Zones of Indeterminacy: Art,Body and Politics in Daoist Thought

Xu in Zhuangzi’s Philosophy and the Politics of Xu

In Zhuangzi’s philosophy, Xu is an important and yet difficult concept. References to Xu appear frequently throughout Zhuangzi’s writing. It constitutes the core foundation of ambiguity in the Zhuangzian Daoism. Xu is in fact not exclusive to Daoism. Both Zen Buddhism and Confucianism also elaborate on this idea. Yet, Xu has become a very distinctive concept in Daoism that helps bring about a conception of the unique Daoist cosmos, especially by way of underpinning the infinite revealing of ambiguity. In the Zhuangzian Daoism the concept of Xu encompasses and denotes a very particular mode of ambiguity. The difficulty of translating Xu is attributed to its pluralist philosophical connotations that include – but are certainly not limited to – blandness and lack of substance.

Rooted in Xu, ambiguity in the Zhuangzian sense constantly unfolds itself to transformation without being reduced to a concrete manifestation of actualization. The Zhuangzian ambiguity, in one word, is an indeterminate relational process. The synthesized concept of Xu thus entails an overflowing of ambiguity over relationality. The philosophical flavor of Xu is savored through a rich mixture of meanings in producing a multiplicity of diverse and yet indeterminate relations. Xu is a generative, transformative and relational idea whose fecundity lies in its inexhaustible production of blended ambiguity that animates the engendering of new relations. In this process, the incompleteness of substance and blandness provides the necessary site for the idea of ambiguity to evolve, transform and illuminate under the enrichment of Xu. In what follows, I further examine the ideas of lack of substance and blandness to analyze Zhuangzi’s concept of Xu.

One of the key components of Xu is lack of substance. For Zhuangzi, while it is true that absence of substance entails nothingness, it differs from no-thing-ness. It is understood as a blend (not even a combination) of both the existent and nonexistent. A Xu-ed lack of substance necessarily involves processes of detachment from the absolute that concretizes via actualization. In addition, this is also a process of mutual engendering – by way of bypassing substance – of tenuous and yet innate relations of new creation. The relational oneness of the existent and nonexistent consists of the flowing of qi (气). In Zhuangzian Daoism, qi is understood as the ‘matter energy’ or ‘vital energy’ that invigorates the constitution and reconstitution of the ‘ten thousand things’ (a Chinese term referring to all things in the universe, both existent and nonexistent). Qi is by no means an abstracted ontological being. Rather, it is an enlivening and nurturing force that holds together the formlessness of nature. ‘As death and life are together in all this’, writes Zhuangzi, ‘All the forms of life are one. … All that is under Heaven is one breath (qi)’ (Zhuangzi, 2006: 188). Life and death, for Zhuangzi, is the consequential effect of the movement of qi. Where life is the convergence of qi, death is the diffusion of qi. In Zhuangi’s philosophy of cosmology, qi is flowing and amorphous energy, serving as the fundamental constituent of the cosmos. The birth of the universe starts from a fluid and formless void, a void of oneness. As Zhuangzi continues to point out,

at the great origin there was nothing, nothing, no name. The One arose from it; there was One without form. … The forces worked on and things were created, they grew [into] distinct shapes, and these were called bodies. (Zhuangzi, 2006: 97)

The oneness of qi, as Jian Xu rightly observes, is ‘protomaterial, a vital creative force that gives “form” to everything in the universe’ (Xu, 1999: 967). An all-pervading force, qi de-ontologizes natural substance through its indeterminate fluidity. It disintegrates and congregates the bodies of ‘ten thousand things’, which inevitably renders them formless. The occurrences of constitution and reconstitution transpose between there-is and there-is-not, leaving behind the reductionist actualization of substance for its exclusion of variation and becoming.

We need not look very far to find a good example in Zhuangzi’s repudiation of sophism. For sophists like Gongsun Long, the pertaining attributes of whiteness and hardness, independent of each other, belong separately to a stone. A stone is either white or hard without being both white and hard at the same time. In this division of white stone and hard stone, Gongsun Long’s dualism of either-or is elevating the stones to the level of ontological substance, rendering the two attributes immutable and inert. Yet, questioning Gongsun Long’s jianbai lun (on white and hard), Zhuangzi despises arguments like these as ‘pointless nitpicking debate about similarity and divergence’ (Zhuangzi, 2006: 67).

