notes 2024
TOC
scott gregory, "bandits in print" (2023)
Chapter 1
- in may 1541, the ancestral temple of the jiajing emperor was destroyed in a fire. a dozen officials were convicted, including guo xun, who had compiled one of the first print editions of water margin
- what was it about a novel of outlaws and criminality that was so appealing to elite officials w/ hereditary rank?
- at this time, vernacular literature as a popular medium basically did not exist in china
- "We can create a sort of reading of this nonextant book by reassembling its social, historical, and literary circumstances around its publication, including both literary and material factors, and through them, decode the literary tastes that shaped them." -- on the Wuding edition compiled by Guo
- Guo was incentivized to publish and market works to furnish his own reputation and that of his lineage
- literary production was a way to signal virtue as a military man to other elites
- Guo was consistently penalized for corruption, but maintained his position by currying favor with the emperor until his downfall (ascribed to "arrogance") in 1541
- Guo began his publishing career with private histories of his clan, then moved on to editions of Tang poetry
- using publishing, Xun attempted to portray his branch of the family (contested descendants of the original ming marquis) as the rightful and unbroken heirs to this position
- having established (to some degree) the legitimacy of his familial and martial accomplishments, xun entered the literary world in an attempt to cultivate his reputation as a man of taste
- "By the time of the latter edition, Guo had returned from Guangdong-Guangxi to the capital. He had entered new social circles, and his presentational strategy had changed: Guo presented himself as having better access to rare editions than the literati themselves" (29)
- during the great rites controversy, guo xun serendipitously took the side of the jiajing emperor and his attempt to enter his father into the imperial line
- guo used the publication of "ballads of harmonious peace" a collection of qu arias, to bolster his reputation after corruption accusations
- after his death, many elite editors continued to reference the wuding editions as exemplary standards, in contrast to popular or "village" editions
- 1522 edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms generally referred to as "censorate edition" but it's likely (due to shared copy editors) that guo xun was responsible for it in some way as well
- Guo had his assistants write a novel "records of the heroes and martyrs" in the style of water margin and three kingdoms to boost the reputation of his ancestor guo ying
- "Shen ends his account with a striking statement about the power of narrative: “Thus, falsifying a biography brought him power”' (36)
Chapter 2
- "In the subsequent Qing dynasty, in particular, scholars pointed to the Censorate Water Margin as being emblematic of the lack of seriousness in the Ming that led to the dynasty’s eventual downfall." (42)
- context: fiction did not yet have popular/commercial connotations in the early ming. q: why did the censorate publish an edition of water margin?
- books in this period were signifiers of taste, and, as the story of ximen qing demonstrates, were an important status item for trade in a broader system of elite gift exchange
- the censorate under the ming reported directly to the emperor and was responsible for managing and surveilling other members of the bureaucracy. in practice however, their activities extended far beyond that
- books often made it onto the official publication list to cement relations between high level bureaucrats w/ publishing activities
- sanqu verse "Engaging in such nonserious writing was, for example, a way for Ming princes to display what Wilt Idema has referred to in one case as “a conspicuous display” of a “lack of political ambition.”" (50)
- in this case, books of sanqu poems become primers for ming literati and officials to practice a socially useful craft (deferring political ambition under scrutiny)
- in general, skills such as qin playing, chess, and writing were expected inclusions on the list, and the list was itself a template for refined behavior and past-times
- beijing publishing during the ming was considered low rent, small in comparison to other cities in the south
- "During the era in which censors such as Wang Tingxiang and Du Nan were active in the capital, and in which Wang Tingxiang worked with Guo Xun as directors of the Integrated Divisions, an edition of The Water Margin would have been regarded as a novelty—even more so than a lavish printed edition of a classic printed by the finest of Beijing publishers. For it to come into one’s possession, one would most likely have had to be a member of the social circles in which these men and their literary collections moved" (62)
Chapter 3
- official and poet li kaixian (1502-68) wrote about the reception of water margin among court and literati circles
- literati singled out the prose style of the novel, especially the complexity of its plot, in contrast to prior literary works
- "Li was highly educated and saw The Water Margin not as “base” or “crude” in subject matter and language but as a novel literary innovation that took advantage of the medium of print. He was, in other words, the model reader of The Water Margin in the time before the fire" (66)
