On the meaning of “individualism” in China, a discussion of Erica Fox Brindley’s <em>Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics</em> (Part 1, Introduction and Chapter 1)
This post is the fruit of a small cooperative reading project that a colleague and I began recently. We are reading an interesting book that discusses the historical salience of the concept of the individual in Chinese thought. Our plan is to proceed chapter by chapter and exchange thoughts as we go. Hopefully others will be inspired to chime in from time to time, or to read the book. My early impression is that it is a sophisticated scholarly engagement with the relevant materials and concepts and, therefore, a worthwhile read. In this post, I’ve included the comments of my colleague (her real ID may be forthcoming) and my own. As she was the first to step up to the plate by sending me her comments, mine make reference to hers, but not the other way around. Perhaps when we come to Chapter 2, we’ll reverse the order. I hope you find the discussion useful.
Lorin
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kuanita’s thoughts My colleague’s thoughts
It’s clear that she distinguishes herself from preceding scholarship on the Chinese self and personhood by boldly choosing to use the word “individual.” She acknowledges that such a term would smuggle foreign meanings into the Chinese context, but argues for its use anyway so as to facilitate cultural translation, particularly regarding “fundamental issues of human concern” (xviii). It’s hard to really evaluate what she’s doing with the Mohist material not being an expert in this field, and one wonders just how radical (or groundbreaking) of an interpretation she is making. But it is pretty remarkable that all the themes we commonly associate with individualism can be found in Mozi – i.e. choice, moral autonomy, self-determination, freedom, and will. And I think her account presents a wonderful little irony: as much as the authors of the Mozi advocate allegiance to an ultimate authority, as much as all worldly phenomena and all appearances can be read in light of the will of Heaven, it is up to morally autonomous choice-making human persons at all levels of society to bring about social and cosmic order. And while this early Mohist ideology serves the justify those who already occupy positions of power, the common people “possess” the capacity make judgments about right and wrong, and can offer or withhold compliance. It presents a rather different picture of how an individual can simultaneously be both the object and subject of power.
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My thoughts
Beginning on p. xviii, there is an extended discussion about the distinction between “self” and “individual.” I recall in Kipnis (2001) reference to a distinction made by Hoffman between identity and self-formation. My understanding is that the former is a more agentic (is this the word we use?) process and the latter more socialized. On this same page, it seems she is hinting at a critique that I made of Kipnis when he looks for Western-style expressions of school counterculture in error. The western mode is the norm. It’s absence in China is, perhaps, inevitable.
On page xx, she arrives at two criteria to frame her conception of individualism: “(1) a belief that individuals possess any number of positive prerogatives or powers in the world by virtue of their existence as individuals, and (2) a belief that individuals can achieve their ideals through the use of their own autonomous, or self-inspired, authority of some kind.” Interestingly, this strikes me as similar to the criteria used by Archer (2003) to ground her argument for human reflexivity, i.e., that they engage in “internal conversation” that is irreducible to other explanations/phenomena and that it is causally efficacious.
On page xxi, I appreciate the historicist approach, i.e., the way in which she situates that emergence and submergence/sublation of ideas within socio-political contexts. However, I would like to see a similar historicism in the comparisons to the “Western” individual. For example, how is the emergence of the disembodied individual related to the emergence of liberalism or capitalism?
On page xxii, the comment on how in the Warring States period, social and physical mobility through meritocratic advancement was associated with greater individual agency. It reminds one of the link between social status, meritocracy, and perceptions of agency in the present. In another vein, the emergence of intellectuals’ interest in agency reminds one of the tendency of intellectuals in general to universalize their own sense of personal agency (p. xxiii).
I like the way she distinguishes her discussion here from those in action theory by retrieving the more “passive” sense of “agent” as one who acts under the authority of another: “conforming” and “individual agents” (p. xxv). The distinction turns on the location of motivation to act, the former external, the latter internal.
In Chapter 1, I’m quite interested in the discussion of the Mohist concept of “upward conformity” (上同), which “advocates universal and uniform allegiance to a single higher power–mediated through a political hierarchy” (p. 2). I’m interested for a couple of reasons. First, because this notion might be read as part of a genealogy of conformity in political hierarchies in China. Second, because, cast as a critique of this concept, it bears resemblance to notions of methodological individualism in, for example, Geertz (1973) and Archer (1986). Archer poses a dual critique of extant social theory by pointing out the fallacy of individualism (upward conflation) and structuralism (downward conflation). Geertz advocates for interpretivist analysis of culture based in “thick description” in opposition to both subjectivist and objectivist views of culture. Such “third way” thinking is, of course, a strong theme in nominally postpositivist social theory. I’ll have to return to this thought when I get a better sense of where Brindley is going.