In opposition to Gongsun’s ‘petite knowledge’ about precise demarcation, Zhuangzi stresses his idea of ambivalent and vague substance. Lack of substance, in Zhuangzi’s theory of Xu, seeps across the dualist border between whiteness and hardness, disavows the essentialist territorialization of the attributes as given, unchangeable and passive, and makes their unexpected encounter not only inevitable but also productive. Zhuangzi’s idea of substancelessness is devoid of preinscribed, intrinsic attributes of any kind and embraces an ambiguous and yet grand fullness of countless merging from within and in-between, a profusion of indeterminate and vague there-only-is. It is about the fusion of both-and via a primordial emptiness – a living emergence of manifold – that renders the ‘ten thousand things’ of nature uncontainable.

Xu also denotes the meaning of blandness, a Daoism-influenced Chinese aesthetics that is dull to intensifications. A taste of insipidity, blandness in the Zhuangzian aesthetics, speaks of a bland detachment from flavor – an inert inclination toward intensification, a state of ambiguity that is not readily excited by flavor. For François Jullien, this blandness is explicated in his terminology of fadeur, a concept that Jullien uses to interpret the Chinese idea of blandness (dan,淡) (Jullien, 2008). In illustrating the meaning of fadeur (blandness), Jullien insightfully observes, ‘when no flavor is named, the value of savoring it is all the more intense for being impossible to categorize; and so it overflows the banks of its contingency and opens itself to transformation’ (Jullien, 2008: 42). For Jullien, blandness is an enabled process, a ceaseless course of mutual transformation without being treated as pre-given. Often used in the word xu dan (Xu-ed blandness), Zhuangzi’s blandness is a philosophical approach to achieve the yin-yang balanced state of serenity so as to savor the flavorless. ‘Resting, they are empty; empty, they can be full; fullness is fulfillment. From the empty comes stillness; in stillness they can travel; in travelling they achieve’, writes Zhuangzi (2006: 106).

Implicating emptiness, a Xu-ed blandness turns into an unstable, bland flavor, a balancing affect that remains indifferent and inert to completion. It is a critical point beyond which fullness comes into being while completion never meets its termination as yet. Mediated by the blandness, completion is always on the go, forever to be attained. Bland tenuousness permeates it all over and isolates it from dependence on intensified flavors, leaving it all the more porous to change and becoming. In this sense, the Zhuangzian concept of blandness is vital to an obscure and dull taste of flavor. Thus, the stake of the Xu-ed blandness lies in its persistent striving for inception, an inchoative stage that is always about to digress from the already forged in order to experiment with the new. For Zhuangzi, the appreciation of blandness is thus all about those tasting experiences that are diffusing, disseminating, distorting and elusively ambiguous. It is important to mention that this part of Xu is bodily registered. The savoring of this blandness, according to Zhuangzi, requires a decentered body, bland in its interiority and diffusive in its exteriority without center:

A hundred parts and nine orifices and six organs,

are parts that go to make up myself,

but is any part more noble than another?

You say I should treat all parts as equally noble:

But shouldn’t I also treat some as better than others?

Don’t they all serve me as well as each other?

If they are all servants, then aren’t they all as bad as each other?

Or are there rulers amongst these servants? (Zhuangzi, 2006: 10–11)

Zhuangzi’s body is a self-detached life, a flowing, unsettled and fused energy, alienating itself from a structured hierarchy, blurring the encircling of a center, expanding and proliferating the uncertainties among the relations between the organs. In this sense, the body is no longer associated with a privileged heart that structures it as such. Rather, it is a body both with and without organs – a bland surface that orients itself inwardly and outwardly, consistently morphing so as to find the organ that cannot be precisely specified with clearly demarcated interior and exterior. The bland body, for Zhuangzi, is alien to a formally structured entity as pre-given. It is, instead, a balance forever in attaining that distances itself from intensified flavors. It is a product of divergence and coincidence.

It would be interesting to compare Zhuangzi’s bland body with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Body without Organs’ at this point. On the one hand, Zhuangzi may agree with Deleuze and Guattari with respect to the stake of immanence in conceiving the BwO, a plane of cartography that opposes organizational structure and stratification and instead embraces substantial mappings and remappings. The bland body shares similarities with the BwO in the sense that they both renounce the internal and external structural imposition of pre-ordained relations and oppose the organized, centered body. They are a moving surface that is not yet definable by its hierarchy but by its horizontality.

However, on the other hand, Zhuangzi’s body also differs from the BwO noticeably in that while the latter stresses the consistency of desire and intensity in activating the circuits of the BwO, the former talks about a process of infinite fusion – a mutual engendering that does not rely on the multiplication of the intensities of the circuits. For Zhuangzi, the Xu-ed body is not a ‘desiring machine’, indulging in flooding the BwO with intensified desires. Rather, it is the body of neutrality that absorbs the interchange of opposite energies (qi) into its insipid unity, dissolving and recreating the relations among different types of the BwOs. It is the surface where desire evaporates and the BwOs bump into and experience each other. The bland body is post-BwO. Thus, compared with Deleuze and Guattari, Zhuangzi is even more radical: it is Body without Body – a body with neither center nor parts! Thus, Deleuze and Guattari’s observation is not entirely accurate by saying that Dao is immanence. Immanence, or circuit fields, instead, is just one precondition of Dao – the ultimate fusion of yin and yang.