- record of the sword, li's water margin inspired revenge fantasy after his forced resignation
- jin ping mei's novelistic/ironic appropriation of elements of this play for more iconoclastic ends
- records of the book of the tang published in fujian, rise of vernacularized historical narratives
- "One might say that minor discourses should not be intermixed with official history. I wholeheartedly acknowledge this point. However, there are truths recorded in unofficial, outside histories that official histories do not provide. If a book records obvious and corroborated facts, then it cannot be taken as extraneous “unofficial” history" -- Xiong Damu (75)
Chapter 4
- a decade after its publication, li's play inspired the publication of commercial editions of water margin and the three kingdoms
- "Broadly speaking, the disparate approaches to The Water Margin that we have seen these various figures take up to this point could be said to fall into three categories: the literary, the subversive, and the commercial" (80)
- late ming novels were known (and reviled during the qing) for their "Cut-and-paste" construction/freewheeling attitude to sources and editions
- one common practice was attributing the editing/collating of an unrelated edition to a famous/infamous literati
- court-case collections were intended for pleasure reading, most commercial publishers in the late ming catered to the cultivation of leisure activity for various strata
- "In this reading, Yu’s portrait borders on being a “gimmick,” hinting at a labor-saving shortcut to the status of cultural elite that was in reality unobtainable. But should we assume that he is nothing but a “huckster,” selling suspect goods behind a thin veneer of social respectability? Elsewhere, in other books, there are signs that the paratextual Yu—if not the empirical one as well—was sincere in his belief that his editing and commenting were intellectual endeavors worthy of monetary recompense." (85)
- li zhuowu, a minor official who became on unorthodox monk and commited suicide in captivity, became a "brand identity" publishers would credit works to, implying subversive content
- the importance of catharsis to subversion: legitimate anger at corruption expressed through literature
- "righteous release" characters in the book escape retribution for crime due to overall greatness/quality of character
- reading main text, captions (which provide interpretive gloss), and illustrations yielded differently paced experiences
- yu xiangdou's annotations emphasize the world of friendship as portrayed in the novel over any subversive implications, whereas li zhuowu's commentary mocks officials and politicizes things like "righteous release"
- One might ask, ‘The magistrate also did personal favors; why doesn’t he become a bandit?’ I answer: ‘Are you saying that the magistrate is not a bandit?’ - li zhuowu (103)
- in 1642, memorial published calling for a ban on water margin, enforced by the censorate
Chapter 5
- this ban was not very successful, as the most popular edition ever of water margin, the jin shengtan version emerged between 1641 and 1644 as the ming dynasty collapsed
- jin's political legacy and the valence oh his interpretation is contested to this day, but he is even more well regarded for his interest in structural/formal elements of the novel
- "Jin’s comments do more than point out the genius of the text’s author. That proclaimed genius is only intermediary; it is used to depict the character of the characters in sharp relief. This first character—the moral qualities exhibited by individual heroes—often takes precedence over “literary” matters in his comments" (111)
- issue of the authority to publish texts
- beyond formal criticism, jin was interested in ranking characters by moral attributes and distilling them as models of behavior
- "By contrast, Ding characterizes the three prefaces in the Jin Shengtan edition as being concerned not with the geopolitical Ming dynasty but a “textual empire” consisting of vernacular texts that are worthy of transmission due to “corrective readings and rewritings (reprintings).” That is, Jin’s edition portrays itself through its prefaces as an attempt to stem the tide of (commercially printed) books that have no right to be written or transmitted. " (116)
- jin canonizes a wide array of works w/ his notion of genius and the common habits thereof
martha s. jones, "birthright citizens" (2018)
Introduction
- this book is a study of the development of african american awareness and political articulation of "citizenship" in the context of the pre-civil war black community in baltimore. jones wants to demonstrate the degree to which these free african americans interpreted and took up the concept of being/becoming citizens, while at the saw time demonstrating the limitations of this approach. Relevant quote: "this is not, however, a story of unbridled agency in a triumphalist sense. inhabiting rights and comporting themselves like citizens only sometimes secured justice" (10)
Chapter 1
