Distraction, Political Activism Online, and the Neglected Physical Sphere

Frank Pasquale left a very interesting comment on my post yesterday, highlighting the political implications of the attention deficit disorder that the ‘Net facilitates and enhances. (Please read the full comment, and if you have the time, chase down the wonderful links that Pasquale provides. Ironic advice, perhaps, given the subject under discussion.)

I want to respond to the opening statement of  Pasquale’s comment:

Rather than empowering new forms of solidarity and political activism, the web may just distract us from them.

In particular, I want to do so by focusing on a kind of activism that suggests itself as a natural strategy to all too many today, that the way to be politically active, an ‘agent of change,’ is to be a ‘thought leader’: to blog, tweet, Facebook-discuss, Twitter-converse, to ‘influence the conversation’ by jumping into the online fracas, dishing out our own, assuredly-unique contribution to the mix. After all, we’re changing minds, one at time, by sending on all these links, writing all these posts, pushing and prodding information hither-n-thither, directing it in the appropriate ways to the appropriate folks. Aren’t we?

So that’s what we do, staying online as we do so, perpetuating and sustaining a set of persistent fantasies associated with the Internet. One of these is the illusion that one’s Internet audience is all there is, all that one needs to worry about. So, when we step out into physical space, away from our keyboards, our activist energies depleted, our work for the day is done. The keyboard is where I do my political work. We’re all cyber-journalists, cyber-polemicists, cyber-pamphleteers, cyber-radical presses now.

My worry about this is the converse of the fear expressed in Frank’s comment: that not just may the web distract us from ’empowering new forms of solidarity and political activism,’ it might tempt us into discharging our political batteries online. It might lead us to disdain the boring, tedious, often unrewarding forms of collective action that are still required in physical space to make political change happen: Do I really need to go for that rally when I’ve already done my bit by forwarding fifty links from the bloggers with the biggest Klout? Why bother attending activist meetings when I’m leading the conversation online?

The excessive attention paid to–and the hosannas showered on–social media tools during the Arab Spring, and indeed, protests elsewhere in the world, seem to have convinced all too many–who I suspect were already primed for such news–that physical space interactions can now be disdained in favor of social-media-capital-accumulation. All to be spent on political purchases, of course.

But this well-intended strategy goes all too wrong, all too quickly. For online is where we stay, distracted, and satisfied by retweets, forwards, link-backs, and Facebook-shares. Sure, we aren’t turned on by the ka-ching of cash registers–we are too elevated for that–but we love watching other numbers pile up. Paying too much attention to those is a diversion too, away from the grubbiness, messiness, and persistent intractability of political work in the physical sphere.

That Beehive in Your Head? That’s Just the Net Calling

Like many users of the Internet I suffer terribly from net-induced attention deficit disorder, that terrible affliction that causes one to ceaselessly click on ‘Check Mail’ buttons, switch between a dozen tabs, log-in-log-out, reload, and perhaps worst of all, seek my machine immediately upon waking in the mornings. My distraction isn’t unique, but it has its own particular flavors: I find myself visiting the same sites far too often, I have too many email accounts,I can only use one social media ‘tool’ at a time. What makes this deficit disorder intolerable is that I am simultaneously resentful and afflicted: I rage and rage against its hold on me, resolve to cut myself loose, but all too soon, stumble back to the keyboard, defeated.

I have tried many strategies for partial or total withdrawal: timed writing periods (ranging from 30 minutes to an hour); eight-hour fasts (I pulled off several of these in 2009, when I was working on A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents; to date, this remains my most successful, if not repeated since, intervention; since then, somehow, it has been all too easy to convince myself that when I work, I should stay online because, you know, I might need to ‘look something up’); weekend sabbaths (only accomplished once, when I logged off on a Friday night, and logged back on on Sunday morning); evening abstentions (i.e., logging off at the end of a workday and not logging back on when I reached home). None of these strategies has survived, despite each one of them bringing succor of a sort.