Xu is political. The politics of Xu is deeply rooted in the concept’s core content of relationality. The political potential of Xu hinges on its vigorously persistent investment in in-betweenness as Xu itself arises from muddy relatedness. Xu is political in that it constantly finds itself in tension with organizational, situated hierarchical structure that aims to permanently settle power relations. Through the lack of substance and blandness, Xu distances itself from political ontology that threatens to base politics on a variety of entrenched divisions. The politics of Xu revolves around the breach of the walling of politics via its deployment of indeterminate and blurring connectedness. It is, essentially, a politics of indeterminacy – a politics driven by undetermined relations and change. In this mode of politics, Xu produces a vacuity of mega-authority that prestructures the flow of relations.

One empirical example of Xu’s politics can be found in the political development of the early Chinese Han Dynasty. The beginning of the Han Dynasty witnessed the flourishing of Daoism as the ruling political ideology. In the beginning of this dynasty, the Chinese intellectuals were striving to construct a legitimating ideology for the political elites, as the demise of the preceding Qin Dynasty was very much a result of its harsh and ruthless rule. Daoism eventually gained its ascendency among the ruling elite class. The political leaders accepted the Daoist idea of light rule and abandoned the imposition of harsh taxes and military oppression. The ruling ideology in the early Han Dynasty followed the tradition of the Huang-Lao school – a combination of the mythical Yellow Emperor and the legendary Lao Zi – which proposed ‘a ruler in touch with the Dao who rules by emptying his mind and limiting his and his subjects’ desires’ (Rapp, 2012: 99).

In following Lao Zi’s core idea of ‘rule through inaction’ (wuwei erzhi), the rulers of the early Han Dynasty implemented the policy of rehabilitation (xiuyang shengxi) to relax the relation between the central authority and its subordinate. The monarch’s hands-off approach exerted considerable tolerance over cultural and political differences across the nation. Unlike the Qin Dynasty’s forceful pursuit of homogeneity, the early Han leaders favored the co-existence of heterogeneity among its peoples (Zhang, 2013). This policy clearly reflected the essence of Xu. What lay at the heart of early Han politics was its unsettled power relation between the ruling and the ruled classes in a hierarchical structure. Given that the nation’s political and economic recuperation became imperative after the overthrow of the old regime, a bland, indeterminate relation granted more autonomy to its people to experiment and create new ideas for social development.

What was more at stake for the early Han rulers to adopt a Xu’s rule was the urgent project of nation-state building. In order to popularize the recognition of the new regime, the politics should be constructed horizontally rather than hierarchically. That means the assimilation of more members into the new political body through non-coercion was more important than building up the hierarchy of a central power. As Francis Fukuyama points out, ‘the initial Han equilibrium was based on a balance between the interests of all parties’ (Fukuyama, 2012: 138). Without repressively filling up the substance of a unified national identity, the political cohort in the early Han Dynasty got tremendously extended. Yet, as the Han regime became more stabilized in its later period, the rulers (particularly after the Emperor Wu) abandoned Daoism and embraced Confucianism as their ruling ideology to strengthen the country’s hierarchical power structure under its central monarchy.

In explicating the politics of silence, Kennan Ferguson (2003) combs through different approaches to silence’s social roles. Despite similar forms, silence, or lack of language, is understood with divergent ends. Symbolizing denigrated, resistant, and constitutive political power, silence resists any reductionist political role. ‘It must be rethought’, writes Ferguson, ‘as not only a site of repression but also a nexus of resistance or even as a potentiality for creation’ (Ferguson, 2003: 65). Silence suggests a politics of indeterminacy. This particular mode of politics is tethered to the pluralist dynamism of silence that ‘makes singular interpretation of silence’s function problematically simplistic’ (Ferguson, 2003: 62).

The politics of indeterminacy, put another way, indicates an open political process where power cannot be fixed and preordained. If politics is understood as an ongoing process of contestation, its open possibility lies in a vast array of indeterminate negotiations in more than one way and by more than one means. In this regard, the Xu-inspired political rule of the early Han Dynasty is exemplary of this indeterminate politics – an unsettled open political process that does not structure politics upon hierarchical organizations. Rather, it extends the horizon of politics to include more rejuvenated political participants in the absence of a dominating central power.

