The Poetics of Sovereignty

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The Poetics of Sovereignty Page 14

by Chen Jack W


  temporal pleasures.

  Denying the Imperial Body

  It is striking that Taizong did not seek to continue this rather spectacular

  tradition of imperial representation, particularly since the Tang dynastic

  house claimed to be descendants of Laozi and consistently gave preference

  to the Daoist religious factions at court. Instead Taizong—at least in the

  first part of his reign—discouraged talk of immortality-seeking in his

  court:

  On the renwu day of the twelfth month [January 15, 628], the emperor said to his attending officials, “Affairs concerning spirits and immortals are, at their basis,

  empty and false, and worthless are their reports. It was this that the First Em-

  peror of Qin adored without measure, and so he was deceived by masters of eso-

  teric techniques, thereupon dispatching young boys and girls in the thousands to

  follow Xu Fu and enter the seas in search of herbs of immortality. The fangshi

  wished to avoid the Qin’s cruel punishments and so remained abroad and did not

  return. The First Emperor nevertheless waited for them by the sea, and died up-

  on going back to Shaqiu. Han Wudi, in order to search for immortals, allowed

  his daughter to be wed to a person of Daoist techniques.56 However, when the matter [of his powers or promises] were not evidenced, then Wudi had him executed. Based on these two affairs, spirits and immortals are not worth the bother

  of foolish searches.”

  十二月壬午,上謂侍臣曰:“神仙事本虛妄,空有其名。秦始皇非分

  愛好,遂為方士所詐,乃遣童男女數千人隨徐福入海求仙藥,方士避

  秦苛虐,因留不歸。始皇猶海側踟躕以待之,還至沙丘而死。漢武帝

  —————

  55. Shi ji, 117.3063.

  56. This was Luan Da 欒大, who entered into Han Wudi’s service after the fangshi

  Shaoweng 少翁 was exposed as a fake and executed. On Luan Da’s marriage to the Grand

  Princess Wei, see Shi ji, 28.1391. On his subsequent execution, see Shi ji, 28.1395.

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  On Sovereignty and Representation

  73

  為求仙,乃將女嫁道術人,事既無驗,便行誅戮。據此二事,神仙不

  煩妄求也。”57

  The thrust of Taizong’s comment is clear enough, though it is worth

  pausing over a nuance in his criticism of the First Emperor and Han

  Wudi. Taizong states that the First Emperor “adored without measure”

  matters concerning tales of spirits and immortals, and he ends by dismiss-

  ing matters related to this alterior world as “not worth the bother of fool-

  ish searches.” What was perhaps worse than the pursuit of immortality

  was the recklessness and immoderation with which the two emperors en-

  gaged in it. That is, while Taizong would not condone the activity, he is

  even more troubled by the lack of self-restraint and discipline evidenced

  in the reigns of the First Emperor and Han Wudi.

  The theme of self-moderation is bound up with the tropology of askē-

  sis. I define askēsis as the disciplining of the body and its desires, a practice that arises out of the denial or negation of the ineluctable fact of corporeality.58 Transposed within the discourse of sovereignty, askēsis becomes

  the idea that the sovereign should devote himself to the responsibilities of

  governance, voiding himself of the temptations created by the wealth and

  power at his command. The ruler who cannot control his private desires

  neglects the public role of sovereignty, and thereby places the kingdom in

  danger. Whereas the goal of auxetic representation was to ensure the pro-

  longation of the body, ascetic representation sought to control or manage

  the body. For Taizong, the central problem had to do with tyrannical ca-

  pacities of the imperial body, with its propensities towards violence, and

  worse, towards pleasure in violence. There was an economic aspect to

  Taizong’s understanding of askēsis as well, one that took stock of the in-

  verse relationship between the vast resources claimed by the single ruler

  and those scant resources allotted to the multitudes that produced them

  in the first place. An anecdote, found both in the Zhenguan zhengyao and

  in the Zizhi tongjian, illustrates these various aspects:

  —————

  57. Jiu Tang shu, 2.33.

  58. On the philological history of askēsis, see Dressler, Usage of άσκέω, pp. 11–24; and Hijmans, ΑΣΚΗΣΙΣ, pp. 54–91. For more theoretical treatments of the term, see Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, pp. 115–136; and Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 72–77.

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  On Sovereignty and Representation

  In the second year of the Zhenguan reign, the capital region was stricken with

  drought, and locusts arose in great numbers. Taizong entered the imperial park

  and looked at the crop. Seeing the locusts, he gathered up a handful and cursed,

  saying, “The people take grain as their life, yet you eat it; this is a harm to the

  common people. If the common people have faults, these reside in me, the One

  Man. If you have intelligence, [you would know that] it is only proper to devour

  my mind but not to harm the common people.” He was about to swallow them,

  when officials around him hurriedly remonstrated, saying, “We fear that this will

  cause illness; you cannot do this!” Taizong replied, “What I hope is to transfer

  the calamity [to Ourself]; what illness could Our person avoid?” Thereupon, he

  swallowed the locusts, and from that time, the locusts did not again cause disaster.