The effect of this distraction on me is not dissimilar to that experienced by other sufferers: I sometimes feel a beehive has taken up residence in my cranium; my attention span is limited to ludicrously short periods; my reading skills have suffered; writing, always a painful and onerous task, has become even more so. Because of the failure to attend to tasks at hand, my to-do, to-read, to-write, to-attend-to lists grow longer and cast ever more accusing glances my way. Worse, their steadily increasing stature ensures that picking a starting point from any of them becomes a task fraught with ever-greater anxiety: as I begin one task, I become aware that several others are crying out for my attention, causing me to either hurry through the one I have started, or worse, to abandon it, and take up something else.

I do realize, as many others have, that all of this sounds most like an incurable, pernicious addiction. But there seems something terribly banal about all of this: an inability to attend to that which is difficult and anxiety-causing is hardly a novel disease. Procrastination has been around ever since the Good Lord took all of six (or was it seven?) days to get on with creating the world. And yet, that doesn’t seem to reduce any of its personal urgency. I haven’t given up hope yet, especially as more drastic solutions offer themselves: ten-day meditation retreats, for instance. If I can stop checking email for long enough, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Note: In case you were wondering, yes, even as I wrote this post, I interrupted myself several times: to check email, switch tabs, and make myself a cup of tea. The last-mentioned brought some calming relief.

Nick Drake’s ‘At the Chime of a City Clock’ and Urban Melancholia

I discovered Nick Drake late, very late. Back in 2007, Scott Dexter and I were busy dealing with the release of our book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software; mainly, this involved engaging in some spirited discussions online with other folks interested in free software, the creative commons, free culture, and all of the rest. One of our interlocutors was a young man from–I think–Reading, UK. His name was–I think–Tom Chance. As is an internet voyeur’s wont, I moseyed on over to his webpage and spent some time poking around through his various links. One link led to a last.fm playlist. One track on that playlist was Nick Drake’s At the Chime of a City Clock.

I’m not sure why I played the track. But once I did,  and as the opening picks on the strings of Drake’s guitar floated out, accompanied by ‘A city freeze/Get on your knees/Pray for warmth and green paper/A city drought/You’re down and out/,’ I was hooked. Not as in ‘I played that track incessantly.’ ATCOACC isn’t really the kind of song that can be played again and again, at least, not at the same sitting. Rather I was hooked as in ‘it got under my skin,’ ‘spooked me out,’ ‘induced melancholia,’ ‘conjured up a rich panoply of images,’ ‘stirred up long-forgotten memories,’ ‘was strangely calming,’ ‘intrigued me with its orchestration,’ ‘haunted me,’ and so on. It was, and is, that kind of song, simultaneously simple and complex, one that almost immediately provokes in its listeners a curiosity about its provenance and meaning.

ATCOACC’s lyrics are alternately straightforward and cryptic, but they never stop being suggestive, leaving themselves open to the varied interpretations that its listeners might bring to it. (It has been suggested  that Drake’s lyrics in general show the influence of William Blake, William Butler Yeats and Henry Vaughan, poets that he studied, and expressed an affinity for, during his days at Cambridge.) When I first listened to ATCOACC, New York was in the grip of a unseasonably cool summer day, gray and overcast, with faint leftover smatterings of the morning’s rain beating against my apartment windows; I felt I had discovered the perfect soundtrack to a day that is all-too familiar on the East Coast. And strangely enough, even though none of the lines in the song are explicitly about urban blight, I somehow felt that images of torn-down city blocks, sidewalks with grass poking up through them, deserted parking lots, and old grimy theaters were easily evoked by it. That was because of my particular history on the US East Coast and it spoke volumes of ATCOACC’s ability to reach into me.

If there is a miniscule weakness in ATCOACC’s lyrics it is that Drake mentions London in one line (Saddle up/Kick your feet/Ride the range of a London street/); they might have worked better without explicit mention of any particular city. And that is precisely because Drake’s melancholia should be familiar to anyone that has ever found themselves confronted with that particular irony of the modern life: to be frighteningly, devastatingly alone, in the middle of humanity’s most crowded spaces.