- Between 1780 and 1820, black baltimoreans found themselves increasingly isolated due to the rise of a domestic slave trade (spurred on by the cotton gin) that threatened and delimited their rights in previously "safe" states like maryland. at the same time, with a growing population of around 10,000 (22), and facing questions of legal status brought on by marylan'ds ad hoc "black codes" and the gilbert horton case (in which a free black man from ny state was detained as a slave) free black americans and their allies attempted to bring the question of citizenship status (via state level courts) to bear through legal debates throughout the first 20 years of the 19th century
Chapter 2
- by the 1820s and 30s, colonization (specifically the resettlement of black americans to liberia and haiti) was generally unpopular among free blacks, especially the more educated, evidenced by a largely rebuffed mission from the haitian government to entice black american migrants with sizeable promises of economic advancement. but, as jones illustrates with the story of hezekiah grice (an advocate for citizenship who eventually decided to emigrate), in the face of increasing restrictions on freedom of movement, those in favor of black citizenship could find few allies/means of legal recourse in this period, which (while not leading to a mass exodus of free blacks) contributed to a widespread sense of disillusionment with the citizenship question.
Chapter 3
- chapter relates the life of george hackett, a black sailor who served as the steward to a white commodore on an american naval vessel and (upon that commodore's passing) chose to return to baltimore despite considerable risk. jones' main goal with this chapter is to characterize seafaring as both an economically viable and legally ambiguous career path for free blacks in america. she documents the relative equality african americans experienced as sailors, particularly as witnesses of and parties to conflict disputes, and how that experience would shape the legal activism of hackett (and presumably others) upon his return to baltimore
Chapter 4
- jones now draws our attention to the participation of black baltimoreans in the criminal justice system in which, while over prosecuted for alleged illegal activity, they were also able to get some measure of redress for wrongs perpetrated against them (as in the case of george hackett's suit against a white assailant) or acquire some form of legal privilege generally not conferred to free blacks. for the latter, jones focuses on the case of cornelius thompson, a black man who acquired a travel permit via dealings with a renowned judge (and a personal confidant). however, jones argues that, to the white legal establishment, these conferred legal statuses were not *rights* at all (unlike in the case of white citizens) and were gifts to be given and taken at the whims of the conferring authority.
Chapter 5
- in this chapter jones analyzes a different form of legal consciousness experienced by free blacks by investigating various disputes between church officials and congregants within black methodist churches in baltimore (mid 1830s to 1850s). jones argues that these cases, in which disputes over church property and the division of authority between trustees, lay congregants, and the state, expanded the domain in which black people could stand before the court system as bringers of dispute rather than targets of the law. again, the development of this consciousness is ambiguous, as most of these conflicts were petty and often violent quarrels over private property and money.
Chapter 6
- jones arg: licensure schemes, originally intended to be onerous on free black americans (esp restricting freedom of movement), because ways for black people to legitimate social activity (hunting, self-defense, even outright violence) with the authoritative backing of the white judiciary. jones is careful to note that, especially in the case of firearms, lacking a permit made little practical difference in the litigation black people participated in (1840s-50s). however, applications for licensure could serve as a symbolic act of justification when no true "rights" were legally on the table.
*Chapter 7
- same basic argument as before, this time focusing on debt relief (which in the wake of the panics and bank runs of the 1850s, free blacks in baltimore were able to acquire somewhat successfully, with race being more of a technical issue than a substantive one) and disputes over apprenticeship. the interesting undercurrent of jones arg there is that the color-blindness of the cours (mostly circumstantial in the case of economic factors) created a legal consciousness that prioritized seeking judicial redress outside the bounds of a formal economic relationship (obviously this could be extended to the 20th c)
Chapter 8 & Conclusion
- the book concludes with a discussion of a the dred scot decision. on the one hand, jones presents the decision with the (already assumed) monumental qualities hat would lead (among other causes) to the civil war. at the same time, the decision illustrates her overall argument: legal personhood for black americans in this time period was not really a question of contesting national citizenship, but a matter of local disputes to which one could be party within the purview of the state. in the conclusion, she casts her gaze forward to reconstruction and the rise of citizenship and national level discourse in the nascent civil rights movement (though she draws few direct conclusions).
