4 - The Contingent Continent: Kafka's China in “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer” and “Ein altes Blatt”

Summary

IN THE PREFACE TO The Order of Things Foucault cites an essay by Borges in which “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia” offers the following classification for animals:

(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

By quoting this passage Foucault suggests the contingent and arbitrary nature of our own systems of taxonomy. For Foucault, China occupies a paradoxical position in the Western imaginary as the site of a pervasive yet perplexing system of order. On the one hand, “in our traditional imagery” Chinese culture is “the most meticulous, the most rigidly ordered, the one … most attached to the pure delineation of space; we think of it as a civilization of dikes and dams beneath the eternal face of the sky; we see it spread and frozen over the entire face of a continent surrounded by walls” (xix). However, this realm that is supposedly obsessed with spatial order employs principles of organization that appear unintelligible and chaotic to the Western observer. Referring to the Chinese writing system, which “erects the motionless and still-recognizeable images of things themselves in vertical columns,” Foucault argues that the taxonomy proposed above results in “a kind of thought without space,” in “words and categories that lack all life and place but are rooted in ceremonial space, overburdened with complex figures, with tangled paths, strange places and secret communications” (xix).