The mottled discourse of chinese studies

tzk1665624468.doc Response: The Mottled Discourse of Chinese Studies James Elkins None of us, as art historians, is likely to have many original thoughts about how meaning works We produce new interpretations, but few of us create new ideas about the process of doing so Even as we dig to reveal new meanings in artworks, we seldom find new ways to think about interpretation itself Such thinking exists, of course, and it structures our understanding of how history presents itself and how it can be written—but it is uncommon The great majority of us follow well-worn paths I take that as a perhaps slightly depressing but acceptable fact It might be said that we can at least master the interpretative methods we select, and that we can learn a range of methods and choose the ones we want I wonder, though, how often we understand how we choose or arrange interpretative methods It seems to me that interpretative strategies are hidden from us twice over: first, because we cannot explain how we pick just a few out of all the possible theories, and second, because there is no narrative in art history that helps us grasp the effects of juxtaposing different theories I might opt for a Lacanian reading for one essay and a semiotic reading for another I know the names of those interpretations, and I believe I know why I choose them in each instance The Lacanian reading, I may think, fits one artwork, and a semiotic reading fits another I feel that in gathering interpretative methods and in knitting them together, I am acting on my own, to produce a new configuration of meanings Yet what happens in art history—and, by extension, in other humanities—is more or less the opposite Interpretative sources are chosen partly because they are in the air Theories are notoriously subject to fashion, which is another way of saying that they come and go without good reason Theory dates research: the theoretical sources cited in an art historical text can be used to estimate the year the work was written This has nothing to with the veracity or fruitfulness of the ideas that are cited or the interpretations that are generated; it is just to say that the historical moment dictates what theories emerge in art history, as much as any considered choice made by the historian It follows that other theories or philosophies that are not named may actually drive our interpretations It may be that we not want to name them, but it may also be that we are unaware that they influence us And when the text has to with non-Western art, it can happen that two or tzk1665624468.doc more traditions can be involved, each one offering its own selection of theorists, philosophies, and critical terms The result is a mixture of discourses, blended according to rules, taste, and customs that the writer may not even be aware of What I have in mind here is a kind of discourse analysis, intended to characterize the choices of theories, theorists, and concepts that have gone into Jonathan Hay’s essay The study of Chinese art provides, I think, an exemplary occasion to analyze how theories are chosen and deployed, because it gives voice to the intersection of two historiographically reflective traditions, each with its critical and historical texts Hay’s essay presents a particular moment in the ongoing encounter of those traditions If I can borrow one of the expressions he uses, it has its own flavor, tianqu, a word that also means “appeal” or “taste.” I will begin with a list of the Western theorists, philosophers, and concepts that he cites, and I will take them in the order they appear The first three notes are, for the reading I am after here, preparatory The first note in the essay is to Hay’s current work The second cites historians of Chinese art, including A John Hay, Wu Hung, and Richard Vinograd, in order to indicate a long-standing interest in mediation among art historians of Chinese art The third note, pursuing the same point outside the Chinese context, cites an essay on T J Clark by Gail Day It is a single, unexpected, and unelaborated reference outside the Chinese context The theoretical sources make their first appearance in note 4, with Niklas Luhmann For Hay, Luhmann’s systems theory suggests that mediation is self-reflexive: the painting not only works between “viewer and world,” but also has the capacity to “problematize, and thus mediate, its own mediations.” Luhmann has been of interest in art history since 2001 or so A number of art historians, including W J T Mitchell, are interested in his work or have experimented with it, and an edited volume is in preparation.1 The following note cites Gilles Deleuze, for the idea of “individuation”—of people as “nodes” of information and agency It is an idea that has been in the air in Anglophone scholarship at least since 1991.2 Deleuze and Luhmann are the only theoretical sources listed in the opening pages of the essay, in notes and 5, following the introductory citations of scholars interested in mediation Then follow several pages of notes to the scholarship on Chinese painting With the exception of note 22 (to Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s “Intervention” published in these pages in 2005) and note tzk1665624468.doc 36 (to David Summers’s Real Spaces), the next citation of a Western theoretical source is note 39, to Krzysztof Ziarek’s Force of Art That in itself is