brook ziporyn, "evil and or as the good" (2000)
Overview
- Z sketches out the tiantai perspective on the question of evil through analyses of selections from zhiyi, zhanran, and zhili. the book is structured like a riff on wittgenstein's ladder: each rung is a necessary foothold to ascend to the next rung, and once the step up has been completed, the premises of the rung below must be discarded. just kidding. it's not quite so cute. the book begins by working through some more familiar antinomies of holism and the question of evil in the scare quotes western tradition, and initially two frameworks (toolkits?) are established. in terms of evil, we have conceptions (obviously) that think of evil as the absence of good, or of good and evil as mutually exclusive, and conceptions that (in some fashion) posit the identity of good and evil. the latter (excluding tiantai) invariably operate on the premise that one term of the dyad (usually good) is the essence of the other, either in a temporally ultimate sense (as in, things that appear evil work towards the construction of the good) or in a sense that divides the world into levels (as in, the perception of evil in the world is a kind of misperception of something that is good). Z moves here to a more abstract discussion of value, expanding our scope to the nature of any property or attribute. a similar picture emerges: framings that emphasize the ultimate separation of distinct properties, or framings that collapse distinctions into a single ultimate property. the latter can be approached in two ways, either affirming unity in existence (everything is both X and Y because X and Y are Z) or non-existence (Z is neither X nor Y because nothing is X or Y). permutate at your leisure. with all this established, we can start becoming chinese. Z slowly builds to zhili's understanding of value-paradox by introduction a series of concepts pertaining to what he calls "omnicentric holism". first he glosses a brief intellectual history of the center (the term or element in a whole that gives meaning or disambiguates all other elements). for tiantai guys, any part can be (and therefore is) the center of the whole. this we know (or could have guessed anyway), so Z then begins to construct the scaffolding of mahayana thought with regards to value paradox (but dear reader, keep omnicentrism in the back of your mind). basically: tripitaka- positive value inheres in the abandonment/cessation of attachment, dharma exists as such, common/shared- two levels, delusive level of distinction and ultimate level without distinctions, dharma is empty in the second sense but in the first sense (a sense that contextualizes all statements) precepts/ideology of non-attachment supersedes other doctrines (emptiness), separate- the middle way is understanding the emptiness of both good and evil from a third standpoint (the exclusive mean), and the content of any distinction is ultimately evacuated into buddhahood (usually via a reduction to the mind), and perfect/round- the middle way is understanding that good is identical to evil (the inclusive mean), and that the content of any distinction entails all 3,000 things. Z says one of the key things distinguishing the round teaching from the separate teaching is the former's emphasis on intersubjectivity, that the relation between center/parts or foregound and background is analogous to the form of a dialogue, in which either term could swap places/significance at any moment. contrast this with huayan and chan guys, where the move to emptiness or buddhahood or good is fundamentally not reversible; contemplating the empty does not reveal distinctions, contemplating good from the perspective of enlightenment does not reveal one to be practicing evil (i'll work out some of the nuts and bolts of these arguments in the next section). finally, Z brings us back to the zhili quote that opens the book "other the buddha there is no devil, other than the devil there is no buddha". we should now understand this remark in the context of:
Key Arguments
- the tiantai position (particularly that of zhili, to whom Z is clearly the most sympathetic) is one that abhors bias and onesidedness. onesidedness can mean any sort of attachment, to the existence of objects, to the non-existence of objects, to debauchery, to the precepts, to dharma, to emptiness. for tiantai guys, every one thing (object, attribute, position) must be identical to all others at once. the meaning of identity here is a vexed question. in some schools that affirm a similar perspective, the identity of objects means their unity in emptiness. but here, every distinction is ultimate. in other words, when an object or attribute is taken as the center of a whole, every other object or attribute is defined in terms of that center, contains that center within it, and is in fact nothing but that center. Z makes frequent reference to the idea of master-signifiers (as found in marxism, feminism, ecology etc). one skeptical response to a focal concept like "class" is that the existence of such a concept is illusory, it is a conventional byword for an aggregate of disparate parts, it derives its self-stability from outside causes and has no distinct nature of its own, or it ultimately emanates from another source entirely. but the tiantai response is that class does explain everything other part of the whole, and that once one understands this one can go a step further: because every distinction and determination we have at hand is ultimately reducible to class, class is also ultimately reducible to every distinction and determination we have at hand. Z characterizes this as a minimal ontological position: the only thing that can (at the end of it all) be said about one thing is that it is all other things. so too then for good, evil, enlightenment and delusion. one reading of the lotus sutra might be that, upon the achievement of buddhahood, evil actions one committed or suffering one experienced can be seen as skillful means towards the realization of enlightenment. thus suffering and evil have an identity with (or at least or not exclusive to) the buddha. but for zhili all of these transformations must be immediate and reversible. evil is not just good's impetus, and the buddha is not one who speaks from a position beyond delusion, rather the buddha is one who knows that her good actions are evil in nature and in practice, and her evil actions are good in nature and in practice. this is what is meant by the well known maxim "the ultimacy of the dung beetle". buddhist cultivation, for zhili is not only a movement towards buddhahood, where all of one's life and prior actions will be recontextualized an understood as means to the end of enlightenment. nor is cultivation only identical with buddhahood. rather, cultivation is, at the same time as being both those things, a movement towards becoming a dung beetle, and already identical with the being and actions of a dung beetle. this argument means to solve two problems. first, for buddhists (and most of us) the omnipresence of evil, its causal relation to the good, and its necessity for a conception of good as such make it difficult to understand what doing good even is. the identity of good and evil supposes exactly what it sounds like it supposes, and in so doing makes evil into something both ineradicable (for it inheres in any other determination) and something workable (through practice, one can continually reveal the omnipresence of any onesided or evil act, thus dissolving its onesidedness while preserving its distinctness). the second is zhili's (and all tiantai practitioners') attachment to buddhism and buddhist institutions themselves, an attachment that is no less provisional, one sided, or deluded than any other. zhili's argument (and this sheds light on his motivation for the quote that begins and bookends this text) is that, in his attachment to buddhism, his one sided, delusive, and evil attachment, there inheres good, there will be good, and there always was good (definitively, and constitutionally) all along.
Personal Thoughts
- i'm broadly on board with Zs gloss on tiantai (as everyone knows) and what i found particularly compelling about this book is its exegesis of the two step structure of meditation in contemplating evil, and Zs characterization of tiantai "opening up the provisional to reveal the real" as akin to a mobius strip, a move that, once complete, suggests a move back to the original antimony, and so on and so on. the affinity i have for this kind of thinking is the same affinity i have for all the other random crap in my personal intellectual suitcase; working with distinctions, dissolving them, and bringing them back in the context of whatever i used to dissolve them is something i have to keep doing for hours every day or i die. that being said, Z is (as in emptiness and omnipresence) kind of skittish about what living a tiantai life (as an attested non-practitioner (lol)) actually looks like. further, there are some obvious gaps in how one would approach tiantai as an epistemological position (at least if one limited oneself to this book alone). as Z says, moralizing doesn't work, and as i'm saying right now, philosophy probably doesn't work either. still, at this stage it's not clear if anything compels those without an intuitive stake in it to adopt the tiantai position, or if it's necessary desirable (if one lacks zhili's particular attachment) that they do. andbutso i do think, without a fully grounded set of reasons/non-reasons yet, that thinking in this way is the minimal pose anyone who is, day to day, confronted and overwhelmed by the irreducible evil that comprises our efforts to do and be good should adopt, and hope that i and others can (as Z gently proposes) live and do good (and bad) amidst our appropriate guilt.