The Pleasures of Etymology Lessons

A persistent reaction of mine while reading is to react with little starts of pleasure when I encounter a little etymology lesson tucked away in the pages of my read. Recently, for instance, I found out that ‘hornbook‘–referring to treatises that aim to provide balanced summaries of a particular area of legal study–originated in England in the fifteenth century, referring to a framed page of study materials–perhaps religious like a prayer, or perhaps more mundane like an alphabet–laminated by a sheet of transparent horn. I also learned that actors perform ‘roles’ because in the same time period, they performed their parts by reading lines written on rolls of paper. And so on.

Every week it seems, brings forth an etymology lesson of sorts, one which sends the nerd antennae quivering and the geek flag a-fluttering. Earlier this year, I read CS Lewis‘ Studies in Words, a veritable bonanza for the etymology-enthusiast. I was every bit as pleased as I expected; besides providing ample opportunity to be awed by the Lewis-meister’s erudition, Lewis’s masterful study provided weeks of ‘Did you know that ‘national,’ ‘nature’ and ‘nascent’ are related?’-type talk.  These little etymology-bombs aren’t bon mots, and they aren’t conversation-stoppers, but they do provoke the odd raised eyebrow and are quite satisfying to dispense, a kind of verbal largesse, if you please. (Other recent favorites include: ‘You do know that ‘legal,’ ‘ligament’ and ‘religion’ share a common root, right?’) It helps of course, that none of my listeners have ever smacked me upside the head, and have instead, provided gratifying responses along the lines of ‘Really?’

But besides providing the incurable nerd an opportunity to show off in polite company, why does etymology provide such pleasure? Most fundamentally, I think, it is because it suddenly makes me aware of the sometimes-mysterious history of the seemingly utterly familiar. I use words all the time: I read them, I write them, I speak them; I agonize over which ones to use; I perform feats of combinatorics with them. They seem handy, mundane, close at hand. But when the etymology of a word is put forth, I become aware of the metaphor that lurks at its heart, the long passages of time that it wears lightly, of its handling by a host of fellow speakers, writers, readers, all subjecting it to the impress of their idiosyncratic usage. The thickets around that contingent combination of letters clears and I see back to the time of its original application and deployment.

We are swamped by words, all the time. To receive an etymology lesson is to realize the enormous history we all bear lightly, as we go about our daily lives, making contact with loved ones, giving directions, communicating ideas, dispensing instructions, and all of the rest; among our daily chatter, our scribbles and notes, lurks the history of countless revisions, emendations and imaginative coinages. A history that we, with our continued usage of words, rewrite on a daily basis. Perhaps the true pleasure of the etymology lesson is to realize that by indulging in the most mundane of daily acts we partake of a gigantic collective artistic and historical project. That should put a smile on any face.

Environmental ‘Luddism’ and Feenberg Contra Technological Determinism

My post yesterday on the debate on the Factories Act of 1844 was written to remind ourselves of the perennial dismissal–in the all-too-familiar language of economic efficiency–of attempts to introduce values pertinent to worker-side regulation in industrial workplaces. As noted, I had borrowed the example  from Andrew Feenberg’s Reason and Modernity, his latest book in a long series of works that have developed his ‘critical theory technology’. It should be unsurprising that this material would have been found in a book on the philosophy of technology, because arguments about economic efficiency often use as cover technological imperatives i.e., ‘this argument has the form that it does because technology has pushed us into this corner, along this path, and to back up now is unthinkable.’ Thus, not only can the sword of economic efficiency be flourished, it can do so under the cover of technological determinism.

