| Underlying the proverbial authority of the script in China is an entrenched indistinction between the texture of the world and the texts of culture. I call this interlacing of script and world the graphic regime. In this regime, social, cultural, and cosmological orders were constituted not only through writing but also as writing, as graphic textures to be composed and commented upon much like canonical scriptures were composed and commented upon. The dissertation addresses an early moment in the historical permutations of this regime in China: the rise of an autonomous gentry society in the wake of the Han dynasty's collapse. Traditionally, this transition has been accounted for in terms of an essentially modernizing scenario, one that centrally revolves around the emancipation of the self, society, and (spoken) language from an archaic imperial state and its scriptural order. I argue instead that the early medieval imagination of community was largely modeled upon the imperial graphic regime that it also superseded. Through a process that may be called mimetic autonomy, the medieval gentry shaped their sociable universe in the image of a scriptural order, a canonical texture composed of personalities, names, reputations, locutions, gestures, and styles. Analyzing medieval poetics, calligraphy, exegesis, as well as the arts of sociability, conversation, and character appraisal, I show how these together contributed to the formation of a new canonical order that cuts across the boundaries of the written and the spoken or the linguistic and the choreographic. |