remarkable, because it interrupts the common pattern in which theory sources are named early in an essay and then not mentioned again until the end (Or not mentioned again at all.) It is a pattern that can be observed in a fair amount of art historical writing, and nearly inevitably the theory sources are Western even when the subject matter is not Midway through, Hay also cites Hubert Damisch, for the idea that naturalism in painting is “a system of visual thought” that “produces possibilities of subjecthood.” The idea of an artwork as “a system of visual thought,” with specific reference to Damisch, is being pursued in at least one research program: Hanneke Grootenboer’s project on “The Pensive Image” at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht Grootenboer’s initiative was launched in 2005 and is explicitly dedicated to conceptualizing the ways in which images can be said to think or philosophize The idea was not original to Damisch but was mobilized by him, and it belongs to the last decade or so of art historical scholarship.3 Rosalind Krauss’s critique of media in A Voyage on the North Sea is also cited (note 44); Hay does not use her argument but takes it as an example of the relativization of the concept of medium For Hay, it helps in thinking about “a generalized mediational condition of the artwork.” Then Jacques Lacan is cited, via A John Hay’s thoughts about applying the Lacanian “screen” to Chinese painting Jonathan Hay says only that assessing the relevance of Lacan would require “a separate study.” Lacan is an older presence in art history, and so are the terms that appear in the following paragraphs: “boundary,” “crease,” and “suture.” No citation is given for those words, but Hay could have named Maurice Blanchot, Lacan, Jacques Derrida, or Deleuze This is another current theoretical interest in the discipline: a book on topology as a metaphor in twentieth-century art theory, with an opening essay by Damisch, is in preparation.4 Alain Badiou arrives on the scene just after the passage on sutures and folds; he is cited for his ontology, which depends on a concept of “inconsistent multiplicity,” which in turn is said to make painting “radically situational and temporal.” Again the reference is timely A conference on drawing at the Tate Britain in May 2006 was opened by Badiou, who read a paper on the ontology of drawn marks.5 In another year there will be more to cite on the subject, and that may make brief citations more difficult tzk1665624468.doc Georges Didi-Huberman is then cited for his “symptomatic model of interpretation,” in which the “unconscious” discourse of art history emerges as “‘rends,’” “‘sovereign accidents,’” and other forms Hay suggests that Didi-Huberman’s symptomatics can be reread as “the exceptional moment when the double-sidedness of mediation exposes its own inconsistency.” This is one of the few places in the essay in which Hay engages directly with his Western theoretical sources He implies, in that one sentence, a possible reinterpretation of Didi-Huberman’s work Bruno Latour appears for his theory of “nonhumans” and “actants,” which are taken to imply that “the capacity for agency is shared by things of all kinds.” Benjamin Buchloh is cited in note 84 for his sense of “contingency” as “the resistance to interpretative closure.” (Other senses of contingency, such as Joseph Koerner’s or T J Clark’s, are not mentioned.) Subsequently, Hay says that “a parallactic framework of understanding” is needed; no source is named, although the term, applied to art historical interpretation, is a recurrent theme in Donald Preziosi’s Rethinking Art History.6 I have gone through these just a little faster than they appear in the text itself None are given more than four sentences of explanation or contextualization It would be possible to ask what Hay gains from each of these sources, and how well he represents them But doing that would assume there is a correct form for citation, that citation can be adjudicated It would also be possible to use an inventory like this to locate his work in relation to scholars who engage Krauss or Luhmann more extensively To a reader of The Art Bulletin who is a specialist in Western art, Hay’s references may sound scattered or inappropriately brief, but that is an effect of reading from just one vantage His essay shows the inevitable “abbreviated” and “unexpected” readings that occur whenever one field encounters or reencounters another: if Badiou reads Hay’s essay he may not recognize his own theories, but he will encounter a new context and new configurations of sources So I not mean my summary of Hay’s roster of Western theory sources as a critique I have something else in mind Wu Hung’s The Double Screen (1996) is a frequent point of reference in Hay’s essay, because it facilitates his discussion of the connections between the painting and Chinese screens For me The Double Screen has another significance, in that it marked a moment in the dissemination of Western interpretative methods into Chinese art studies Wu mentions anthropological, linguistic, and semiotic theories that were current beginning in the later 1980s; in the same way, Hay’s essay names sources that have tzk1665624468.doc mainly materialized on the horizon of North American art history in the last decade Some are new enough so that they may seem idiosyncratic (Luhmann, Ziarek, Badiou) Others are older and can