So, today, I’d like to quote Feenberg to note the followup to the little story recounted yesterday:

Yet what actually happened once the regulators succeeded in imposing limitations on the work day and expelling children from the factory? Did the violated imperatives of technology come back to haunt them? Not at all. Regulation led to an intensification of factory labor that was incompatible with the earlier conditions in any case. Children ceased to be workers and were redefined socially as learners and consumers. Consequently, they entered the labor market with higher levels of skill and discipline that were soon presupposed by technological design. A vast historical process unfolded, partly simulated by the ideological debate over how children should be raised and partly economic. It led eventually to the current situation in which nobody dreams of returning to cheap child labor in order to cut costs, at least not in developed countries.

The key phrase in this paragraph, of course,  is ‘Children ceased to be workers and were redefined socially as learners and consumers.’ Technical systems are flexible, as are the societies in which they are embedded, capable of conceptual redefinition and the absorption of new values. Technological development can be pushed into new trajectories, guided and prodded by the introduction of values that we, as a society, have elevated in our priorities. Among the ways in which these new trajectories can be sought out and followed is the redefinition of key theoretical terms–such as ‘children–in the discourse that guides technological development. These redefinitions may alter the term of the debate such that some old dialectical positions, once thought commonsensical, are unlikely to be ever adopted again.

On page 38 of Reason and Modernity Feenberg provides us a photograph by Lewis Hine of a ten-year old girl standing in front of a cotton mill. The machines are built to her height, designed to be operated by people four feet tall. Needless to say, their design was altered in response to the regulation of child labor.

Those that articulate modern dismissals of environmental concerns, describing it as ‘the new Luddism’ and couching their objections in the language of we’d-love-to-be-environmentalists-but-our-hands-are-tied-by-the-technological-infrastructure, would do well to read up on the history of the technological apparatus they so fervidly defend.

The Factory Act of 1844 and the Economic Inefficiency of Banning Child Labor

One of the dominant threads–sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit–in any modern conversation about employer-side regulation of the workplace (health and safety standards, worker unions etc) is that such constraints are invariably economically inefficient, a burden on the profit-making potential of the enterprise. The parameters for this conversation are drawn from a sparse set consisting of technocratic values: revenue-maximization and technological efficiency, with human welfare as a to-be-hoped-for but not inevitable by-product. Some winners and some losers, you see.

‘Twas ever thus, of course. Consider for instance the debates surrounding the passage of The Factories Act of 1844  by the Parliament of the United Kingdom, to regulate the number of hours worked by women and children in industrial establishments. Some of its benevolent provisions limited the number of hours that children between the ages of 9-13 could work to a mere nine hours a day, others required machinery be fenced in, and yet others required accidental deaths to be reported to a surgeon and investigated.

Unsurprisingly this Act met with determined opposition from factory owners, bemoaning, I presume, the ‘nanny-state’ and busy-body bureaucrats determined to stick their oars into the frictionless, benign churnings of market forces and technological imperatives. For instance, it was ‘inefficient’ to use full-grown workers to do work that could be done just as well–and sometimes better–by children. Adult labor was more expensive; employing it would lead to ruination. Increased poverty and unemployment, decreased competitiveness in the international market for manufactured goods were but the least of these consequences. Sir J. Graham, who spoke up vigorously on behalf of factory owners, said,

We have arrived at a state of society when without commerce and manufactures this great community cannot be maintained. Let us, as far as we can, mitigate the evils arising out of this highly artificial state of society; but let us take care to adopt no step that may be fatal to commerce and manufactures.

Sir Graham then went on to greater concreteness as he noted that reducing the workday for women and children would throw the current depreciation cycle for machinery off-kilter–a factor in assessing year-end balance sheets–and result in lower wages, higher prices for goods and trade imbalances. Thus,

In the close race of competition which our manufacturers are now running with foreign competitors …such a step would be fatal…

Regulation was felt by Sir Graham to be:

[B]ased on a false principle of humanity, which in the end is certain to defeat itself.

Its proponents were disingenuous; for what they were offering was:

[I]n principle an argument to get rid of the whole system of factory labor.

