432) of Tel Quel writers Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, Philippe Sollers, and François Wahl, who together undertook a three-week trip to China in 1974 and reported back about it in their writings (Jacques Lacan was supposed to go but didn’t; in an interview, Sollers points out that “the person who was most interested in China was Lacan”; Kao 1981, 34). Across their works, these writers produced a largely “idealized” and “fantasy-like” (ibid., 431, my translation; on 435, van der Poel has “phantasmatic”) image of China that has by now been well criticized. (The exception was, perhaps, Wahl, who attacked his colleagues’ “sinophilia” but was accused by them of “sinophobia,” with antiorientalist tendencies evident in both positions; Hayot 2004, 153.)
There is plenty of scholarship on Tel Quel, and my goal is not to review all of it here. Apart from van der Poel, who seeks to understand why China was able to take on “the magical aspect of a modern Utopia in the writings of the Telquelians” (van der Poel 1993, 435), United States–based critics Lisa Lowe and Eric Hayot have already explored these Chinese hallucinations (Barthes himself uses the term; Hayot 2004, 154) or dreams, with Hayot dedicating a full third of his book Chinese Dreams to Tel Quel (he writes of Tel Quel’s “dream logic” [ibid., 122] in its approach to China) and Lowe discussing Tel Quel as a separate case alongside Kristeva and Barthes in Critical Terrains (Lowe 1991). Both Hayot and Lowe refer in this context to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article “French Feminism in an International Frame,” which skewered Kristeva’s book About Chinese Women, a direct result of Tel Quel’s China trip (Spivak 1981). Spivak arguably played a leading role in the later debates about Tel Quel as well as Western representations of China in general not just due to this review but also due to her critical comments, in her introduction to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, about Derrida’s use of China in that book (see Chow 2001 and Bohm, Staten, and Chow 2001; see also Meighoo 2008 and Jirn 2015).3
Lowe’s account in particular can be said to continue Spivak’s argument in that it criticizes the orientalist features of Kristeva’s, Barthes’, and Tel Quel’s accounts of China (the ways in which they are “disturbingly reminiscent of [earlier French orientalism’s] postures and rhetorics”; Lowe 1991, 137). Those features are all the more damning given the antiorientalism of some of Barthes’ work before Empire of Signs (his book about Japan) or his writings on China—specifically the entry “Continent perdu” (Lost continent) in Mythologies. This “irony” leads Lowe to speak of a “postcolonial form of orientalism” to describe such orientalist antiorientalist formations. Lowe criticizes Kristeva and Barthes for “constitut[ing] China as an irreducibly different Other outside Western signification and the coupling of signifier and signified” (ibid., 138). She further criticizes them for construing China as “feminine or maternal” and “disrupt[ing] the ‘phallocentric’ occidental social system” (139). Lowe’s analysis of Barthes is particularly provocative in that it traces the shift in his writing “from the targeting of orientalism as an object of criticism in the late 1950s to the dramatic practice of orientalism as a writing strategy in the mid-1970s” (153) in an attempt to escape the dominant Western point of view:
Ironically, Barthes’ attempt to resolve the dilemma of criticizing Western ideology while escaping the tyranny of binary logic takes a form not unlike that of traditional orientalism: through an invocation of the Orient as a utopian space, Barthes constitutes an imaginary third position. The imagined Orient—as critique of the Occident—becomes an emblem of his “poetics of escape,” a desire to transcend semiology and the ideology of the signifier and the signified, to invent a place that exceeds binary structure itself. (154)
Lowe points out that in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes “one of the designations for this space is atopia,” which is deemed superior to utopia because utopia “proceeds from meaning and governs it”—whereas Barthes’ attempt is precisely to get away from such a space governed by meaning (Lowe 1991, 158).4 And so a mythical no-place is invented that is called “Japan.” As Hayot points out, Barthes is very aware that his Japan is a construction; indeed, he explicitly presents it as such (Hayot 2004, 125). Still, Japan is evoked as
an imaginary topos of “untranslatable” difference. . . . The imagination of Japan is an occasion to wish, as in a dream, the toppling of the West: the undoing of its systems of language and discourse, its institutions of meanings, its symbolic paternal order. (Lowe 1991, 159)
As such an “antitext to the West, however,” Lowe writes, “Japan is ultimately not an ‘atopia’ but a ‘utopia,’” precisely in the sense that Barthes gives to this term: it’s the product of an “oppositional desire, still caught within the binary logic he seeks to avoid” (ibid., 159). In short, “Barthes’ Japan is a reactive formation,” and for that reason, Lowe argues that it fails as an atopia—and succumbs to orientalism.5
A similar problem affects Barthes’ writings on China: China is, in Barthes’ own terms, “hallucinated” in his work—but entirely within Western terms, as the West’s opposite. It is “considered exclusively in terms of occidental cultural systems,” as Lowe puts it (Lowe 1991, 162). Barthes “does not offer an explanation of how China is subversive within its own autonomous cultural system” (ibid., 162). Rather, it’s “invoked according to a logic of opposition” (163). In its blandness, which (as I have discussed in my introduction) Barthes identifies as China’s aesthetic trait, it offers “a commentary whose tone would be no comment” (Barthes quoted in ibid., 167; emphasis original).6 “Again,” Lowe writes, “as in traditional orientalism, the Western writer’s desire for the oriental Other structures the Other as forever separated, unpossessed, and estranged” (ibid., 167). “From this discussion of Kristeva, Barthes, and Tel Quel,” Lowe concludes, “we understand that even on the Left the orientalist gaze may reemerge, even when the purpose of its project is to criticize state power and social domination” (189). “The continuing utopian tendency of projecting revolutionary, cultural, or ethnic purity onto other sites, such as the Third World, must be scrutinized and challenged” (ibid.).
Hayot too seeks to understand—in the wake of scholars like Patrick French, Philippe Forest, and Danielle Marx-Scouras—the melding of “the imaginary and the real” (Hayot 2004, 128–29) that we find in Tel Quel’s accounts of China. He considers such melding to have been enabled by
the theoretical ground laid by Foucault (associated with Tel Quel early on but no longer involved by the time of the journal’s Maoist turn) and Barthes, among others, in which traditional notions of representation and reality gave way to more complicated projections of linguistic systems and dream worlds, blurring the line between actual and imaginary China. (Ibid., 129)
This is very much in line with Edward Said’s Foucault-inspired book Orientalism, which is interested in the “interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism” (Said 1978, 3)—between research on the Orient and then also what Said refers to as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident,’” which is the starting point for “elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its peoples, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on” (ibid., 2). What Said refers to as the “traffic” between the two produces what is, in his view, “the third meaning of Orientalism,” “which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two”: “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). It’s at that point that Said brings up “Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse” (ibid.), noting that he found it useful even if he will also criticize Foucault for not believing enough in “the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism” (ibid., 23). Overall, one can see here how much Said’s own book—which dates from 1978, just four years after Tel Quel travels to China—is in line with the work by Foucault to which Hayot alludes.
What
