London Taiwan Workshop

This weekend was the London Taiwan Workshop, a now annual event held at the London School of Economics. I was tasked with making concluding comments, bringing the papers together and summarizing the day. This is what I came up with, more on the issues of method and some comparisons with Chinese and Japanese Studies. Meanwhile, I thought I would update here a bit more often with less formal items.  

This is the fifth London Taiwan Workshop, and I think I have been to all of them in one capacity or another. I certainly recall very warmly the first event at the end of 2002. For me that event marked the establishment of a sense of place for me both in Britain – this most displaced of places – and, very strikingly, at the same time also in Taiwan. It legitimized my knowledge of Taiwan and so gave me part of a sense of place, which is to know a place.

So I find myself now with the difficult but interesting task of trying to bring the day together.

Tremlett started with anthropology. He appealed, implicitly, to the claim of anthropology to be the primary social science discipline by virtue of its apprehension of the fundamental and universal human experiences – birth, marriage, death, etc. Tremlett showed how even these most basic of traditions – rituals inscribing the cosmological, political and social – rooted in their claim on immutability over generations, are mutable when subject to the forces of modernity, or post-modernity. Tremlett looked at urbanization – with all its associations with the effects of capital and the state – as a force of modernization in Taiwan and in the Philippines, which as it produces new ways for people live together spatially and in their social practices, also transforms the way people die. (Dr Tung raised the importance of religious revival). Tremlett shows how life’s fundamental traditions are then rather more improvised and contingent, opening many questions about the choices we make as to what is really “fundamental” in our traditions when their transformation becomes necessary, or possible, or efficacious, or desirable.

Thompson took these issues from a different point of view. He looked at the experience of modernity in Taiwan, this impetus of and for change, not as a cause of the transformation of tradition, but from the point of view of the renewal of its own self-representation by those who live it. Taiwanese filmmakers approach the transformation of their own lives in spatial, visual and emotional terms, visualizing and narrating change in Taiwan through a medium which is itself transformative of their experience. In a this way, Thompson’s paper broke down the distinction between theory, cultural representation and the represented object, which might be Taiwan or theory or film itself. The Taiwanese know themselves and are able to reflect critically upon themselves in their own self-representation. Thompson applied theorists to intersect with these representational transformations of place, highlighting the way Tsai Ming-liang’s films expose, like Tremlett on the practices of death, the contingency of place.

Bernath’s paper elaborated these issues further. She examined the transformative practices of architecture which are remaking urban spaces and creating its modernity through the spatial and aesthetic effects of architectural representation. Bernath introduced a new vector into the day’s analysis, that of the global. Global architectural practices have impacted upon Taiwan’s three-dimensional spaces through the introduction specific modes of representation, privileging the simulation of architectural space, and the affect of space over its objective reality. These are not critical, self-conscious reflections upon transformations, as Thompson outlined in cinema, but practices with specific transformative effects.

Lai’s paper also took in the vector of the global and offered a different take on spatiality in Taiwan, that of a media space. The physical presence of Eslite bookstores across Taipei and elsewhere in Taiwan intersect with the virtual geographical features of a media and consumer landscape, in her mapping the places of art in Taiwan, as art passes through this landscape through the expressways of consumption. For Lai, the transnational media and commerce in Eslite is another transformative force, this time for art practices which themselves have been self-consciously remade by the transformative forces of modernity. Art makes a certain self-conscious appeal to the universal or the transcendent in the human condition, and as Lai shows, is also self-consciously remade both willingly and perhaps sometimes not so, by the remaking of the media space and the intervention of commercialism in which it operates.

Chien elaborates these themes in her work. The interaction between the physical presence of an exhibition space, in Eslite, and a space of consumption, which Lai described, is now overtaken by the domination of new media. The physical spatial transformation of traditions by modernity has given way to transformative effects unbound by the physical world and freed to play out in the media technology space of the internet. This explosion of the constraints of real space has allowed new and impossible vectors of cultural movement through East Asia and internationally, and as Chien notes presents new dangers for old forms of hegemony. However unanchored to the physical world this media space might be, it remains structured by pre-existing global forces of power.

And finally to Lee’s paper on the transformation of education in contemporary Taiwan. She added the missing piece in this three dimensional jigsaw, that of the state. However much we can observe the multiple vectors of the transformative effects of modernity on Taiwan in art, architecture and traditional social rituals, the presence of the state can never be discounted and in Lee’s paper she highlighted precisely the place where the state intervenes most proactively in social and cultural life, education. She also showed how at the same time new interventions with new “yin and yang” strategies have occurred through social movements and new sites of power in a democratic and modern Taiwan . Lee’s paper focussed on a particular site of that power, that of gender.