sound a bit dated (Lacan’s “screen,” the fold, parallactic vision) The miscellany of citations in Hay’s essay, as in Wu’s book, points, I think, to the presence of deeper debts that unify his enterprise A way to get at them is to note some of the work that is done using the term mediation Hay opens by redefining the painting normally attributed to Li Cheng as “an event that comprises mediations with which the painting also engages reflexively.” Consider the elements of that claim: the painting is to be understood “not as an object,” but “as an event”; the structure or content of the event is “mediations”; and these are also selfreflexive It is not explicit at first whether the self-reflexivity of the “mediations” is indispensable or supplementary to the “event,” but the next sentence makes its supplementary nature clear, as Hay notes that historians since the 1970s have paid attention to “the artwork’s mediations and reflexivity.” I think these three concepts— event, mediation, and self-reflexivity—can be separated and assigned to different strands of twentieth-century thought Rethinking the artwork as an event is a move normally authorized by a reading of Charles S Peirce, in opposition to what is seen as a stricter or less dialogic Saussurean semiotic Reflexivity is, according to Clement Greenberg, nearly a definition of modernism The fact that Hay derives these in part from anthropology and in part from Luhmann is epiphenomenal: their deeper currents are semiotics and theories of modernism Of the terms, the central one, mediation, is the most interesting, and I think its intellectual genealogy is the most occluded by Hay’s choice of sources Mediation is, I believe, a placeholder for phenomenological experience.7 That is so, first, because of its initial definition: “the mediating work that art accomplishes,” Hay writes near the beginning of his essay, “changes the viewer’s sense of her place in the world,” and at the same time the painting “alters what the world is in her eyes.” This is identical with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s argument about the artwork, and it follows that the encounter is principally transformative and liquid and has nothing necessarily to with aesthetics Hay makes this assertion immediately afterward: “mediation offers no guarantee of pleasure or reassurance.” While the idea that no “reassurance” is to be found in mediation has a modernist tint (it is, after all, what Theodor Adorno hoped for from truly avantgarde art), the idea that there is no “pleasure”—that this encounter will be outside tzk1665624468.doc aesthetics—is wholly consonant with phenomenological interests Phenomenology also accounts for one of the essay’s principal moves, away from “the project of social art history,” because phenomenology “exceeds the parameters of the interpretation of art as a social practice,” as Hay says of mediation Another reason to say that what is at stake in the word “mediation” is phenomenological experience is that mediation is said to produce “individuation,” matching Merleau-Ponty’s central preoccupation with a person’s beingin-the-world Hay assigns “individuation” to Deleuze, but I not consider him the appropriate point of reference here, and without a reference to phenomenology, an explanation for why mediation is more closely linked to individuation than any number of other kinds of response to artworks would be needed I not mean to argue that phenomenology accounts for all the uses to which “mediation” is put In some cases, mediation is more aligned with communication theory, and even with Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics,” especially when Hay glosses “mediation” with “relation”—as in “the relation of Song state ideology to Buddhism,” or “the relation of the Buddhist believer to the presence of the Buddha.” At other times, “mediation” just marks places that contain a maximum of ambiguousness, complexity, or (as he puts it at one point) “resolution-nonresolution.” And in other places “mediation” is offered as a synonym for translation, substitution, incorporation, and inhabiting Those would not call for an explanation in terms of phenomenology, but the central examples, and the majority of examples, A literary critic might point out that the word “mediation” is stretched thin by its many contexts It is like a tarpaulin covering the miscellaneous baggage of more conventional art historical concerns Hay explores the painting using a succession of traditional analyses—social contexts, style elements, technical elements, philosophical themes—pulling the concept of mediation over each in turn Nominally, mediation is pinned down by the citations to Deleuze, Luhmann, Damisch, Krauss, Lacan, Badiou, Didi-Huberman, and Ziarek, but it is clearly distorted by its many contexts, and since Hay’s main project is clear and coherent, I think that the distortion is an effect of not properly naming the guiding term The main source of what he calls mediation, I think, is Merleau-Ponty, along with the other theorists of the genesis of subjectivity in reciprocal encounters, especially Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre That is the “well-worn path” I mentioned at the beginning, the unnamed guiding interest underneath the apparently original constellation of sources tzk1665624468.doc The attempt to theorize in many directions, while taking phenomenological understanding as a given, is