Review of Byung-Chul Han's 山寨

Byung-Chul Han really is, as the description of the book says, “one of the most well-read philosophers of our generation.” Taking a phenomenological approach (Hegel/Heidegger), he contrasts the Notion of being in Western and Chinese thought. Chinese thought really does just win; there is a moment in the book where he expresses the ethic of Western cultural expression as “exclusion and transcendence”, while Chinese thought communicates it through “inclusion and immanence.” It is a short book and I encourage you to read it in order to see the examples of that.

In general, this distance (supplied by undertones of Platonic forms, Kantian transcendental idealism and Christian reverence of selfhood) still pollutes the minds of Western cultural critique. He details this as a relatively modern phenomenon: the “museum-isation” of cultural artefacts and the endless chase of the fantastical real/authentic/true — such that a work of art is only valuable if it is an original, ignoring the mastery necessary to create a copy, as well as the act of mimicry being an act of flattery. This is only a fraction of what it means for a culture to abide by an ethical aesthetic of “exclusion and transcendence.” This clouds the West with a cultural malaise, producing a stagnation and the repetition of culture (à la Mark Fisher): the malignant reverence of individualism and symbolic value over utility, metastasising and strangling flourishing beauty.

Not to mention that the “original” is a paradox. In one of the chapters he goes through real-world examples of the Ship of Theseus, and how the Western eye fails to comprehend the East through its misguided notions of originality. A paradox isn’t unsolvable; it just means there is something wrong with the question. In this case, it is an issue with the epistemology driving the propriety of ideas that creates this so-called paradox. The copy is the synthesis of the old becoming (sorry for the confusing Heideggerian language); it is not a new or an old but simply is.

In Chinese culture this does not exist; knowledge, culture and art are ever-changing and fundamentally communal. Art is littered with the stamps and poetry of those who have engaged with it. To be hailed as an expert is to duplicate and create anew the old.

An interesting point in this is that the man who pioneered biological cloning was a Buddhist, seeing it as an act of reincarnation and the reanimation of life (de anima), while the international community (under Western hegemonic pressure) moved to ban it, as it is still tacitly commanded by the Christian dogma of God being the sole creator of life. China never had a wave of Christianity; almost everyone accepts the Big Bang and the revelations of science — they are not strangled by the dogma of the past.

Shanzhai is a neologism for ‘fake’, representing the phenomenon of “fake Chinese goods”, such as Fuma in relation to Puma. It is an expression of play.

After recounting some of the lessons from this book to my partner, they asked me “what is ‘about’ in Chinese culture?” I think it is in becoming, through the act of replication, that we find this. In Chinese, ‘about’ is 關於. 關 can mean to close, confine, or shut, or to involve, hailing from the noun for a mountain pass / guarded passage. 於 indicates in/on/at a time or a place or an origin; it can also refer to the doer of an action or a comparison (than). 於 points forward from somewhere (time and/or place); 關於 thus represents bringing what was confined forward, where the new is in comparison to the old.