The Crab’s Efficacy

With his Treatise on Efficacy, ¹ philosopher and sinologist François Jullien pursues his long, oblique march through the uncertain territories he so loves. Over the past ten-odd years he has paid visits to propensity and blandness, immanence, detour and access; he has sojourned with Mencius to compare his ethics with Enlightenment thought. What manner of traveler is it who can gain entry to so many lands, and such shifting lands at that? Is he Chinese or a philosopher? An amphibian, perhaps.

The Treatise does more than provide Jullien with a new occasion to point out the most singular traits, Chinese and European respectively, of the notion of efficacy; more than provide him with a new marvel to set on his shelf beside all the others. The study of efficacy allows Jullien to bring out the principle behind both this latest prospection and its predecessors. But don’t expect a Discourse on Method. A crab will hasten to explain the advantages of walking sideways. The wise man who believes it effective just to make his chains of reason straight and limpid, or the strategist who believes himself impervious to defeat as long as he optimizes the balance of forces for the final clash, will grow impatient with this subtle animal’s oblique approach. But our animal perseveres: shuffle a little farther with me into the no-man’s-land between Chinese thought and European theory on the subject of effects. ‘But why? To what end?’, we might ask. Have you come to lecture the West yet again on some strategy pinched from the Chinese classics?

No, in fact. Jullien would be quite content, he says, to ‘effect a shift [décaler]’, to shift the ‘chalk [cale]’ blocking our idea of efficacy, to budge the heavy apparatus of means and ends, of the subjective and the objective, of will and passivity, that has jammed the Western conception of efficacy. And how does he intend to do this? By his lateral approach to the symptom rather than by defining and debating characters. After all, a crab owes its efficacy not to the grinding force of its pincers but primarily to its sideways, stochastic walk. To think through efficacy the Chinese have ‘other potential resources of intelligibility’, so why not make use of them? It’s a ‘matter of convenience’, says our subtle animal. Or, indeed, of efficacy.

No more than a Chinese strategist, then, Jullien here ‘projects nothing, constructs nothing. Nor does he “deliberate” or need to “choose” (between means of equal possibility). This presupposes that for him there is not even an “end”, set at a distance and within an ideal.’ The ideal of an end to be reached that would guide one’s will and, if possible, inspire the proper means suitably to transform the current situation – the Western representation of performativity – seems unknown to the Chinese classics on warfare, politics, diplomacy, and, a fortiori, the art of thinking.

The treatises present a wise man, a courtier, a strategist the extent of whose art is to be ‘forever taking advantage of the situation as it develops’. This practical empiricism, which we judge shortsighted, the Laozi calls ‘act / not act’. A Westerner who must face a situation will reduce it by constraints so as to modify it, but Jullien’s Chinese will cultivate it, embrace it, ‘help along’ whatever advenes naturally in it. The former will seek to justify the means by the end, and the end by some ultimate reason; the need to ground things is so foreign to the latter’s ways that the whole secret of efficiency is reduced to ‘exploiting’ the situation. The situation does all; we need only draw from it. It is a fund, and calls for the ways of peasants and merchants – indifferent to the Grund, and profit-seeking – rather than those of architects.

Moreover, Jullien muses, we Europeans keep theory so pure of practice that neither would ever influence the other without a nudge. The point of talent, virtù, prudence, chance, the opportune moment, the daring of all these ‘certain somethings’ is to put thought into contact with the situation. Theory fails to ground them, and fails for that very reason. It is a strange efficiency, obtained at the cost of ‘brushing against an outside’ that attains for thought the exquisite vertigo of its inefficacy. Chinese thought, meanwhile, ‘has never conceived of a true exteriority [. . .]: it is therefore unaware of the ecstasy of the encounter’. If indeed there is an other in China, partner or adversary, it is, by the same token as the agent, an element of the situation, an aspect of potential efficiency that lies dormant within it.

It is obvious to the Chinese that a situation has a propensity, that we are enveloped in it, and that it is unspooling its results. A situation consists of that unspooling. And all possible effects are due to that immanent effectuation: causeless effect, willed or not, a moment rather of permanent effectivity. Jullien suggests we call it ‘effect’ [i.e., the English word, in contradistinction to effet] in order to withdraw it from the causalist doctrine. He cites good-old Mencius: ‘Though your hoe be in hand, it is best to wait for the proper season.’ Plants grow; rain falls; things take their course. You would be efficacious to follow that course and its rhythm before it becomes overly determined, before the moment of ripeness. Upstream the water that wells from a spring has not yet taken the form imposed by its fall through the defile. And the water that stagnates below has more potential – it spreads – than it has running on its riverbed, etc. Efficacy begins when we embrace the situation in its most open potential state. Do not wait for your enemy to barricade himself in before launching your assault. Attack his rear before he has finished forming up. Nothing is more contrary to efficacy than a siege or a pitched battle. Likewise a courtier will employ his art to exploit any vagueness and indecision in the prince’s mind, never confronting head-on what the prince believes he has already decided. What else does a thinker do with what he tries to think, or an actor with what he tries to portray? We walk around a thing; we make it forget us; we let it advene. The flower of interpretation, wrote Zeami, inventor of Noh theater, holds as its absolute the quality of shioretaru: evanescence.

There is nothing mystical in all this, Jullien maintains. The Laozi is seen as a recipe book, for its art in the description of effects. An effect is fully exerted, we read, when it advenes, and the void is what helps it advene. That is all. The brush achieves perfection in the fruit pulp it represents when the upstroke lets the downstroke come through. The fullness of the downstroke depends on the void in order to advene. By embracing the situation in its most saturated upstream, thought blends with an as yet imperceptible configuration, vanishes inside it, and silently delivers its potential in the form of effects [the English word]. In the Chinese universe, then, it is permissible to distinguish ‘levels of advent of the real’: the concretion or completion that is the ‘earth’; the ‘lineament’ or discreteness of the ‘sky’; the endless course that conveys things from latency to actuality, called the ‘Way’. The Way is perfect that carries within it the upstream and the downstream, all that is open and all that is closed, yin and yang; and it is then called ‘natural’. Chinese metaphysics, as we can see, has no ontological pretentions. From what are outsides for us vagabonds and subtle creatures it attempts, rather, to gather and classify recipes for efficacy. Here thought strategizes all that is, all that advenes, in all situations. It does not inquire as to the why of things. It wraps itself in their way of being, to allow the way to develop fully. It is not being’s guardian, or becoming’s gardener.

The slight, immense, endless joy we experience by serving the efficacy of the Way, by repeating how easy it is to help the passage pass, no matter what: François Jullien excels at bathing his reader in such rejuvenating tautologies. Here and there, however, we glimpse impatience. Revolt finally breaks out in the final pages: Enough with your obviousness and conformations, he bellows at the wise strategists; we want passion, fruitless expenditure, a true other that serves as no adversary-partner in your manipulations! We don’t care to win at all! Fie on your efficacy! All right, all right, we hear Jullien the wise reply to Jullien the madman. In that case ‘the essay needs rewriting in reverse’; it would become an apology for the counter-effect, for non-tolerance of the real – an elegy, in sum, of resistance, he tells himself. . . . Is Jullien ending on a pirouette? Yes and no. The philosopher-and-sinologist (or vice versa) has so much knowledge to spread and so much talent at his command, he so enjoys a surprise, his intelligence is so anxious and ambiguity-piercing, that I think him capable of rising tomorrow and writing in a single shot the very anti-treatise called for in his brilliant ‘treatise on effects’.

Translated by Pedro Rodriguez