Reconsidering the Life of Power

James Garrison

Description

Reconsidering the Life of Power examines Chinese perspectives on bodily self-cultivation and explores how these can be resources for working past the ritual scripts of everyday life. In recent decades, European and American thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have called attention to the way that people live out ritual scripts in order to be recognized by other people such that they might survive. Philosophers in China, however, have a long history of considering ritual not just in terms of confining power structures but also in terms of empowering artistic self-cultivation. Out of this convergence, a response to Butler's The Psychic Life of Power becomes possible, along with fascinating implications for improving real-world experience.

James Garrison looks at art and aesthetics as a way of responding positively to the vicissitudes of everyday life. This means reframing ritual practice in domains like meditation, yoga, tai chi chuan, dance, calisthenics, fashion, and beyond as a kind of work that delves into and unearths society's long-accruing unconscious habits in a way that makes conscious one's everyday speech, comportment, countenance, and presence. The everyday body thus becomes an artwork, speaking in novel ways to the everyday self by revealing an alternative to the programmed ritual scripts through which most of us tend to survive. Reconsidering the Life of Power offers a compelling contemporary intercultural perspective on body, art, self, and society that bridges theory and practice by providing an actionable yet deeply philosophical approach to enhancing life.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Work: A Statement on Method

1. Subjectivation/Subjection

2. Autonomy and Appearance in Artful Ritual Practice

3. Confucianism and Li: Ritual Propriety, Music, and the Arts

4. Subjectality

5. Technique in Appearance

6. Somaesthetics

Final Thoughts

Notes
Index

Sujets

• Confucianism

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438482125
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 12 Mo