Well said, Sir Graham. Someone has to step up and speak out on behalf of the entrepreneur, constantly on guard against the intrusion of profit-denying Whitehall mavens. The next thing you know these do-gooders will be asking for environmental safeguards against economically-necessary and profit-ensuring pollution. Better to man the barricades now.

Less facetiously, I hope to write a follow up to this little story very soon.

Source: Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (MIT Press, Cambridge: MA, 2010, pp-11-12)

Edmund Burke on Pakistan and the Loyalty of Armies to the State

Friedrich Leopold Freiherr von Schrötter said of the Prussian Army during the reign of Frederick the Great that ‘Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country.’  Schrötter made this remark in response to the size of the Prussian Army–which then numbered almost 200,000, a puny number, incidentally, compared to the size of twentieth-century and contemporary armies–and its utilization of all Prussian social classes. This quote is quite easily pressed into service when it comes to describing Pakistan, which of all nations in modern times perhaps best meets this description: Army generals in charge of central administration more often than not, a gigantic portion of its budget given over to defense expenditures, the subordination of all democratic institutions to military control, the hijacking of clearly visible, articulated, and pragmatic national priorities by the need to ensure a continued dominant role for the armed forces; the list goes on. (Nowhere is the power and influence of the armed forces in Pakistan more visible than in the cushy retirements that Pakistani senior military personnel enjoy. I recently read the autobiography of a Pakistani Air Force senior commander that begins with him recounting the precise moment when he decided to start writing his memoirs; this inspiration occurred to him at his post-retirement villa in Spain.)

In preparing my syllabus for my Political Philosophy in the fall semester–which I have organized around the theme of ‘Revolution, Counter-Revolution’–I am revisiting Edmund Burke‘s Reflections on the Revolution in France. As I read through it, I was reminded of, and encountered, a passage that while normally regarded as being eerily prescient of the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, could well be pressed into service when it comes to talking about Pakistan:

It is known that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate or popular authority; and they will least of all yield it to an assembly which is only to have a continuance of two years. The officers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of military men if they see with perfect submission and due admiration the dominion of pleaders; especially when they find that they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders, whose military policy, and the genius of whose command (if they should have any), must be as uncertain as their duration is transient. In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full off action until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master — the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.

Note: I am well aware that almost any country with a sufficiently well-developed military industrial complex would meet the description I afford of Pakistan in the first para above. Pakistan distinguished itself by the persistence of military commanders in active positions of political leadership.

Geertz on Comparative Anthropology and the Law-Fact Distinction

(Continuing my series of notes on Clifford Geertz’s Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, Basic Books, New York, 1983; earlier notes appear here and here.)

Geertz’s Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective (first presented as the Storrs Lectures for 1981 at Yale Law School; an online version is available) should be essential reading for philosophers of law. In it, Geertz explores the relationship between law and anthropology by way of examining how comparative anthropology–especially that concerned with legal systems in different cultures–provides us a means of examining how our legal categories and assumptions could be reconfigured. To confront a legal mind from another culture is to not only examine a new legal sensibility but to have ours made more aware of its particular qualities: how has it sliced up the world and established its categories, how has it come to this particular ontology? There is a whiff of relativism and incommensurability in the air but,

[I]t is one that neither argues for nihilism, eclecticism, and anything goes, nor that contents itself with pointing out yet once again that across the Pyrenees truth is upside down. It is, rather, one that welds the processes of self-knowledge, self-perception, self-understanding to those of other-knowledge, other-perception, other-understanding; that identifies, or very nearly, sorting out who we are and sorting out whom we are among. And as such, it can help both to free us from misleading representations of our own way of rendering matters judiciable (the radical dissociation of fact and law, for example) and to force into our reluctant consciousness disaccordant views of how this is to be done (those of the Balinese, for example) which, if no less dogmatical than ours, are no less logical either.