In order to justify Daoism as the legitimate ruling ideology, Huainanzi, another Daoist magnum opus, a book evocative of an anarchist sensibility, as Roger Ames suggests, was presented to the Han ruler at that time to propose less overbearing rule. Xu-generated politics (e.g. in the case of early Han politics) indicates that political power itself in this period of China’s history was transformative and could not be fully contained. It was a result of multi-directional communication and exchange that evades the determinative top-down classification. Embedded in the flowing multiplicity of relations, power dynamics was explored and experienced without being stabilized. Politics of indeterminacy, after all, is ultimately about the perseverance of the vacuity – Xu – that always exists within the network of power relations.

However, to what extent can we broaden our understanding of politics via the idea of Xu? How do lack of substance and blandness specifically forge the Xu-ed politics? In what ways can this Xu-generated politics help us conceive of a different political sphere? I will now turn to these questions in the following sections.

Liubai, Xu and Politics

I aim to introduce in this section the relation between the emptiness of liubai and Xu’s lack of substance in illustrating how a politics of indeterminacy comes into being out of this relation. Liubai, or leaving blankness in its literal meaning in Chinese, is a painting strategy popularly applied in traditional Chinese landscape (shanshui hua) ink painting. Heavily influenced by the teaching of Daoism, liubai is popularly used as an important strategy in creating sparseness to help painters not only structure the space of the paintings but also achieve a particular aesthetic effect that centers on the theme of nothingness.

The motif of liubai, or nothingness, arises from the aesthetics of Daoism. A Xu-inspired emptiness is the origin of ‘ten thousand things’:

There is the beginning, there is not as yet any beginning of the beginning; there is not as yet beginning not to be a beginning of the beginning. There is what is, and there is what is not, and it is not easy to say whether what is or, is not; or whether what is, is. (Zhuangzi, 2006: 15)

These infamously confusing words of Zhuangzi in fact allude to the noneness of the cosmos, a perpetual inceptive condition of ambiguity that allows things to emerge and merge into one another. ‘The “that” is on the one hand also “this”, and “this” is on the other hand also “that”’ (Zhuangzi, 2006: 12). That what-is and what-is-not are both in and of themselves the beginnings suggests a cosmos that is far from being stabilized. We can take a look at Guo Xi’s (c.1000–1080) Zaochun Tu to savor the taste of liubai (Figure 1). This painting is an exemplar of Zhuangzi’s theory of emptiness. In the painting nature is not imitated. Rather, it is conceived through the interplay of there-is and there-is-not. Structured by blankness, nature is portrayed as a Xu-ed matter (xuwu) with a void core. Washed ink is so immersed in the blankness that liubai intermingles trees with mountains, mountains with mists. The emptiness hence is characterized by an undirectional fluidity of relations that defies ontologization and predomination. Embedded in the imagination of nature, the nothingness of liubai is both the producer and catalyst of relations. It empties so as to catalyze and revamp relations. It is flowing, changing and, most importantly, constructive and constitutive. ‘Like notes from an empty reed, or mushroom growing in dampness … we cannot know more about the Origin than this’ (Zhuangzi, 2006: 10). OPEN IN VIEWER

In Wang Hui’s (1632–1717) Taohua Yuting (Figure 2) we see another example of how liubai conceptually structures the space of nature. Noticeably, blankness winds through the painting’s space from its forefront all the way to the far back, extending infinitely beyond. For Wang Hui, nature’s liveliness lives in the space that is left blank as if it breathes through the winding blankness. In this light, liubai is also understood as flowing emptiness (流白), a fluid stream of blankness that runs through the ‘ten thousand things’ of nature. It helps the force of qi to channel through the material world and renders it into formless fluid to morph into various forms. Liubai is an idealistic expression of the conceived rather than a realistic representation of the seen. Liubai is not the representation of the Xu-ed ambiguity, it is part of the idea itself. Absent liubai, things exist in fixed relation to each other and are hence removed from the opportunity for mutual encountering. OPEN IN VIEWER

To better demonstrate its distinctiveness, I compare liubai with Paul Cézanne’s works. In so doing, I rely on Merleau-Ponty’s (1964) description of Cézanne to explain how liubai’s ambiguity is distinctly different from Western art forms. Technically, the use of color poses distinctive difference between the two. For Cézanne’s scenery painting, color is an important means through which natural objects’ immanent vibrancy is revealed.

