Contemplating the Self

This English text follows Professor Chiang's Chinese essay paragraph by paragraph; where the two differ, the Chinese original is authoritative.

If we read the “questions” and “answers” in HSU Che-jui's photographic series Answer too closely, we find ourselves trapped instead inside the so-called “answers.” Are these really “answers”? Can “questions” and “answers” give us true — that is, genuinely correct — knowledge? Can this so-called knowledge really bring us strength and power? Or does it, the more we look, only breed further confusion and doubt? Or drag us back into the student-day memory of cramming standard answers by rote? We may be at a loss as to what exactly HSU means to convey through the “questions” and “answers” of all these different school subjects — Chinese, English, mathematics, history, geography, civics, physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, national defense, and more. And do the figures in the images, deliberately assuming their varied poses and gestures, hint at something to us?

For the current generation of Taiwanese students, confronted with an experimental, perpetually “in-progress” curriculum, should one silently accept the disciplined standard answer, or dare to raise a reflection? HSU Che-jui chooses to invent a “martial art of thought,” assuming the various “stances” (zīshì) of martial training — a homophone of “knowledge” (zhīshì) — and, with the maxim that “to hold a horse stance without grasping the principles of the fist is to drill the body to death,”[1] mocks knowledge acquired by rote without understanding. Through this he asks: is it that “knowledge is power,” or is it only those who already hold power who can control how knowledge takes form? On the dialectic of knowledge and power, the French thinker Michel Foucault (1926–1984) held that the essence of knowledge is power, for power is everywhere and can sway and even control the words and conduct of others. Society, he argued, is like a surveilled ring-shaped prison, in which those who hold power, through the tower that watches over the cells, monitor whether the many obey society's norms; and modernity is precisely the construction of that paradoxical act of thought, the “law of thinking the unthought,”[2] through which alone we have the chance to know ourselves. Yet the answer to “Who am I?” has, across the ages, driven people to ask obsessively — and Foucault foretold that man would be erased, like a face of sand at the sea's edge washed away by the tide.[3]

In the Answer series of self-portraits, shot on 4×5 black-and-white film, HSU Che-jui inscribes on his chest the motley “questions” of Taiwan's present-day education — past exam items on the Three Principles of the People, earthquakes, nuclear power, semiconductor fabs, population aging, phonetic symbols and homophone puns, and the like — while the “answers” are made to appear, deliberately, on his back: a symbol of “how is one to move forward toward an answer one cannot even see oneself?”[4] At the same time it conveys how, “when the purpose of learning grows too utilitarian, study becomes a swallowing-whole to get through exams; the moment the exam ends, knowledge (the answer) is cast to the ‘back’ of the mind, and we let others decide what we should learn, having thought and values forcibly ‘implanted’ in us by another.”[5] Some images also allegorize an exam-king chasing a perfect hundred: can he really govern a nation along the standard road toward the right direction? The exam-citizen has plainly become an exam-machine, obliged to answer by the rules of discipline; those who answer well are granted “the right — the power — to speak,” while those who diverge are discarded as scrap. HSU, who has long reflected on the examination system, says: “Education mirrors the thinking of those in power; the school becomes a vast brainwashing institution, and the exam a contest over who has been brainwashed most thoroughly.” Yet in truth the many value-judgments each of us holds about life have no correct standard answer. “Who are we?” and “Who should we be?” are not questions whose answers anyone may set as standard; a student's capacity and results in learning do not amount to possessing true knowledge. The wisdom of a life must come through lived experience, not merely the martial drill of tactics rehearsed on paper — on the exam sheet.

Through the images of Answer, HSU Che-jui tries to make members of society across the generations recall the exams, large and small, they went through in their own school years, and ask whether the so-called “knowledge” they gained still remains in their minds today. Taking himself as the test subject of his own self-portraits, he probes how the utilitarian system of examination lets those in power “assimilate thought through violence and forge a faith in ‘man,’” while “man” comes to “survive” only for the sake of the exam.[6] In light of this, people today should pursue the paradoxical act of thought that is the “law of thinking the unthought,” so as to truly come to know the self — for it is because I exist that I can think, and the self must be “made into a question.” By inscribing “question and answer” on his own body, HSU, through this “problematization of the self,” lays bare the paradox of “question” and “answer” in the examination system and reflects on the paradoxical act of the unthought. His courageous act of thought in “speaking truth” is exactly as Foucault, in Fearless Speech, problematizes the human act of truth-telling — showing that to “speak truth” is not merely to “speak truth” but is itself a social act, and that the one who “speaks truth” is one who dares to take a risk. The philosopher of truth-telling to come, Chiang writes, will be an artist who ceaselessly recreates the contemplation of the self.