Geertz holds out this possibility of transformation because of the view of law that he holds, one which assimilates it to:

[N]ot… to a sort of social mechanics, a physics of judgment, but to a sort of cultural hermeneutics, a semantics of action. What Frank O’Hara said of poetry, that it makes life’s nebulous events tangible and restores their detail, may be true as well, and no less variously accomplished, of law.

Such an understanding of law has immense potential to inform philosophical debates on the nature of law, on whether natural law, positivist, legal realist or critical legal theories best describe it. Central to Geertz’s intervention in this debate–via his empirical attention to the three alternative systems that he considers–is his critique of the fact-law distinction:

The rendering of fact so that lawyers can plead it, judges can hear it, and juries can settle it is just that, a rendering: as any other trade, science, cult, or art, law, which is a bit of all of these, propounds the world in which its descriptions make sense. I will come back to the paradoxes this way of putting things seems to generate; the point here is that the “law” side of things is not a bounded set of norms, rules, principles, values, or whatever from which jural responses to distilled events can be drawn, but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real. At base, it is not what happened, but what happens, that law sees; and if law differs, from this place to that, this time to that, this people to that, what it sees does as well…..

If one looks at law this way, as a view of the way things are, like, say, science or religion or ideology or art–together, in this case, with a set of practical attitudes toward the management of controversy such a view seems to entail to those wedded to it–then the whole fact/law problem appears in an altered light. The dialectic that seemed to be between brute fact and considered judgment, between what is so and what is right, turns out to be between…a language, however vague and unintegral, of general coherence and one, however opportunistic and unmethodical, of specific consequence.

Geertz’s essay makes for essential reading, not just because it abounds in marvelous insights like these, but because of the richly informed comparative study it provides of what Geertz terms the ‘Islamic, Indic, and Malaysian” legal systems. It should be read by anyone interested in the conceptual foundations of the law.

The ‘Guilty Pleasures’ of ‘Friday Night Lights’

When Lorrie Moore wrote her New York Review of Books review of the Friday Night Lights phenomenon—the television series, the book, and the movie–she made sure she prefaced it with talk of ‘guilty pleasures’:

On my way to a Manhattan book party recently my mind was wandering to cultural guilty pleasures: sprightly but inane movies, or half-baked television programs no sophisticated person would admit to watching, as well as other aesthetic uncoolnesses….So it was, then, with great and satisfying surprise that almost immediately upon arriving at the party, I found myself locked in enthusiastic conversation in a corner with two other writers, all three of us, we discovered, solitary, isolated viewers of the NBC series Friday Night Lights. We spewed forth excitedly, like addicts—this was no longer a secret habit but a legitimately brilliant drama. Though the title might make the uninitiated think of shabbat candles, the show is actually about football in Texas, a state that I felt just then had not been this far east since the Bush administration.

In quoting Moore’s review–in a venue like the NYRB!–I am, it should be clear, getting my ‘guilty pleasure’ disclaimer out of the way. (Friday Night Lights–the television series–has plenty of weaknesses and some of them are apparent even in the first season. Nevertheless, I intend to watch it through to the end.)

Moore’s review concentrates on the show as drama, its characters, storyline progressions and the like. But how well does the series Friday Night Lights work as a sports drama? It employs the standard clichés of its genre in its game segments: the hyped-up aggressive opponent that gets its comeuppance, the come-from-behind last-minute victory hinging on a dramatic, unconventional play, the slow-motion tracking of the play, the internal tensions between team-players, dramatic conflict between coaches and players, sideline shots of anxious, disgruntled spectators, and so on. (A standard in the school sports movie genre is the struggling team taken to new heights by the inspired coach. Friday Night Lights does not follow that template; it begins with a successful team being taken over by a successful coach; their real problem is living up to the expectations of their town.)