Doing away with exact contours in certain cases, giving color priority over the outline – these obviously mean different things in Cézanne and for the Impressionists. The object is no longer covered by reflections and lost in its relationships to the atmosphere and to other objects: it means subtly illuminated from within, light emanates from it, and the result is an impression of solidity and material substance. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 12)

For Merleau-Ponty, the meaning of Cézanne’s color is twofold. First, it highlights objects’ interior vitality from within. Through his unique use of color, Cézanne attempts to present an object that is full of depth and reserve, ‘an emerging order of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 14). In Merleau-Ponty’s eyes, Cézanne’s paintings make objects swell. Cézanne’s objects are encircled by contours, not outlines. The difference is this: while the latter limit objects in continuous lines that sacrifice depth, the former allow an apple to spread out inexhaustibly from within. Second, the vividness of color separates the objects from their surroundings. From Cézanne’s painting, according to Merleau-Ponty, we see living, self-centered objects that radiate from its density. Cézanne’s apple has a fresh smell. It is a product of an intensified brushstroke ‘with an infinite number of conditions’. It is depth and density, not horizontality, that is highlighted in Cézanne’s work. Cézanne abandons himself to the instantaneity of permeating color to achieve the intrinsic energy of objects in nature.

The obscurity in Cézanne’s works is attributed to the portrayed externalization of this interior illumination that estranges objects from their surrounding environment. Cézanne’s purpose is to introduce a knowing vision: an epistemic sensation capable of acquiring and producing knowledge. It is his contention that science is not independent of nature and thought cannot stand above sensation. Rather, they must be reconciled. An intensified vision is perhaps the best way for Cézanne to substantiate the incompleteness of our mind.

Yet, liubai has a different take on ambiguity. At the technical level, the fusion of ink and emptiness replaces the function of color in Cézanne’s works, leaving the realization of object-vibrancy to the effect of liubai in the Chinese paintings. The blankness of liubai is suffused into the space of the paintings and animates the painted natural objects through the creation of a Xu-ed wholeness. The use of non-color, in the form of emptiness and washed ink, enacts the transformation between there-is and there-is-not. Unlike Cézanne’s color, the emptiness of liubai pervades through nature’s whole body and renders all natural objects in their flowing interrelation with one another. This wholeness, as Shih Tao (1642–c.1707), a prominent Chinese art theorist and painter who closely followed the teaching of Daoism, suggests, ‘could prevent the dangers of destabilization and mediocrity. If the wholeness is not perceived, then inhibitions will arise in the depiction of things. But if it is thoroughly understood, then all things can be comprehended’ (Shih, 1989: 72).

Dong Qichang’s (1632–1717) Xiamu Chuiyin Tu (Figure 3) illuminates Shih Tao’s point. Liubai is vital to his painting in terms of achieving this wholeness. Blankness in this painting is the undertone of the whole space as if ‘the ten thousand things’ grow out of it and thrive on its abundance. In this regard, liubai ‘brings about a complete metamorphosis’ by ‘transforming “one” into a state of fusion’ (Shih, 1989: 71). What is at stake here is that liubai functions as ‘a single, pervasive energy’ of flowing qi that diffuses the boundaries of ‘ten thousand things’ such that ‘mountains and oceans take on each other’s characteristics’ and hence ‘mountains are oceans and oceans are mountains’ (Shih, 1989: 80). ‘Nothing exists which is not “that”’, teaches Zhuangzi, ‘nothing exists which is not “this”’. OPEN IN VIEWER

Via this interconnectedness, ‘this’ and ‘that’ have become fused into each other, so much so that ‘“this” comes out of “that” and “that” arises from “this”’ (Zhuangzi, 2006: 12). Without the other, one’s existence is impossible. Thus, if Cézanne’s obscurity is identified with an isolationism-based vibrancy through the fullness of pulsating color, the ambiguity of liubai is characterized by its dynamic interrelationism through vacuity. Contra Cézanne, who relies on the cultivation of intensified vision for us to understand nature, Zhuangzi proposes to blur our vision to marginalize human agency. For Zhuangzi, nature is not seen; it is conceived and imagined as such. Where ambivalence for Cézanne is a tool to gain knowledge, ambiguity itself is wisdom, according to Zhuangzi, when our eyes are shut and our minds closed. Nature is absent of substance, it is a perpetual impermeability that cannot be penetrated by vision.