I’m curious about the possible congruence of Kipnis’ (2011) “literary masculinity” and the Mohist concern with the “acheived man,” which encapsulates both the religious ideal of self-cultivation and preservation of notions of political hierarchy.
Overall, I’m with you in admitting that I know nothing of Mohism and am, thus, incapable of commenting on Brindley’s thesis. That is why, I suppose, my comments and interests tend toward illumination of my own present concerns. That approach isn’t really fair to the author, but it’s what I’ve got for now!
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. My current research focuses on the educational culture of a rapidly transforming city in Mainland China.
That is the perfect Mahmood passage to quote – it gets at the book’s central argument. (And not that I want to go on about Mahmood’s book, but hers is a case wherein having contributed to the consultable record, the familiar is made strange – rather than the other way around. The quote you picked nicely captures this intention.) Not that my opinion matters, but I think your understanding of Geertz is perfectly sound. I’m just still unsure as to what “methodological individualism” means (why the word individualism?) – but that may have more to do with my thick skull than with thick description. I’ll come around… : )
You’re completely correct about flipping the strange/familiar. I let that one float past without noticing carefully enough. About methodological individualism, let me get back to you when I’m not phoning around for a good breakfast place.
Let me begin by allowing wikipedia to speak: “Methodological individualism is the theory that social phenomena can only be accurately explained by showing how they result from the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.[1] The idea has been used to criticize historicism, structural functionalism, and the roles of social class, gender roles, or ethnicity as determinants of individual behavior.[citation needed] It is promoted by the Austrian School of economics in interpreting economic developments.”
People like Giddens, Bourdieu, & Archer all reject MI as in rational choice theories of action. They have a concomitant critique of structuralism, i.e., in which material necessity determines action, or where biological structures determine action. This is where Archer’s conflationist critique is useful, because it takes into account both “upward conflation” (e.g., MI, rational choice) and “downward conflation” (e.g., normative functionalism). For the record, I think it is the latter (i.e., in the form of “operationalism”) that Geertz is after in promoting an interpretivist approach, although it should be said that Archer, for one, would identify him as an upward conflationist. Also of note is that Archer targets both Giddens and Bourdieu for a third type of conflation, central conflation, but I think she goes too far with that one.
I hope this is more clear.
References
Methodological Individualism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodological_individualism
Your comment about her distinction between “conforming agents” and “individual agents” got me thinking about whether or not this distinction is useful. I agree with you that she’s doing something interesting in bringing attention to passive agency, but – as I’m typing this out – I wonder whether the first chapter actually collapses the distinction she lays out in the introduction. For example, even the “stupid and base” in her reading of Mohists texts constitute an important source of authority. More than mere instruments (pg. xxvi), they are not only self-determined in their “authority to sense right from wrong” (pg. 19, section title), but also “help determine” what gets decided up above in their role as community informants (pg. 22). Indeed her discussion of conformity gets more complex in the introduction – after offering a rather dichotomized definition, and she closes the section on the “mindful conformists” in noting that “conformity in early Mohist thought is a complicated ideal” (pg. 25). I will try to remember to see whether this distinction does become more useful in later chapters.
I like your observation that intellectuals have a tendency to “universalize their own sense of agency.” This is certainly true of modern social scientists (us anthropologists might be the guiltiest of all). I’m now reading this book a friend recommended years ago: Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety. She raises a provocative question: what would ethnography (or feminist scholarship specifically) look like if we detached scholarship from progressive politics? She argues that the prescriptive aspect of feminist scholarship and its search for agency can hinder the understanding of practices that deeply offend liberal sensibilities on their own terms – and that a critique of these sensibilities is in order. (Hers is a study of an Egyptian mosque movement where women appear to be “reproducing” the structures of their own subordination. She makes a very different argument, of course, without giving the usual “here’s some agency in the nooks and crannies!” – interpretation.) I don’t mean to digress from the reading project at hand, but only mention this to say that “conformity” offers a similar challenge that will surely be very productive!
I have a question for you, which you don’t have to answer right away: what do you mean by “methodological individualism” and how does this apply to “thick description”?
In terms of the initial definition, i.e., the bringing back in of the “passive” sense of “agent,” I think that you’re right about the collapse of the distinction. My impression, however, was that this was expected in the case of the Mohists. I thought that she was saying that the Mohist conception rests fundamentally on the passive end of the spectrum. I’ll have to go back and take a look, though. Going back to your initial comments, though, I agree with you that the way she draws out gradations of agency (all passive to some degree?) to be quite well argued.