a principal interpretative method across the board in art history A primary phenomenological understanding underwrites such diverse enterprises as Irit Rogoff’s radical criticism, Hubert Damisch’s reinterpretation of perspective, Michael Fried’s terms of encounter with objects, and David Summers’s Real Spaces None of us, I think, is immune to it: it is our interpretative horizon, in the usual critical metaphor—although it is more appropriate to say that phenomenological understanding is our common ground We start from what we take as phenomenological encounters and build outward in many directions, but we remain on the ground cleared by phenomenology One can find examples of what art history looks like when it begins elsewhere Text-based iconographic readings, for example, need never show that their authors encountered the work in a phenomenological sense But I not think there is a model of what current art history might look like without phenomenology A simple demonstration of this is the place Merleau-Ponty occupies in the historiography of art history He often appears as if he is outside history: figures who formed his imaginative world, from Michel Leiris and Jean Dubuffet to Lacan and Paul Klee, appear in their different contexts and tend to be treated as historical figures Merleau-Ponty’s historical context—his favorite painters, his direct influences—do not often figure in art historical writing His philosophy is taken as mainly, simply, true.8 He is the substrate, the packed ground of art historical encounters, and his phenomenology, I think, is what drives Hay’s essay at a level deeper than his choice of theorists “Mediating,” as employed in Hay’s essay, is hard to capture in a phrase, because the word is asked to fulfill too many tasks “Phenomenological experience” would be more accurate, and it would open the way to a large literature It is interesting to speculate what would happen if art history began to engage more directly and critically with Merleau-Ponty Hay’s essay, for example, might achieve a tighter unity and be able to relinquish some of its many individual sources So far I have said nothing about the Chinese theoretical sources Hay deploys The same kind of analysis could be made of them Because the tenth-century Chinese literature has been well studied, it is not likely that Hay will uncover “new” theoretical sources, but he can reinterpret leading concepts and introduce less common ones Some, like li, shi, shanshui, qi, shengdong, and cun, already have more or less extensive literatures, and Hay’s mentions of them are just as abbreviated as his citations of screen, suture, or parallactics (He does that, I am assuming, for the purposes of this essay; the tzk1665624468.doc same essay in Archives of Asian Art or Philosophy East and West would be obligated to explore those concepts at length.) Other concepts, such as ti, tianqu, gewu, and (in this context) shen, are not as often analyzed, and figure as promising newer objects of critical attention The debate over the use of non-Western terms in the art historical analysis of nonWestern art has reached a critical point In the spring of 2005, David Summers participated in a roundtable conversation, which will appear as the centerpiece of a book called Is Art History Global? Thirty scholars who were not present at the event contributed assessments, making this the largest forum on the spread of “world art history” to date.9 One of the central concerns of the roundtable and the subsequent contributions was the place of non-Western terms in the analysis of world art Some contributors, such as Craig Clunas, argue in favor of mixtures and affinities and advocate letting go of the East-West model (or rather the nostalgia it still sometimes provides) Others, including the Japanese scholar Shigemi Inaga, propose complex theories that could help manage apparently untranslatable terms (Inaga outlines an “elliptic” model of translation in which Japanese terms that are opaque to European languages can be coordinated via a third language, Chinese.) Despite those and other diplomatic initiatives, the book registers a fundamental disagreement on the issue Summers’s position is very consistent: he feels that key Western concepts can be made sufficiently capacious and flexible to accommodate non-Western contexts I was skeptical of that when Real Spaces appeared, and I set out some counterarguments in my review in these pages.10 It is a complicated issue, however, and no single answer can be constructed Terms such as pingdan that have worried Western scholars of Chinese painting tend to attract a kind of fetishistic attention, which does not always produce interesting results 11 What matters is not deciding this as an issue—as if there were a way to say, “Yes, the word ‘space’ is adequate to all non-Western settings”—but considering the kinds of writing that result from different mixtures of Western and non-Western terms Hay notes these issues in passing, saying he has tried to “mitigate the dangers” of being a “Euro-American scholar” writing on Chinese art “by incorporating into the essay as citations voices from the Chinese past.” To this I would add that it is important to study the ways terms and texts are cited, and to so in detail, slowly, and systematically, including all the sources and not just the Chinese ones, and always asking: What is “incorporating”? What are “citations”? What