Thus, growing out of liubai’s ecology, a tree may not be a tree and a mountain might perhaps become more of a mountain. In Ni Zan’s (1301–1347) Rongxi Zhai Tu (Figure 4), clear visual distinction between the foreground and background is challenged as the blandness of mist and water permeates the whole scene to arrange everything at the same horizon. The ‘invisible’ river, lake and mist in this painting are seen as limitless extensions of each other’s body – a ceaseless and unexhausted changing of existence that has transcended a Heideggerian ‘ontic’ through a process of becoming. As Kuo Hsi rightly points out in his famous Essay on Landscape Painting, ‘thus views of a single mountain combine in themselves the changes and significances of a thousand mountains’ (Guo, 1935: 38). In a nutshell, the emptiness in liubai alienates itself from the nothingness of nihilism. Rather, it speaks of a fullness of ambiguous relations. OPEN IN VIEWER

Liubai shares commonality with the new materialism. For example, at the forefront of this field, Jane Bennett brings up the important concept of ‘thing-power’ in her book Vibrant Matter. The project of ‘thing-power’, for Bennett, as Mel Chen insightfully observes, is ‘an interest in the animal that hides in animacy’ – an intellectual investment in discovering vital materiality or materiality with life (Chen, 2012: 11). Thing-power deals with the intrinsic energy of the material world. ‘Vibrant matter’ is the name that Bennett gives to it. Vital to the vigorous energy of such vibrant matter is its own immanent forces in intervening in the active making and shaping of our natural world. Bennett would agree with Zhuangzi in seeing qi as the vital force of energy that energizes the ‘vibrant matter’. Understood as a transcending force, Bennett’s ‘thing-power’ is also the power of qi intrinsic to ‘ten thousand things’ in nature and turns them into actants.

For both Bennett and Zhuangzi, the powerful force of thing-power and qi emerge and operate in the absence of form, structure and order. They encircle and permeate through the materiality of nature and protect it from the intervention of human agency. Despite the similarity, however, Bennett’s theory of ‘thing-power’ lacks the characteristics of Xu. Similar to Cézanne’s ambition in finding the intrinsic vitality of things, Bennett also focuses on the inherent liveliness of the material world from within. The effect of ‘thing-power’ is the rich fullness of natural objects, filled with energy both internally generative and outwardly expansive. Nevertheless, for Zhuangzi, a Xu-generated world retreats from full substantiation, morphing between materiality and immateriality, transposing freely across the fixity of things, matters, or objects. Evaporated by qi, the void of the ‘ten thousand things’ is a commitment to an unknown world, a strangely ambiguous one whose existence is a multiplicity of accidents and coincidences.

Liubai’s ambiguous emptiness is political. Liubai creates a political ecology – an open and dynamic relation between nature and its political environment – that extends itself from human society to nonhuman entourage. It is a politics of indeterminacy that suspends the fixity of a human-centered power structure. It not only rejects a human-centered understanding of agentic capacity but also counts in the affect of nonhuman agency. What matters about this political ecology is that it introduces more possibilities for new power relations. Political ecology as such consists of a series of indeterminate relations that transcend human political ideology – discourses of power that only flow toward the ‘centric’ of the ‘anthropo’. A bee is as effective a political actant as is the flower that feeds it. The political agency of the bee is based on its capacity in introducing new relation through this enacted connection between the flower and itself. The instance of touch is the very moment when two strangers void out their formed identity and become each other’s life – a new life of relation that makes the world different. This relation is thus the unexpected result of the bee and the flower becoming-each-other in enacting and sharing the relation.

Since the politics of Xu is the politics of indeterminacy, which essentially concerns the discovery and rediscovery of excessive relations, liubai provides us with an alternative ecological imagination in obtaining the goal. This tenuous excessiveness, forever unsettled, is exactly the characteristic of nature, lack of predetermined relations and meanwhile productive of new relations that change and transform among themselves. As Zhuangzi reminds us in his best known chapter, ‘Working Everything Out Evenly’ (QiWu Lun), ‘everything has what is innate, everything has what is necessary’ (Zhuangzi, 2006: 13). The ‘innate’ and ‘necessary’ constitute the political agency of ‘ten thousand things’ to act and to be acted upon. It is not about the initial; rather, it is about every initial, each, in its own way. In this particular mode of politics, the divisions between men/animal, subject/object, positive/inert, us/them, inevitably get dissolved.

Body, Xu and Politics

In this section, I explain how a Xu-inspired body may be political. I first analyze in detail a few theorists who shed light on the important concept of the politicized body, and then explore how Zhuangzi’s body differs from them politically. Democracy, as Davide Panagia (2009) sees it, is essentially about how to deal with the visual. For Panagia, politics necessarily involves the participation of the body. Panagia’s analysis of The Ring centers on his conceptualization of the ‘haptic visuality’ as the vital regulative that guides the viewing relationship between the film and its spectators. The idea of ‘haptic visuality’ revolves around the collapsing of the gap between the theatricality inside the film and the visual outside of it. As a result, the audience is cordially invited to participate in the proceedings of the film through their experiences of ‘haptic visuality’. More importantly, such participation is not only upfront but also inseparable to the making of the film, which successfully overthrows the predominant rule of theatricality buttressed by the traditional reign of narratocracy. The disruption of a predetermined vision contributes to the democratic making of the plural. In visuality, Panagia finds a way to address the relation between democracy and the body.

