Introduction

As the previous chapter briefly noted, plants were significant to the economic, cultural, and religious life in medieval China. Grains, vegetables, fruits, and raw materials for making textiles and papers helped sustain a society. Undoubtedly, plants played indispensable roles in the daily life of medieval Chinese Buddhist community. They provided material foundation for the daily operation of the Buddhist community, not only serving as food and nutrition nourishment, but also being presented as offerings to the Buddhist saints. In addition, plants often appeared as landscape decorations around the Buddhist sites, temples, and architectures. In other words, the Buddhist monastic and lay members developed both practical and symbolic meanings for having plants in their life. The Buddhist knowledge and concept of plants are also primarily based on the practical and spiritual needs of the Buddhist community, which emphasize moral and spiritual cultivations of the Buddhists, especially the monastic members.

In the long history of Buddhism from South Asia to China, similar to animals, some plants were more visible and remarkable for their close connections with the Buddhist tradition, such as the lotus f lowers, for their affinity with the Buddha. While Asia is a vast land, different regions might technically cultivate and culturally value different plants. Even for traditional China, as a vast empire, many different regions cultivated their own indigenous plants. With the spread of Buddhism in China, the Buddhist community gradually grew and expanded, and more and more gardens and fields were donated by lay supporters to the monastic community. The Buddhist community also received grains, vegetables, and fruits directly from the lay community. While dealing with both agricultural activities and plant offerings, some Chinese Buddhist masters, especially those who were involved in monastic administrations, developed their own knowledge and experience with plants in both Chinese and Buddhist traditions. This chapter will focus on how a medieval Chinese master Daoxuan (596–667) addressed the issues on the classification of plants in the monastic context. For me, this classification of the plants can be viewed as a Buddhist effort of ordering plants in medieval Buddhist world. This effort not only ref lected a Buddhist master’s knowledge about the botanical world, but also indicated how he reconciled the difference between Buddhist botanical knowledge and Chinese experience.

Introduction

Wittgenstein seeks to throw light on our concept of understanding by looking at how misunderstandings arise and what kinds of failure they involve. He discerns a peculiar kind of misunderstanding in the writings of the social anthropologist James Frazer. In Frazer’s hands, the anthropological project of enabling us to understand human behaviour seems to yield the paradoxical result that there are certain forms of human behaviour that simply cannot be understood. The source of Frazer’s misunderstanding, according to Wittgenstein, is that he places narrow requirements on what could count as meaningful, prior to, and independently of, his encounter with the subjects of his interpretation. Frazer, similar to some of the philosophers who Wittgenstein addresses in his other works, succumbs to nonsense in his very attempt to draw the limits of sense.

My aim in this chapter is to clarify the connections between Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frazer and his criticism of his fellow philosophers, in particular of Frege. The materials I draw on stem from various periods in Wittgenstein’s career, and they reveal, in my mind, an important continuity in Wittgenstein’s thought: addressing misunderstanding, in Wittgenstein’s view, is fundamentally an ethical problem, not a theoretical one.

The Anthropologist’s Misunderstanding

Frazer, as Wittgenstein interprets him, occupies the position of an observer of human behaviour who declares himself unable to properly understand his fellow humans, not through any fault of his own, but because his interlocutors’ thoughts and behaviours are allegedly inherently defective. The element in Frazer’s thought that Wittgenstein highlights is representative of a larger trend in early anthropology, within the context of which the mindset and mentalities of the members of various non-Western, so-called primitive societies have been treated as irrational; and Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frazer is in this sense comparable to later developments in anthropology, in which the tendency to pit the allegedly rational observer against the allegedly irrational subjects of his study has been criticized and debunked.

Frazer’s inability to understand the subjects of his study testifies, in Wittgenstein’s eyes, to Frazer’s own confusion:

John Henry Grose’s Voyage to the East Indies (1757) offered ‘a faithful recital of facts’ collected during the many years of his service at the East India Company’s (EIC) military station in Bombay. Grose’s book enjoyed a brief period of popularity immediately upon its publication. Indeed, many eighteenth-century travel writers and authorities on travel and exploration praised the book for its detached and scientific style, which was important for informing the public about British wars and imperial expansions abroad. But the spontaneous style of Grose’s book – the fact that he reported on what he observed in a forensic manner without necessarily showing that he had background knowledge of the region – was little appreciated by some. The Monthly Review (1757), for example, accused Grose of exploring Oriental ‘theology’ without showing any expertise on the topic (1757: 302). The Critical Review in 1758 did not ‘recommend’ the book because ‘the stile is stiff and labored’ and ‘in some parts of the performance absolutely unintelligible’ (1758: 319). Yet, all agreed, as the Critical Review affirmed, that Grose’s book offered valuable information relating to ‘the interests of England’ in the East Indies (1758: 319). After all, the book was published during a period in which the EIC was battling the French and their Indian allies in the Carnatic region. This view of travel writing as a valuable means to promote ‘the interests of England’ appeared in an age of rapid British imperial expansion in the East, which encouraged Grose to add to the 1772 edition of his book a short travel narrative titled A Journey from Aleppo to Busserah, written by the Scotsman John Carmichael, who travelled along the overland routes between Europe and India in 1751. Norbert Schürer argued that despite the hostile treatment it received in the press, the Voyage showed a hospitable view of Islam in contrast to Carmichael’s hostile views of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad in his short narrative: ‘it is somewhat surprising that Grose included Carmichael’s “Journal” in his Voyage’ (Schürer 2019: 304).