  貞觀二年,京師旱,蝗蟲大起。太宗入苑視禾,見蝗蟲,掇數枚而咒

  曰:“人以穀為命,而汝食之,是害于百姓。百姓有過,在予一人。

  爾其有靈,但當蝕我心,無害百姓。”將吞之,左右遽諫曰,“恐成

  疾,不可。”太宗曰:“所冀移災,朕躬何疾之避。”遂吞之,自是

  蝗不復為災。59

  Within an agrarian society, the sovereign had responsibility for the conti-

  nuity of agricultural life, something that is threatened by the locust plague.

  To return the world to its proper order, Taizong offers himself as a sacri-

  fice to the locusts. There is an undeniable sense that the act has been

  staged, as suggested by the non-agricultural setting of the imperial park,

  Taizong’s melodramatic speech to the locusts, and the rote attempt of his

  ministers to dissuade him from risking entomophagic harm. Yet the an-

  ecdote points to a more serious argument about sovereignty, one that

  thematizes appetite, body, and the relationship between ruler and empire.

  To understand what is at stake, one must read the anecdote in terms of

  its semiotic economy. Here, two points are critical. First, there is a paro-

  nomastic troping between the terms for emperor ( huang 皇) and locust

  ( huang 蝗), whose pronunciation can both be transcribed as ghwang, following David Prager Branner’s transcription system for medieval Chi-

  nese.60 In other words, the locust is, by virtue of its punning name, an im-

  peri
al insect, the arthropodic double of the sovereign. Second, when

  Taizong addresses the locusts, he offers his xin 心 (“mind”) for them to

  —————

  59. I use here the version in Zhenguan zhengyao, 8.30.237. See also Zizhi tongjian, 192.6053–54.

  60. Compare Branner’s transcription to those in Pulleyblank, Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation, p. 132; and Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, p. 186.

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  On Sovereignty and Representation

  75

  devour, rather than his body or his stomach (which would make more

  sense in this story of eating and being eaten). The mind is not a wholly

  corporeal thing, referring both to the material organ ( xinzang 心臟) and

  the immaterial operations of thought and ideation ( sixiang 思想; yinian

  意念). And perhaps most importantly, the mind serves as the figure of rulership in the political analogy of the body—that is, just as the sovereign

  is the mind of the empire, the mind is sovereign of the body.61

  This play of signifiers is what makes intelligible the logic of equivalence

  and sacrificial exchange when the emperor offers his mind to his semiotic

  double, the locust. The account is structured around three acts of tropic

  exchange. First, we begin with the substitution between the people and

  the grain, since the grain is the central means of subsistence for the people.

  The locusts harm the people because they feast upon that which consti-

  tutes the very life ( ming 命) of the people. Second, we have the substitu-

  tion between the people and the sovereign. Taizong claims that the sover-

  eign’s one body has responsibility for all other bodies, and that all faults of

  the people are to be found in the “One Man” ( yiren 一人). In this way, he

  acts as the singular representative for all the empire. Third, Taizong re-

  stores the proper order of things by substituting himself for the grain that

  the locusts are devouring. It is significant that this is a double exchange,

  since Taizong not only assumes the part of the grain, but also displaces the

  ravenous locust from the equation. In the very act of sacrificing his xin,

  the sovereign of his body, Taizong asserts his emperorship ( huang) over

  the insect that puns on his title.

  With the last exchange, the circuit is closed and the locust plague is

  lifted from the empire. The ending of the anecdote suggests that this is a

  miracle tale: Taizong’s personal virtue is translated into efficacious action

  through self-sacrifice. And undoubtedly, Wu Jing included this story in

  the Zhenguan zhengyao with this purpose in mind. However, the rhetori-

  cality of Taizong’s address to the locusts—and in particular, the way in

  which it stages certain tropes of sovereignty—makes this something more

  than a vehicle for propagating an image of Taizong as model ruler. The

  locusts that eat the grain of the empire, and the emperor who eats the lo-

  custs, indicate a pervading concern with appetite and the problem of its

  —————

  61. On the corporeal metaphor of the state, see Hale, Body Politic, pp. 18–47; and Hale,

  “Analogy of the Body Politic,” pp. 67–70.

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  On Sovereignty and Representation

  governance. This is particularly troublesome because of the semiotic ech-

  oes between emperor and locust, the punning suggestion that the emperor

  who saves the empire by taking the plague into his own body is somehow

  identified with the plague, or the plague with him.

