New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. US$35.00, paper; US$35.00, ebook. ISBN 9780231209397
Just when it seems that enough has been said about the history of writing reforms in modern China—well-charted as the terrain has become in recent years by scholars in history, literary studies, linguistics, critical theory, science and technology studies—Uluğ Kuzuoğlu offers us a refreshing and necessary revision to the familiar story. “Step[ing] away from phonocentrism and language reforms as explanatory frameworks” (7), Codes of Modernity places the advent of technics at its centre stage, bookending its chronological range with two major shifts in China’s technological milieu: the arrival of telegraphy in the late nineteenth century and—to borrow a Kittlerism—the globalization of Turing-zeit a century later. This focus on technicity allows for a more precise historicization of modernist script reforms. As historians such as Mårten Söderblom Saarela and Nathan Vedal have shown (and as we know from Dunhuang manuscripts such as IOL Tib J 1404), the practice of writing Sinitic languages down phonetically and the discourse of phonocentrism were by no means alien to the Sinographic world before modernity. Although much of that earlier history of hybridization and exchange with Inner Asian writing systems had been neglected or dismissed by modern Chinese intellectuals with an ethnonational frame of mind, what truly distinguished their moment from earlier ones was technological. Modernist script reforms were responses, as Kuzuoğlu skillfully demonstrates, to newly emergent “human-machine ensembles” (10) in the age of telegraphy.
The ontology of cerebral-electrical flows that pulsed through the late-Qing information network consisting of “scripts, wires, and brains” (chapter 1) posed neuropsychological and metaphysical problems as much as linguistic ones. The idiosyncratic cosmotechnical thought of Tan Sitong (1865–1898) who sought to synthesize Yogācāra philosophy of mind, neurophysiology, and signaletic infrastructure into a coherent metaphysics of ethereal benevolence, is emblematic of the psychophysical tendency within modern understandings of communication (5–7). Networks of wires and nerves extended into and supplemented each other, and writing—in an extended sense that included stenography, telegraph codes, grammar (chapter 1), phoneticization (chapter 2), lexical inventory (chapter 3), and the shape of sinographs (chapter 4)—became their visible interface subjected to multifarious efforts of measurement, experimentation, optimization, and control. On the one hand, the epistemic techniques of modern techno-science such as statistical analysis and psychometry allowed a wide range of persons (the book’s dramatis personae includes an ex-Qing-bureaucrat, a pastor, a dramaturg, missionaries, academics, study-abroad psychologists, among others) to discretize and quantify cerebral-electrical flows at every step, seeking to optimize the efficiencies of inscription, signal transmission, language acquisition, or even thought itself through script reforms. On the other hand, cerebral-electrical flows were discursively and institutionally over-coded, not only serving (in the form of mental labour or naoli 腦力) as the target of industrialized cognitive management under Taylorist psychology (chapter 3) but also functioning—over the course of the twentieth century—as the common material basis of missionary proselytization (chapter 2), mass edification (chapter 3), Soviet productivity campaigns (chapter 5), and PRC colonialism in its “ethnic frontiers” (chapter 7).
With this insightful materialist reframing of Chinese script reforms that intimates their heterogeneous formation and transnational genealogies, Codes of Modernity returns to particular moments in this history—including the 1913 Conference for the Unification of Pronunciation (chapter 2) and the short-lived Sin Wenz of the 1930s (chapter 6)—to elucidate the space of politics amid technical crises. While the antagonism between competing script proposals had often been remembered as a politics of representation (for example, of northern and southern Sinitic topolects), by focusing on what he calls “the material politics of language” (58) and situating the conflicts within media-historical contexts, Kuzuoğlu reminds us that the various proposals had fundamentally been (often equally-dissatisfactory) responses to persisting socio-technical problems. “National pronunciation” as it was debated upon in 1913, for example, had everything to do with the accessibility of telegraphic codes to operators nationwide, and only peripherally does it relate to the ideological problem of national language as such (76). By centring the technological a priori of script reforms, their political stakes are understood in a new light.
This expanded understanding of material politics, moving beyond the geopolitical (be it domestic or international) toward the infrastructural, exposes at times unexpected media congruencies between ideologically-opposed blueprints, while the genealogical method Kuzuoğlu deploys (especially masterfully, one might add, in his telling of Dunganese latinization in chapter 6) articulates equally unexpected media histories connecting seemingly-distant technical milieux. Through an impressive display of archival material from many continents and languages, Kuzuoğlu renders visible broader patterns of the “global information age” that might otherwise be drowned out within national histories. As the technics of writing expands to blur the distinction between humans and machines, one sees that the resultant cerebral-electrical flows open up new fields of power and control. The project of character simplification in the 1920s (chapter 4), which mined premodern corpora for “vernacular character forms” or suzi (俗字) as prototypes, exemplifies in some way the centripetal redistribution of writing-power (in this case, the power to produce and normalize neographisms) in the age of telegraphy. This technological alienation of writing renders intuitive the relevance of the elite reformers Kuzuoğlu discusses, even if the actual impacts of their plans were sometimes “minimal” (114). But one nevertheless wonders: What did these writing reforms mean to ordinary subjects, affected as they were by the changing technological and political landscape without directly participating in its most consequential dialogues? It was their mental labour that these reforms were supposed to be saving, after all. Codes of Modernity raises this question, but it might require a different kind of book to answer—a critical reception history that focuses on classrooms and consumers rather than committee meetings, maybe even extending chronologically into our own time. But leaving this question aside and taking Codes of Modernity on its own terms, Kuzuoğlu has without doubt written a well-researched and intellectually rewarding book, one that will certainly leave its imprint on how we think about the history of Chinese script reforms for many years to come.
Elvin Meng
University of Chicago, Chicago