Extrait

RECONSIDERING THE LIFE OF POWER
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor
RECONSIDERING THE LIFE OF POWER
Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy
James Garrison
Cover image courtesy of the author. Reprinted with permission.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Garrison, James, author.
Title: Reconsidering the life of power : ritual, body, and art in critical theory and Chinese philosophy / James Garrison.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2021. | Series: SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020024802 | ISBN 9781438482118 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438482125 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, Chinese. | Aesthetics, Chinese. | Critical theory—China.
Classification: LCC B5231 .G37 2021 | DDC 181/.11—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024802
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Work: A Statement on Method
1 Subjectivation/Subjection
2 Autonomy and Appearance in Artful Ritual Practice
3 Confucianism and L ǐ 禮/礼 : Ritual Propriety, Music, and the Arts
4 Subjectality
5 Technique in Appearance
6 Somaesthetics
Final Thoughts
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
This work uses text that the author has republished with permission, including the following:
Garrison, James. “The Aesthetic Life of Power: Theories in Subjectivation and Subjectality (An Overview).” Annals of the University of Craiova, Philosophy Series , no. 34 (2014): 30–47. “Introduction” is a newer version of this work.
———. “Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Work: A Statement on Method.” In Orte des Denkens / Places of Thinking , edited by Murat Ates et al., 80–98. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2016. “Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Work: A Statement on Method” is a newer version of this work.
———. “Reconsidering Richard Shusterman’s Somaesthetics: The Confucian Debate between Mèng Z ǐ and Xún Z ǐ .” Contemporary Pragmatism 12, no. 1 (2015): 135–55. Chapter 6 , “Somaesthetics,” is a newer version of this work.
———. “Revolution in Kant’s Relation of Aesthetics to Morality: Regarding Negatively Free Beauty and Respecting Positively Free Will.” In Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht: Akten des XI. Kant-Kongresses 2010 , edited by Stefano Bacin et al., vol. 4, 47–57. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013. Chapter 1 , “Subjectivation/Subjection,” uses material from this earlier version.
———. “The Social Value of Ritual and Music in Classical Chinese Thought.” Teorema: Revista internacional de filosofía 31, no. 3 (2012): 209–22. Chapter 3 , “Confucianism and L ǐ 禮/礼 : Ritual Propriety, Music, and the Arts,” uses material from this earlier version.
———. “What Should the World Look Like? Li Zehou, Confucius, Kant, and the World Observer.” In Li Zehou and Confucian Philosophy , edited by Roger T. Ames and Jinhua Jia, 118–34. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. Chapter 4 , “Subjectality,” is a newer version of this work.
If there is anything worthwhile here, it owes first and foremost to the writing, teaching, mentorship, and authoritative conduct of Professor Roger Ames, whose great work I hope here with this effort to appreciate in turn.
Additionally, this work was undertaken with substantial support from the University of Vienna’s Department of Philosophy, with Prof. Dr. Georg Stenger and Ms. Andrea Schönbauer meriting particular thanks. Prof. Richard Shusterman, Dr. Sophie Loidolt, Dr. Anthony Everett, Dr. Megan Blomfeld, Dr. Anke Graneß, Prof. Henry Rosemont (RIP), Prof. Tao-chung “Ted” Yao 姚道中 (RIP), Prof. Eliot Deutsch (RIP), Prof. Graham Parkes, Prof. Douglas Berger, Murat Ates, William White, and Robert Willem Diem also deserve substantial appreciation for the help that each provided along the way. Scripps College, particularly Professors Sheila Walker and Yuval Avnur deserve appreciation, as does the Consortium for Faculty Diversity, which made my time there possible. Likewise, thanks goes out to the University of Puget Sound, particularly Justin Tiehen, Ariela Tubert, Sam Liao, Sara Protasi, and Bill Beardsley in the Philosophy Department and Kris Imbrigotta and Kent Hooper in the German Department. Thanks are also due to Ruhr Universität-Bochum’s Theatre Studies Department and Meike Hinnenberg. Further thanks go to my new institution, Baldwin Wallace University, and my colleagues in the Philosophy Department, Amy Lebo, and Kelly Coble. Professors Ron Bontekoe, Arindam Chakrabarti, Thomas Jackson, and David McCraw at my first graduate institution, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, deserve recognition as well. Thanks also go to my undergraduate home, Whitman College, and particularly to Professors Patrick Frierson, Julia Ireland, James Soden (RIP) and Tom Davis, the latter of whom introduced me to philosophy and posed the question that prompted this very book, along with Trustee Emeritus John Stanton for first bringing me as an IT intern to Vienna, where I would later compose much of this book.
My mother, Judy Leonard, and my brothers, Joseph and Jesse Garrison, of course deserve thanks for their kindness and love, along with my aunts, Carol Leonard and Alicia Rinehart. My deep and abiding gratitude also goes to Matt McMurrer, David Beckley, Kevin Phillips, Bryan Haynes, Alyssa Hays, and Vana Sarkisian each for being profoundly great friends. Anneliese Rieger of PenArt Zeitschrift deserves heartfelt thanks for her crucial support, feedback, care, and love during the time that this was written. Finally, this is for Vera Stefanović, my perpetually amazing best friend and muse.
Introduction
It must cease forever describing the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes,” it “represses,” it “suppresses,” it “censors,” it “abstracts,” it “masks,” it “conceals.” In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. 1
—Michel Foucault
The task of accounting for how persons, how subjects, are made brings a convergence between what Euro-American traditions tend to deem to be the separate domains of ethics and aesthetics. It is in this regard that alternative voices, particularly those from East Asia, and even more particularly from the Confucian tradition, possess a distinct advantage. Having had such a long history in which to develop its own terms, Confucianism can address the conjunctions of ethics, aesthetics, and politics that occur in person-making in ways that the best, though still ultimately tradition-bound and reactive efforts from Euro-American critical theory cannot.
Here the path is sixfold, going through the critical post-structuralist notion of (1) becoming subject—subjectivation—and the accompanying idea of (2) autonomy alongside (3) the classical Confucian idea of ritual— l ǐ 礼 —as well as contemporary notions of (4) subjectality, a Confucian/Marxian-materialist approach to collective unconsciousness in social ritual, (5) technique in appearance, and (6) somaesthetic (bodily) practice. This results in an intercultural and interdisciplinary account of how a set of traditions, some newer and reacting to dominant traditions and others relatively older and with longer histories of internal conceptual development, still nonetheless converge on an important issue for philosophy generally—understanding and broadening the radically (a) relational, (b) discursive, (c) bodily, (d) ritually impelled self.
Subjectivation
The first key word here is subjectivation. Judith Butler follows Michel Foucault in using a variant of this term—subjection—to describe how melancholy defines the emergence of subjects as the question of survival induces them to perform a kind of ritually driven life in order to gain recognition from broader social forces. Butler specifically breaks down her account in terms of five key paradigms—Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, Nietzsche’s bad conscience, Freud’s ego, Althusser’s interpellation, and Foucault’s power-resistance dynamic (with bits from Lacan and other writers). All of these sources form her narrative of the body being turned on itself and trapped in a skin-tight prison, sentenced to go through a rigmarole of ritual motions in order to get through the day, with the repetition itself bringing a meager measure of freedom in the form of rage and the reappropriation of the terms of the ritual/symbolic field. However, this view of rage as resistance as reappropriation offers little more than the temporary relief that a prisoner might likewise obtain through using “the routine” of prison life against itself. The argument here starts from the finding that this subversive reclaiming of slurs like “n-----” or “f-----” and of more extended ritual behavioral norms cannot be the endgame, and that, even as an intermediate strategy, it should be but one approach. Even with its somewhat unsatisfying conclusions, Butler’s paradigm remains compelling as a framework for consid