  Taizong’s concern with the imperial body emerges from a broader

  question of the relationship between the public institution of the sover-

  eign and his private self. To borrow a distinction made within Renais-

  sance political thought, what concerns Taizong is the relationship be-

  tween the body natural, or the private person of the ruler, and the body politic, or the symbolic body of the state represented by the ruler.62 From

  Taizong’s perspective, the sovereign should be constituted wholly by his

  public aspect, as he states in the following speech, made shortly after his

  accession to the throne:

  The ruler depends on the state, and the state depends on its people. Oppressing

  the people to make them serve the ruler is like slicing one’s flesh to fill one’s

  stomach. The stomach is full but the body destroyed; the ruler is wealthy but the

  state is lost. Therefore the harm to the ruler does not come from outside, but of-

  ten comes out from within the ruler’s own body. Now if the [ruler’s] desires are

  abundant, then his expenditures will be expansive. If his expenditures are expan-

  sive then his tax exactions will be heavy. If his tax exactions are heavy, then the

  people will be sorrowful. If the people are sorrowful, then the state will be in peril.

  If the state is in peril, then the ruler will be destroyed. We often think upon such matters, and thus dare not give free rein to our desires.

  君依於國,國依於民。刻民以奉君,猶割肉以充腹,腹飽而身斃,君

  富而國亡。故人君之患,不自外來,常由身出。夫欲盛則費廣,費廣

  則賦重,賦重則民愁,民愁則國危,國危則君喪矣。朕常以此思之,

  故不敢縱欲也。63

  Taizong’s statement begins by delineating the interdependencies of the

  people ( min 民) and the state ( guo 國), and of the state and the sovereign ( jun 君). If the sovereign does not realize that the people and sovereign

  are united in the single body of the state, and he allows himself to satisfy

  —————

  62. This is the formulation analyzed in Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies. Related to this is the Hobbesian distinction between the “natural person” (one whose words and actions are considered his own) and the “feigned or artificial person” (one whose words and actions belong to, or are representative of, others). See Hobbes, Leviathan, XVI.101–105.

  63. Zizhi tongjian, 192.6026.

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  On Sovereignty and Representation

  77

  his own desires at the expense of the people, then the resulting exploita-

  tion can be likened to self-cannibalism.

  In referring to the sovereign’s person, Taizong uses the term shen 身, a

  term that can be used to denote the person or self, but in this context,

  may be best understood as the self as it is instantiated in one’s particular

  body. This is a telling choice of terms, because while the shen may seem to

  belong to the sovereign alone, Taizong wants to show how it actually de-

  pends upon the sustenance-producing labors of the people. Taizong em-

  ploys what we, as Western readers, would identify as synecdoche, as a

  trope that substitutes part for whole within an organistic logic. He asserts

  that the people are the very flesh ( rou 肉) of the body and the ruler is the

  body’s stomach, and in this way, acknowledges how the ruler’s desires are

  an inescapable part of his existence. The ruler is, after all,
the one person

  in the empire who has the means to satiate whatever desires he might have

  (which is why he can be confused with the locust that devours everything).

  Yet to act as the stomach, rather than as the mind, is to place the emphasis

  on the production of appetite, and not on the higher faculties of govern-

  ance. Taizong’s worry is that the ruler who mistakes his shen as private

  and autonomous will make the people labor and suffer in order to satisfy

  his selfish needs.

  This leads Taizong to a second discourse, that of economics. Turning

  from synecdoche, Taizong constructs an argument based on metonymy,

  on cause and effect, in which he demonstrates how the sovereign’s bodily

  desires result in state expenditures, and the state expenditures lead to tax-

  es upon the people, and the taxes translate into human misery. Again, re-

  turning to the sovereign’s misprision of his shen as private, Taizong argues that the unrestricted indulgence of imperial desires cannot but lead to

  popular suffering, because the imperial body is essentially bound to the

  economic welfare of the empire, and moreover, because desires are intrin-

  sic to human nature, the imperial body constitutes a continual threat to

  the empire. The solution, then, is to refrain from acting upon desires:

  “We often think upon such matters, and thus dare not give free rein to

  our desires.”

  This concluding line is a performance of imperial askēsis, one that both

  admits selfish desire and deflects it, or rather, admits selfish desire in order

  to deflect it. In a complex rhetorical performance that centers on the im-

  perial body, Taizong ends by confessing the fact of desire and then rising

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  On Sovereignty and Representation

  above it, demonstrating that he possesses the moral self-discipline to avoid

  personal and empire-wide disaster. Without the admission of his own de-

  sire, Taizong might simply come across as a moralistic scold; by implicat-

  ing himself in the potentiality of tyrannical misrule, he shows how he can

  transcend his baser instincts in order to cleave to the ideals of virtuous

  sovereignty.

 

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