mixture of discourses have I made? tzk1665624468.doc (Parenthetically, before I close: Hay acknowledges the worldwide dissemination of art history in his penultimate paragraph and mentions its “capacity to challenge and upset our assumptions.” This is a very delicate question I wonder, for example, whose assumptions might be upset by his essay Others may read it differently, but for me the Chinese material in Hay’s essay affects my assumptions about understanding Chinese painting It contributes many new things, and as the perpetual outsider to the specialty, I am, as always, very grateful But am I upset, even potentially? I not think so Readers who find their assumptions challenged or upset by the essay would presumably be those whom the essay identifies as formalists, style historians, “cognitive evolutionists,” and social art historians Such scholars might well be uncomfortable with writing that opens the doors to “uncertainty, undecidability, inconsistency, and contingency.” In other words, the essay might be seen as challenging, but only for those within Chinese studies I mention this because world art studies can sometimes be sanguine about its capacity to undermine its own assumptions and rethink itself Our unpredictable encounters with other cultures are frequently said to be opportunities for radical redefinitions of scholarship, historical understanding, and sense of self I would like to register my skepticism that such a thing has happened.) “We”—for the moment, readers and contributors to The Art Bulletin—are creating a new kind of discourse on Chinese art Hay’s essay is measurably different from Wu Hung’s The Double Screen, and both are measurably different from much of the scholarship currently being written in China There is still fundamental disagreement in the field regarding the differences between scholars trained in the People’s Republic of China, in Taiwan, and in North America or Europe For some observers, such as James Cahill, the current Chinese understanding of the history of Chinese painting retains the traditional Chinese focus on literary sources For others, Chinese art history as practiced in China and Taiwan differs from art history in the West because Chinese-trained scholars learn a kind of combined art history and aesthetics that does not exist as such in Western universities.12 For still others, whatever divide might exist between Chinese and Western scholarship, it isn’t as deep as the gulf between traditional or modernist Western approaches to Chinese painting and more recent approaches such as postcolonial theory.13 From yet another standpoint, it no longer makes sense to speak of “Chinese scholarly understanding” at all, because the field has become effectively international or is driven by things other than thoughts about what it might mean to say that art history is Western tzk1665624468.doc 10 (The ongoing Westernness of the art history of Chinese art is my concern; Craig Clunas would be an example of someone who doesn’t worry about it.) It is crucial to continue discussing such differences in institutional and national practices, especially when postcolonial theory has made some of them seem ideologically overdetermined, and when translation studies have made them appear unrewarding.14 The mood of current scholarship is to move away from these issues and get on with work in local contexts I think that would be a mistake Hay’s essay alone is enough to show that something new is being produced that is not indifferently Western, European, Chinese, or Taiwanese: his essay is, I think, distinctly North American In its current form his essay might not easily find a publisher, or a wide reception, in China.15 It is also experimental enough that it might have a hard time finding a home even in some Western journals of Chinese art For me those practical, institutional facts are enough to show that it is important to pay close attention to the changing shape of the discourses that represent Chinese painting—or any non-Western practice As art history spreads around the world, as it addresses increasingly diverse cultures and works, we need to keep watching what happens when gewu meets “the gaze,” or tuhua meets “painting.” But art historical practice also needs to take reflective notice of the effect of mixing discourses It matters that Didi-Huberman is brought in for one note, and then Guo Xi, and then Ziarek The surprise matters, the dissonance matters, the desire to cite matters We have to pay attention, in the texts, as the citations are made, to the strange mixtures of discourses that we are concocting, to the mottled references we are collecting, and to what they say about the flavors we prefer—our tianqu Because Jonathan Hay will be answering this essay, let me end with some questions for him The real world forces all sorts of compromises, starting with the painful first line of your essay, in which you hope the painting, as famous in Chinese art as a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, “may be at least vaguely familiar.”16 As it is, your essay uses potentially unfamiliar material to introduce a potentially unfamiliar concept Your readers might naturally be skeptical, and I see how that structures much of what you have to say Some passages are written, so it seems to me, to say what China specialists might expect to find in a generalist journal, and other passages are written for Western specialists