These clichés are such an integral part of the sports drama lexicon and grammar that I’m entirely unsure of how any product of that genre could do without them.  What makes them work in Friday Night Lights is that the show is only incidentally about football; it is about high-school life in a small Texas town at a particular time in America. (And thus, it brings us the Iraq war, drug abuse, racism, sexism, and all of the rest.) If there was any more football in Friday Night Lights, it wouldn’t work; the sports clichés would overwhelm us. The reason they work in Friday Night Lights is because the show–in somehow convincing us gullible types seeking ‘guilty pleasures’ that the players are school-going athletes prone to their vulnerabilities and foibles–manages to make the football both sideshow and centerpiece.  It realizes, as smarts sports movies do, that the sports on the field is only interesting when the characters involved in the game are. To that end, it brings out the entire bag of tricks available to storytellers of the television story and throws them at its material.  This method is transparently, shamelessly, and finally, effectively manipulative.

Reflections on Translations – IV: Embedded, Untranslated Text, and Tintin

Louis Mackay has an interesting article at the London Review of Books Blog (‘Tintin in China’, 11 June 2012) , which continues an examination–commenced by Christopher Taylor (LRB, 7 June 2012)–of the Chinese artist Zhang Congren’s influence on Tintin‘s creator Hergé. (In particular his influence on one of Hergé’s earliest Tintin adventures, The Blue Lotus.)

Zhang influenced Hergé in a couple of ways. First, he helped Hergé develop an attitude in The Blue Lotus that is ‘consciously satirical towards European notions of cultural superiority’ [Mackay citing Taylor] and as such is

credited with bringing about this change in Hergé’s attitudes, as well as with helping him develop a sense of pictorial composition that owes something to Chinese aesthetics.

But Zhang also helped enhance the realism of Herge’s work by providing ‘Chinese writing in signs, wall-hangings, posters, graffiti, and occasionally speech bubbles.’ As Mackay notes, this text is all intelligible, and would have made perfect sense to a Chinese reader.  They most certainly were not ‘merely random characters included for atmospheric effect’, noise to pad out the background. They were meant to make sense, whether observed by Chinese eyes or not.

This ‘intelligible’ Chinese text richly informs the backdrop for Tintin’s adventures:

One prevalent poster is an advertisement for Siemens (西門子, ‘Xi-men-zi’), which had run factories in China since 1899. Indoors there are proverbs andshanshui poems. Political slogans are daubed on outside walls. Some are incomplete but all would have been instantly understood by a Chinese reader. A truncated line of graffiti refers to 三民主義, the ‘Three Principles of the People’ adopted by the Chinese Republic under Sun Yat-sen (national self-determination, democracy and the welfare of the people). A torn poster reads: 取消不平等… (‘Abrogate the unequal…’). Any Chinese reader would know that the final missing characters were 條約, ‘treaties’. The ‘agreements’ imposed by force after the Opium Wars, which established Western and Japanese commercial dominance in the treaty ports, with extraterritorial rights giving foreigners immunity from Chinese law, were deeply resented.

This nod to fidelity to locale in Hergé’s work was demonstrated vividly to me in the course of reading the second Tintin-Chang adventure, Tintin in Tibet. At the beginning of the tale, Tintin, having dreamed about Chang being in trouble, flies to Kathmandu with Captain Haddock to commence an expedition into the Himalayas. To this end they arrange for a Sherpa guide and some porters. While walking through the streets of Kathmandu, Haddock bumps into a porter, and as is his wont, lets loose with a volley of colorful invective. But on this occasion, Haddock’s outburst is not met with the usual stunned silence. Rather, in response, the porter flies off the handle, loudly delivering a lungful of indignation to  Haddock’s flabbergasted face.

The porter’s  Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani outburst was written in the Devanagari script; I read it and chuckled. The line was perfect in its tone and archness; the long-suffering, hard-working porter finally driven to the end of his tether by always-bumbling overlords.  In perfect Hindustani, in the middle of  a Tintin book. Till then, Hergé had placed his familiar characters on the background of a foreign, mute, land that paid silent witness to the adventuring of others. Then suddenly, it intruded and spoke. A little Easter Egg for those in the know; a reassurance of attention to detail for the rest.