貧不能自給。有帶經而鋤者。有負薪拾黍而誦者。今之人飽食煖衣自暇自逸。一可惜也。
古人不遠千里負笈求師。今人有賢父兄教之。而不從。或閭里間有賢師友不知親近。二可惜也。
古人手自鈔寫。夜以繼日。常苦無書。今人有見成印本。藏之萬卷。堆案盈几。不知誦讀。三可惜也。
古人三年通一經。三十而五經立。自少唯以讀書為務。今當少壯。有書不讀。日月逝矣。四可惜也。
古人聚螢映雪讀書。今人當簡編可舒卷之時。有燈火之可親。而遊談無根。博弈是娛。五可惜也。
人之生有不見日月者。有不聞雷霆者。今後生耳聰目明。又各稟智慧之質。不知讀書。則趨向之不知。義禮之不講。殆將與聾者盲者等爾。是為六可惜也。
人有身則有丁。有丁則有役。今後生或有父母代其勞。或承閥門之舊。無丁役之籍。然有書不讀。與閭間畎畝人等爾。七可惜也。
人患家世之舊不聞詩禮之言。故或為農圃或為工商。今人生儒家。少襲箕裘之緒。有書不讀。使父祖之業至此而墜。八可惜也。
人患藏修無所。今有上庠有鄉校可以從師。然巍冠博帶出悅紛華。名曰士人。其實一經不通。一辭不措。有玷先聖。九可惜也。
人有君臣父子之大倫。忠孝仁義之大節。今後生不學習。非則大倫大節俱掃地矣。揚雄曰。人而不學。雖無懮。如禽獸何。十可惜也。

這篇文章的基本修辭是用條件很好但不用功的“今後生”與有志于學的窮古人做對比﹐結果把“今後生”比下去了。勵志的意圖固然明顯﹐但這裡面沒什麼內在的道理可講﹐也談不上對求知本身的肯定。——“今後生”如果不好好學習﹐就是在浪費家族成本﹐日後做官不成﹐賺不回收益﹐就虧本了。——雖然還要扯上聖賢大道理來“勸學”﹐但骨子裡已經是十足商人式 ﹑市井化的了。如果用白話改寫﹐倒更象日後話本小說裡精明的嘮叨。

這個張憲武是南宋延平人﹐曾寫了《勸學錄》六卷。“十可惜說”可能是其中的一部份﹐被編類書的發現了“賣點”﹐給 copy n' paste 過來了。

© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。

Hitler’s Oratory and Beethoven’s Pastoral/ 希特勒的演说术与贝多芬的《田园交响乐》

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 60-61.

Our post-1945 impression of Hitler’s speeches is deceptive. As a rule, what we know of his oratory consists of excerpts, aggressive, often hoarse passages in which his staccato-fortissimo dominates.

But these were only a part of his speeches, and often not the part that had the greatest effect on the audience. As rhetorician Ulrich Ulonska noted in 1990, Hitler’s speeches typically followed the tripartite structure of classical oratory—or, musically speaking, Beethoven’s Pastoral. Ulonska writes:

Hitler usually begins calmly with anecdotes and seemingly objective descriptions of facts. In particular, he invokes the values and desires of his audience, and in so doing portrays himself as one of them and appeals for their trust…. There are no wild affects in this phase of his speeches.

The second phase is dominated by defamations and insults. Hitler awakens untamed emotion…he creates an enormous amount of interpersonal tension by depicting the values and needs of his listeners as being under threat. He calls forth fear, worry, desperation, and the desire for salvation and a leader to show the way out of danger.

All of Hitler’s speeches conclude with a positive, constructive phase. There are fewer and fewer defamations. Hitler releases his listeners from the tension that he previously induced by offering them a vision of a better future attainable through the achievement of certain topically specific goals…. With emotional force and conviction, Hitler simultanelusly sets out the ethical basis for the better days to come and positions himself as an example of moral integrity. With that, he elevates himself to a position of symbolic rescuer, moral savior, and collective superego for everyone in attendance.

Eagleton on Jeorge Orwell/ 伊格尔顿评乔治·奥威尔

Terry Eagleton/ Reach-Me-Down Romantic

George Orwell by Gordon Bowker · Little, Brown, 495 pp, £20.00

Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor · Chatto, 448 pp, £20.00

Orwell: Life and Times by Scott Lucas · Haus, 180 pp, £8.99

…

Like any self-transformation, this one was imperfect. Orwell may have castigated Britain's class-ridden education system, but he put his adopted son down for Wellington and kept up his Etonian contacts to the end. Some Old Etonians have even claimed that they could identify him as one of their own from his writings, a hard case to credit unless Eton was stuffed with budding critics of saucy postcards and analysts of dirigiste economics. Like most of us, however, he loved Big Brother more than he admitted. He portrayed his prep school, run by a couple named Wilkes, as a brutal place, but D.J. Taylor thinks this is typical of his self-pitying image as the victimised outsider. (A sentence of Taylor's beginning 'Though presumably touched up by the Wilkeses' turns out to concern Orwell's letters home rather than his person.) One friend considered him conservative in everything but politics. This is not entirely paradoxical, since Orwell saw socialism as all about preserving traditional decencies. He knew a strange amount about ecclesiastical affairs, preferred Housman and Kipling to Yeats and Pound, and fretted about the quality of tea he would get in Spain. After resigning from the colonial service in Burma, where he had been in charge of 200,000 people at the age of 20, he described imperialism as 'that evil despotism'; but he also admired empire-builders for their practicality, and thought that a clip around the ear might do the natives no harm at all. In Burma he had used the left-wing Adelphi magazine for target practice.