who need familiar points of reference I am interested to know what your project would look like if it weren’t obligated to the readers of The Art Bulletin What is the ideal form of tzk1665624468.doc 11 your essay? What theoretical sources are essential to make its points? In the best of all worlds, in a journal of infinite length, with readers of infinite scholarly capacity, who not require persuading or introductions, who are more than “vaguely familiar” with the painting, who know the literature from Badiou to Susan Bush, could your project leave “social art history” behind and find its own voice? James Elkins’s recent books include Master Narratives and Their Discontents (New York, 2005) and (as editor) Photography Theory and Is Art History Global? (New York, 2007) [Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 112 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Ill 60637, jelkins@saic.edu] Notes The project, whose provisional title is The Art of Systems Theory, is edited by Francis Halsall, Limerick School of Art and Design, f.halsall@ucc.ie See Gilles Deleuze’s anti-Cartesian essay “A Philosophical Concept ,” in Who Comes after the Subject? ed Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 94–95 The inaugural conference was March 31, 2006 Grootenboer’s project is at www.janvaneyck.nl/0_3_3_research_info/thepensiveimage.html The editor is Wolfram Pichler, University of Vienna The book is based on the symposium “Verkehrte Symmetrien: Zur topologischen Imagination in Kunst und Theorie,” which was held at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, October 21–22, 2005 The conference was called “With a Single Mark: The Models and Practice of Drawing,” Tate Britain, May 19–20, 2006; a publication is planned Peter Hallward, whom Hay also cites, led a discussion with Badiou Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) Hay uses the word “phenomenology” once, in referring to his initial description of the painting, but a better word there might be “ekphrasis,” which has the full range of connotations he wants to capture with “phenomenology,” including the evocation of sounds and motion I thank Aud Sissel Hoel for an exchange on the genealogy of the word mediation This is developed in a conversation with Richard Shiff, in Shiff, Doubt, vol of Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts, ed James Elkins (New York: Routledge, forthcoming) James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? vol of The Art Seminar, ed James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007) A second anthology, which may appear at the same time, is edited by Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme at the University of Leiden World Art Studies program Theirs is the second program of that name; the first is the one at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, founded by John Onians 10 James Elkins, review of Real Spaces by David Summers, Art Bulletin 86 (2004): 373–80 The review is reprinted in Is Art History Global? It formed one of the starting points for the roundtable 11 This is discussed in James Elkins, Xi fang mei shu shi xue zhong de Zhongguo shan shui hua [Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History], translated from the English by Pan Yaochang and Gu Ling (Hangzhou: Zhongguo mei shu xue yuan chu ban she [National Academy of Art], 1999) 12 These are points that come out in the interviews that Jason Kuo has conducted with scholars of Chinese art See Kuo, ed., Discovering Chinese Painting: Dialogues with Art Historians, 2nd ed (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 2006) My own afterword in that book, 249–56, pursues these issues 13 This is one of the themes in a series of letters James Cahill and I are currently preparing, intended for publication, on the subject of the state of Chinese art history 14 In light of David Hall and Roger Ames’s work in the 1980s, for example, it may appear unrewarding to talk at too great length about the translation of individual concepts Hall and Ames, Anticipating China, Thinking through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture (Albany: State University of Albany Press, 1995) 15 Needless to say, this is a general point; there are exceptions, such as Mei yuan, the journal of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts Beijing See James Elkins, “Why It Is Not Possible to Write the Art History of Non-Western Cultures,” translated into Chinese by Ding Ning, in Mei yuan (2002): 56–61 16 In James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), I speculate what art history, or visual studies, might look like if such paintings were as familiar as their Western counterparts The entire shape of the field, from its root concepts to its introductory pedagogy, would, I think, be completely different  ... that the distortion is an effect of not properly naming the guiding term The main source of what he calls mediation, I think, is Merleau-Ponty, along with the other theorists of the genesis of. .. aware of What I have in mind here is a kind of discourse analysis, intended to characterize the choices of theories, theorists, and concepts that have gone into Jonathan Hay’s essay The study of Chinese. .. some of its many individual sources So far I have said nothing about the Chinese theoretical sources Hay deploys The same kind of analysis could be made of them Because the tenth-century Chinese