So does the project of Jacques Rancière (2010). Arguing that politics ultimately concerns the ‘distribution and redistribution of the sensible’, Rancière holds that politics are embodied in humans’ bodily sensations and to what extent those physical sensations are allowed to operate and function. Politics of consensus, according to Rancière, builds its regime around policing the judgment of bodily experiences. Anything beyond is disavowed. For Rancière, the politics of dissensus, however, aims to overthrow such a presupposed partition of sensation by supplementing a gap in the sensible itself and redistributing the latter in search of the ‘unfeelable’ (Rancière, 2010: 38). Challenging consensus politics that partitions the counted from the uncounted, the politics of dissensus extends the making of the political to include the excluded. In this light, Panagia’s ‘haptic visuality’ resonates with ‘dissensus politics’ in breaking through fixed divisions of the visual.

Rancière shares his views with Elizabeth Grosz. For Grosz, what resides at the core of art is the excessiveness that invites the intensive participation of a variety of sensorium. This process of sensorium intensification involves the magnified and active functioning of such receiving organs as ears, eyes, and nose, ‘resonating with colors, sounds, smells, shapes, and rhythms’ to discover an intact sensory (Grosz, 2008: 66). In Grosz’s view, sensation is the effective intermediacy that draws the connection between the human body and art. It prepares an emptied body to be enriched by artwork for sensational intensification from within – interior revival through the body’s encounter with various forms of art. What matters about aestheticized politics is a political force of dissenssus that distorts the distinction between the seeable and the unseeable, the hearable and the unhearable, the speakable and the unspeakable, to remake the potentiality of our pluralist bodily sensation. Thus, for Grosz, the political meaning of women’s bodies is predicated on its intensified experiences of the corporeal volatility that ultimately expresses sexual difference (Grosz, 1994).

For these theorists, body ventures into the unknowable and becomes explorative rather than the explored. The political, in this light, lies in the dissident bodies that were previously uncounted and untrusted. Thanks to erratic sensations, the discursive body is now turned into a political arena in which we begin to experience the unexperienced and experiment with the unexperimented. Zhuangzi may agree with these authors to the extent that the digressive body trumps the supremacy of rationality. In echoing Panagia, Rancière and Grosz, Zhuangzi would once again heighten the latter’s political capacity to act and change. However, Zhuangzi’s theory of body is more ambitiously and radically transcending. Zhuangzi does not find the seed of politics through the excitement of the sensorium and the redistribution of sensations. Instead, his political body is conceived through the blandness of Xu.

Zhuangzi proposes a bland and dull body in making the political. If Cézanne relies on color to highlight the perceptive capacity of vision and indicate that thought cannot work independent of vision, Zhuangzi is suspicious of such sensational capacity itself. Wisdom and knowledge, which traditionally separate humans from animals, are now turning against us and hurting our potential as political beings. For Zhuangzi, men are deprived of their political agency because of their attachment to being a knowing subject and their obsession with knowledge and perception. Instead of using our mind and body to learn and perceive, we should use them to become, to transform and, most importantly, to retreat into the primordial void – the indeterminate and yet vibrant oneness above all knowledge.

I can sit down and forget everything. … My limbs are without feeling and my mind is without light. I have ignored my body and cast aside my wisdom. Thus I am united with the Dao. This is what sitting right down and forgetting is. (Zhuangzi, 2006: 58)

Sit-down-and-forget (zuo wang), for Zhuangzi, is to dwell in a Xu-ed body, an insipid body that protracts itself into the noneness, a fusion of self and other and an exchange of a conscious body for a void body. It is about an absence of a preconceived body and a body of balanced and bland void. Here, Xu distinguishes the Zhuangzian body from Merleau-Ponty’s body. For the former, the body is animated in its alienation from self and achieves vitality to become. For the latter, the body’s energy awaits our recognition of its capacity to perceive. Compared with Merleau-Ponty, Zhuangzi’s conceptualization of the body is characterized by its tenuous part of that which is always to be fulfilled by others. Zhuangzi’s bland body is a body that becomes animal:

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi), dreamt that I was a butterfly flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no idea I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again. But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu? However, there must be some sort of difference between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly! We call this the transformation of things. (Zhuangzi, 2006: 20)

This is Zhuangzi’s theory of becoming animal. It is a process of becoming butterfly – a bodily invitation from a butterfly for self-alienation and self-transformation – a process of unlearning and becoming. What matters here is not a simple question of subject/object interchange: it goes beyond identity and subjectivity – it is about freeing up our bodies to encounter, experience and become part of each other. Becoming animal, for Zhuangzi, is a medium through which the body becomes imperceptible, no matter how fragmenting, fleeting and provisional those moments might be. In this light, I find Fraser’s (2008) understanding of Xu limited. For Fraser, the idea of Xu is only expressed within the sphere of psychology and ceased with the argument that ‘the epitome of Xu is the mirror-heart of the perfected person, blank and empty of any content of its own, which merely reflects what appears before it’ (Fraser, 2008: 136). While Fraser might be right that Zhuangzi uses Xu partially to mean interior self-cultivation, he fails to see Xu’s broadened meaning to also include blank and empty body.