On Saba Mahmoud’s book, I know I heard a podcast that discussed her work recently, but can’t seem to find it now. To be honest, I understand the problem as stated about removing analysis from progressive politics, but that is a damned vexing problem. I’ll have to read the book. It seems to me that the discussion must turn on the mandate that Geertz (1973) invokes about understanding the other: “The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said” (p. 30). Still, my own take is that having performed this task successfully, there must be a “universalizing” moment, a counter-relativistic movement in which the strange is made familiar, or one in which oppression is recognized in its local form. I suppose this betrays my post-positivist bent, though.
RE your question about MI and TD, I wish I could remember what I was thinking, but I suppose it was something like the following. I was suggesting a morphological homology between Geertz and others who seek transcendence of the traditional oppositions in social theory. The theoretical moves of Bourdieu and Giddens in this respect are well known, as are those of those who subscribe to various forms of critical theory including critical realists. In Geertz, it was a comment on the concept of “thick description” per se, but rather my understanding of the general direction he takes in “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” While he does demand that we understand the local on its own terms, he also holds that something more is called for: “it is such extension of our analyses to wider contexts that, along with their theoretical implications, recommends them to general attention and justifies our constructing them” (p. 21). Now, my understanding of Geertz no doubt sounds like the semi-coherent rambling of a pedantic non-anthropologist, but I think I’m not entirely off base!
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Retrieved from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;idno=heb01005
From Mahmood: “My goal, however, is not just to provide an ethnographic account of the Islamic Revival. It is also to make this material speak back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable—such as the belief that all human beings have an innate desire for freedom, that we all somehow seek to assert our autonomy when allowed to do so, that human agency primarily consists of acts that challenge social norms and not those that uphold them, and so on” (p. 5). I think you’re right in bringing up this work. Especially in the last sentence, a concept of a “passive agent” seems to be at least implied.
Lorin. I’m holding you to your 10.08 pm. And I have some ideas drawn from The Economist.
Cheers
KT
Sorry for the delay, KT. Thursday is a busy teaching day for me. I’m a little hesitant about your request because I’m not sure what you’re looking for and because I haven’t read this entire book yet. Having said this, let me throw out for consideration what I was thinking as I was reading the author’s take on the Mohist lit.
My impression was that the idea of virtue attained through effort could be said to describe the kind of merit through hard study that we see today. Also, there is a sense in which the CCP today justifies its power as a kind of mandate of heaven, but that in the present that mandate is somehow connected to a right bestowed by one’s pursuit of a scientistic Marxism. For cadres, then, mindful agency comes from aligning oneself with the truth of extant Party dogma, a display of morality. For the “stupid and base,” we might look to those who participate in the tens of thousands of protests every year. They are, I would say, questioning the actions of the powerful, typically with reference to the promises made by leaders, as opposed to presenting some radical alternative to the Party. My sense is that this is a good example of a highly circumscribed agency that might align with the Mohist ideal as described by Brindley.
I’m not sure if this is what you were thinking about by way of examples. If you’re interested in a first hand read of the text, some is available here: http://books.google.ca/books/about/Individualism_in_early_China.html?id=X3LbfuK1V0QC
Still wondering about the comments drawn from The Economist, KT.
Appears to be a fruitful line of inquiry since I don’t like denigrating theory-type discussions.
Over there…your guide to modern China. I don’t need any …….guidance, and am perfectly able to form my own opinions based on long experience, reading and academic background.
Combined with the mostly nitwit commentariat.
One reason to condemn empiricism to Dante’s inner circle.
Now that I have that off my chest…..
Agency. Agentic. Agentically. Agenthood….
Cheers
It’s funny that despite feeling that I don’t need the guidance, I still take part, mainly because I think Tom himself is transparent about what he is trying to do and modest about his insights. Also, there is obvious growth in his views even over a short period of time. The same cannot be said for many of the commenters who typically get caught up in intricate webs of their own contradictions. They don’t appreciate when I point this out to them. I’m thinking your more indirect approach in your occasional comments might be the way to go, but I’m not very good at that. Call it the academic’s disease. I’ve been here too long…
Can we transpose self and individual into some concrete, everyday contemporary Chinese examples, pls.
And this transposition must be undertaken without reference to the the west in any shape or form.
Then we will reach the stage where theory is doing the actual work it claims to be able to perform.
Lorin. Don’t try this type of discussion over at Seeing Red….
Let me put some thought into it, Tubby. And no, I wouldn’t dare attempt it over there.