…

copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007

丰子恺的画（五）：二女印象

Eagleton's Diatribe on American Academia/ 伊格尔顿抨击美国学术

这篇书评里，伊格尔顿骂人的厉害劲儿不弱于鲁迅先生。

Terry Eagleton/ The Estate Agent

The Trouble with Principle by Stanley Fish · Harvard, 328 pp, £15.50

...

Like most of his compatriots, Fish is not the most cosmopolitan of creatures. The essays in The Trouble with Principle deal with racism, pornography, abortion, free speech, religion, sexual discrimination, in fact most of the stock-in-trade of enlightened US academia. This, on any estimate, is a pressing agenda; but it does not betray the slightest sense that there is anything else in the political universe worth discussing. With typical American parochialism and self-obsession, Fish's book is silent about famine, forced migration, revolutionary nationalism, military aggression, the depredations of capital, the inequities of world trade, the disintegration of whole communities. Yet these have been the consequences of the system of which the United States is the linchpin for many perched on the unmetaphysical outside of it. Being unable to leap out of your own cultural skin seems to mean in Fish's case having no grasp of how your country is helping to wreak havoc in that inscrutable place known as abroad. One has the indelible impression that Fish does not think a great deal of abroad, and would be quite happy to see it abolished. He is strenuously opposed to hate speech, but appears utterly ignorant of the structural conditions in his own backyard which give rise to such ethnic conflict. Indeed, he champions the social and economic order which helps to breed the effects he deplores. He is rightly concerned about anti-abortion fanatics, but not, as far as one can judge, about the military, ecological and economic threat which his country represents for so much of the world. For him as for many of his 'leftist' colleagues, a good deal of morality seems to come down to sex, just as it always has for the puritanical Right.

...

To refer to Fish the Dean, however, is to reveal the fact that there are two Fishes, Little and Big. Little Fish is a sabre-rattling polemicist given to scandalously provocative pronouncements: truth is rhetoric, free speech is an illusion, unprincipled behaviour is best. Big Fish is the respectable academic who will instantly undercut the force of these utterances by insisting that they are descriptive rather than normative. Far from being radical recommendations, they simply describe what we do anyway without always knowing it, and 'theory', the Trumps of this world will be relieved to learn, thus has no effect whatsoever on practice. Anti-foundationalism is therefore unlikely to alienate the New York foundations, and Fish can buy his reputation as an iconoclast on the cheap.

Little Fish is in hot pursuit of a case which will succeed in alienating absolutely everyone; he is the cross-grained outsider who speaks up for minorities, and himself Jewish, comes from one such cultural margin. Big Fish, by contrast, has a consensual, good-boy disdain for rebels, whose behaviour is in his eyes just as convention-bound as those they lambast. It is fortunate for this schizoid character that there is a place where aggression and consensus go together. It is known as the US corporation, of which the campus is a microcosm. In academia, you can hammer your colleagues, safe in the knowledge that, since you all subscribe to the same professional rules, it doesn't really mean a thing.

...

copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007

Walter Benjamin, the Beauty of Jewishness, and Ancient Chinese Sagehood/ 犹太之美与中国的圣贤

犹太民族有一种深邃而忧伤的美。它来自久远的东方。犹太的先知在沙漠仰望星空的时候获取了这份美丽，并世代传承了下去。犹太的精神与我们圣贤的教诲“为天地立心，为生民立命，为往圣继绝学，为万世开太平”相通。否则，数千年的离乱如何挺得住？喝牛乳的与食粟麦的同为“三才”之首，“虽与日月争光可也”。家园和邦国破碎了可以重建。凯撒、成吉思汗与帝国主义是过眼云烟。

本雅明（1892-1940）的文章里充满了这种美，深邃而忧伤。

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

"The Task of the Translator"

In the individual, unsupplemented languages, meaning is never found in relative independence, as in individual words or sentences; rather, it is in a constant state of flux—until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all the various modes of intention. Until then, it remains hidden in the languages. If, however, these languages continue to grow in this manner until the end of their time, it is translation which catches fire on the eternal life of the works and the perpetual renewal of language. Translation keeps putting the hallowed growth of languages to the test: How far removed is their hidden meaning from revelation, how close can it be brought by the knowledge of this remoteness? (74-75)

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade. (79)

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. (223)

[按：这里关于 aura 的神思接近于陶渊明的“山气日夕佳，飞鸟相与还”。“真意”就在这里，然而“欲辩已忘言”。]

The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. (226)

© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。