Your mind must become one, do not try to understand with your ears but with your heart. Indeed, not with your heart but with your soul. Listening blocks the ears, set your heart on what is right, but let your soul be open to receive in true sincerity. The Way is found in emptiness. Emptiness is the fasting of the heart. (Zhuangzi, 2006: 29)

Palmer’s translation here is not entirely precise as the original text uses the word qi instead of soul. What Zhuangzi emphasizes is a bland body that is devoid of sensory sensitivity and flows with qi. The abandonment of hearing and seeing constitutes the important process of unlearning/unperceiving, which is a crucial step for Zhuangzi’s body to experience self-transformation. Unlearning prepares our body not for the purpose of perceiving but for the end to become and to transform. No-knowledge, the effect of unlearning, hence necessarily entails a dull human sensation – a feeble sensorium without penetrating power of knowing. The ambiguous effect of Xu brings a blind date between our body and the world – an indeterminate encountering that is tenuous and yet enlivening. Nature lives us: our obsession with knowledge about nature and inquiry of knowledge from nature leads us astray in understanding the true political meaning of the body.

The political force of body resides in the ambiguous and bland body, forever impervious to external objectification. As Jullien observes, ‘it cannot inquire into the existence of emptiness because it is constantly experiencing it, prior to any constituted knowledge, prior even to any “question of knowledge,” which emptiness is in the process of bringing about’ (Jullien, 2009: 81; emphasis in original). The seed of politics, for Zhuangzi, is found in the body’s potential in persistently nourishing the unsettlement of the power relation. Power is indeterminate and indefinite, for body is an ambiguous void, empty of knowledge. True knowledge is unspoken. It can only be bodily experienced in the process of unlearning. The reason why the Confucian sages are deceptive, according to Zhuangzi, is their preaching of misleading ways of hearing and seeing in pursuing knowledge. ‘Throw away the six tones, destroy the pipes and lute, block the ears of Blind Kuang the musician, then every person in the world would for the first time be able to hear properly’ (Zhuangzi, 2006: 78).

As Zhuangzi sees it, the danger of the sages arises from their inculcation of knowledge through the disciplined and tamed body. Crucial to the Confucian moral regime, for example, is exactly the ritualization (li hua) of the human body, an organized and structured body taught to hear and see. Under this regime, power is defined in the form of bodily domination. It prepares the body for the purpose of learning knowledge. Yet, for Zhuangzi, such a training of the body not only eliminates more possibilities for power relations but, worst of all, it terminates politics, for the incompleteness of the body is replaced by the fullness of the body, an absolutism that inhibits the body from becoming and being political.

For Confucius, politics is rectification; but for Zhuangzi, politics is contestation. The Zhuangzian Xu-ed body demonstrates a ‘force-field’, to borrow the terminology of William Connolly, that displays a capacity to morph in unsettled patterns in the making of a world of becoming. Within this ‘force-field’, Shi or efficacy is the driving force in rendering the metamorphosis of the body. It is dynamic and vitalizes the propensity of things to reach maximum efficacy. The withdrawal of knowledge is crucial for shi to perform. ‘Allow the propensity of things to operate outside you’, writes Jullien, ‘as their own disposition dictates; do not project values or desires on them but adapt constantly to the necessity of their evolution’ (1995: 39). Agreeing with Jullien, Bennett defines shi as ‘the style, energy, propensity, trajectory, or élan inherent to a specific arrangement of things’ in describing her conceptualization of ‘thing-power’ (Bennett, 2010: 35). That shi is concerned more with efficacy than telos precisely speaks of the essence of the Zhuangzian body. It is animating force that makes Zhuangzi’s politics of indeterminacy come into being.

In conclusion, Zhuangzi has a very different vision in conceiving politics. Instead of embracing a substantiated politics predicated on settled power structures, he proposes a Xu-ed politics – a particular mode of politics that defies simplistic determinism. Evident in his understanding of emptiness and body, Zhuangzi’s theory of Xu aims to explore more possibilities to extend the development of politics horizontally. For him, politics is never solved. Its organic growth receives its best vitality when it remains inchoate and ambiguous.