Six papers on different topics, but with a narrative of approach to Taiwan running through them all. We have spent the day examining forces and vectors of transformation, of the cause and effect of one category of analysis affecting another.

“Modernity”, modernization, or “post-modernity” might be appealed to as a foundational category, but in the elaborations of the papers, what strikes me I think is the lack of a necessary ground or a base from which to project the features of the New Taiwan. The notion of modernity seems to mean little but “time’s arrow”.

I wonder then if we can start to think about method within Taiwan Studies and how the emergence of a method might be brought to bear upon other area studies.

In the first instance, the papers of the present event might be contrasted with other, related, fields of area studies.

Chinese Studies, in its contemporary form, does have a ground, and that is politics. In Chinese Studies, cultural, social and even economic changes are mapped over changes in politics, especially party politics, so than developments in these areas of Chinese life are explained as responses to or reflections of politics. May Fourth, Maoism, Hundred Flowers, Anti-rightist, Cultural Revolution, post-Mao, reform, Tiananmen, the Southern Tour, and so forth are political events which are used to structure or produce the explanations of the cultural and social in China.

Japanese Studies is, I think, a form of psychoanalysis. Contemporary Japan is characterized by neuroses, excesses of cultural disturbance and irrationality, which are explained by past traumas and the “national baggage” of its history. Contemporary Japan was as if born out of the Bomb, and from this original trauma has come the neurotic cultural expressions of the weight of its domineering history and traditions against which it struggles to grow out of.

Neither of these models apply fully to the study of Taiwan, although there are some interesting intersections. With the important exception of the date of the lifting of martial law, we do not map Taiwan’s cultural and social transformation against the political machinations of its ruling regimes. Neither have we seen Taiwan’s cultural and social life analyzed as a neurosis borne out of the trauma of the past, although such rhetoric is, of course, a feature of Taiwan’s political discourse, which often invokes the crisis of Taiwan’s politics as a result of the traumas of 2-28 and the White Terror.

In reviewing the papers today and other work on Taiwan, there seems to be no unifying approach to Taiwan Studies. So I would like to conclude the day with the question of what this thing called Taiwan Studies might be.

In the first instance, it is not enough to claim that the method of Taiwan Studies is to proclaim that there is no method, that it is unconstrained or open-ended. This is, I think, a lazy conceit.

Instead, we have an approach to the study of Taiwan structured around the notion of its change, of transformation often but not always through the experience of modernity or post-modernity. As the papers today have shown, it is possible to produce a narrative of change in Taiwan through a multiplicity of vectors, placing any number of categories of analysis against others showing multiple, countervailing, forces of change – forwards, backwards, up and down – media, politics, the state, social practices, architecture, art, urbanization, education, gender, consumerism. With each vector is its effect – cultural forms and social practices which are turned from one thing into another, erased, recreated, redeployed, recontextualized.

There is a kind of aesthetic to this narration and mapping of transformation. It has a ceaseless, turbulent quality. Nothing is unchangeable, everything is plastic, invented and inventible.

Reflecting on the papers today, I think there might be something here to self-consciously develop. The basis of Taiwan Studies might be a specific way of thinking about temporality and Taiwan, and the method might be to do what we have done today which is to self-reflexively describe the vectors of the forces of change in Taiwan. Contingency and indeterminacy of these vectors has been a crucial aspect of the day, in which no received social practice cannot be transformed and remade, and contingency is something which can work in a methodology if it is done knowingly and skillfully. At the end of today, I can see a form for Taiwan Studies which deliberately produces Taiwan as a multiplicity of temporal vectors of transformation.

In conclusion is the question of whether it possible to systematize any approach to deliver legitimized knowledge. Is it possible for forums such as this to articulate a Taiwan Studies which then moves towards its own naturalization, so that we know what it is we do when we study Taiwan. Is it plausible or credible to suggest that Taiwan Studies is narrating the transformations of the meaning of Taiwan through time. These are complex questions, and a major theme of my own work is the way the indeterminacy of Taiwan as a geopolity is expressed in the indeterminacy of the scholarship which occurs under the label “Taiwan Studies”.

I think, though, that after five years of this forum we can start to think about and propose an approach.