Any discussion of world literature today is apt to lead critics into a garden of forking paths, a grand narrative that is also an elaborate labyrinth, where each step simultaneously reveals or forecloses apparently infinite possibilities. Or, perhaps, to cite another tale by Jorge Luis Borges from the same period, it is more like the library of Babel, a hauntingly vast bibliographic phantasmagoria in which every imaginable work of literature confronts the bewildered reader, from sheer nonsense to supreme masterpiece, although part of the unending Angst of such an approach to the whole “world” of literature is the awareness that such distinctions cannot be easily made.

The question of world literature, its functions and effects, as well as its value as a formal object of literary study, is deceptively complex. On the one hand, the widespread availability of and interest in literary works produced in various countries, languages, and cultures from around the globe would seem to be wholly beneficial; these texts educate readers about foreign experiences and social forms, while making possible transnational and cross-cultural literary relations. On the other hand, such seemingly cosmopolitan practices have participated in processes of globalization which have frequently elided cultural specificity, either reducing or fetishizing the differences among societies, and at the same time creating a marketplace for a certain type of “world literature,” often at the expense of the variety and wealth of literature written, read, and studied throughout the world. During an era of multinational capitalism or of the globalization of culture, these questions have gained greater urgency and complexity, and it is perhaps not surprising that world literature—as a concept, a field of study, or even a genre—has emerged as a major topic in literary studies in these opening years of the twenty-first century, and it has become a key element of contemporary criticism and theory.

World Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Exemplary of this sense of urgency, Emily Apter’s provocative book, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, raises troubling questions about the study of world literature as a disciplinary or subdisciplinary field. To be clear, Apter is for the most part an advocate of expanding the study of literature beyond national borders and linguistic traditions, and she certainly does not argue that literary studies ought to return to a more narrowly circumscribed social, national, or linguistic domain.

In this book, I cast back to the Cold War era of international radio broadcasting, typified by global strategic competition and Asia–Pacific regional tumult. I did so with one eye squinched towards Australia’s ‘smart power’ challenge in today’s Indo-Pacific. Key findings about the political history of Radio Australia during the twentieth century, tested against the potentially timeless model framework proposed in Chapter 6, offer points of reference when interrogating contemporary practices of intercultural communication. The use or adaptation of this framework could assist in the development of a more purposeful and coherent application of discursive power than recent Australian governments have demonstrated.

The recurring propensity of governments to invest and disinvest in international broadcasting results from multiple causes, including vacillating perceptions of threat and opportunity over decades since the end of the Cold War. This inconstancy also dates from a period when neoliberal orthodoxy relegated geopolitics and the contest of global systems to the periphery; that is, until revisionist powers asserted themselves and sources of regional and global instability multiplied. Principally under centre-right governments, Australia responded by prioritising investment in hard power assets and security-inspired alliances or associations of the like-minded. First, these responses occurred in the context of post-9/11 US-led campaigns in the Middle East and Afghanistan, then in response to a more assertive China. In some measure, the yo-yoing of Australian policy mirrored the philosophical biases and shibboleths of whichever political coalition or party held office at points in time. Importantly – as this book argues – a more specific and outcome-oriented description of international broadcasting functions and deployment might assist in tempering the biases or disinclination of policymakers to consider the practice strategically.

Circumstances and the tactics of programme design and deployment necessarily will vary when directed to Australia’s innermost strategic perimeter of the southwest Pacific, where it exercises regional hegemony, compared with Indonesia and the other ascendant nations of Southeast Asia, and/or the outer reaches of North Asia and the eastern Indian Ocean. Across all three zones, Australia experiences the challenge of cultural divides, much more so than with its Western democratic interlocutors in Europe and America.

It sometimes seems that a perennial task of laborers in the vineyard of the liberal arts is to defend that labor, that vineyard, and those arts. That liberal education is under attack on various fronts is as indubitable as it is now tiresome, and in the media covering the state of higher education we see almost daily apologias, jeremiads, and polemics aimed at sounding the increasingly apocalyptic alarm. Literature students hear it a lot, of course, as they frequently deal with jokes or jibes, or sometimes earnest warnings, about the uselessness or impracticality of their field of study. Even within universities, we sometimes find ourselves on the defensive from those whom Terry Eagleton has referred to as “hardfaced philistines and crass purveyors of utility.” Under such circumstances, the idea of the critical genius seems utterly foreign or laughably nostalgic, and yet, the need for this sort of genius, here understood as a guide or spirit of inspiration, has perhaps never been greater.

As a scholar and critic working in the literary humanities, I do not think we need to adopt a defensive posture against such threats; nor do we need to argue for the usefulness of literature, at least not in any instrumental form. That all too easily plays into the enemies’ hands, inviting those who do not appreciate what the humanities are all about to use “metrics” and “data” to characterize our “outcomes” and demonstrate our “productivity.” This is, in more ways than one, quite literally beneath us as teachers, students, and lovers of literature. I want to speak of the vocation of the critic, which is the fundamental role of literary scholars, at least for the last hundred years or so. I am aware that we do much more in our language and literature departments today: rhetoric and composition, technical communication, creative writing, film and media studies, to name a few, and even within literary studies, activities include literary history, biography, and theory, along with analysis and evaluation. And yet criticism remains the cornerstone, and all students of literature are, in one way or another, guided by a spirit of critical genius.

Introduction

Why is intercultural understanding so elusive? Is there anything inherent in the concept of a culture that renders intercultural understanding such a difficult and unstable achievement? In this chapter, I shall outline a partial answer to these questions by elucidating the kinds of prescriptions that are constitutive of the concept of a culture.

We may initially consider a culture to be a network of rules. But what does following a rule consist of? In ‘Following a Rule and Aspect Perception’, I shall defend a reading of Wittgenstein’s analysis of rule-following, according to which following a rule presupposes the ability to see something in a context; in other words, to see X as an aspect of a certain object or situation. Aspect perception will thus emerge as constitutive of our ability to follow a rule. Wittgenstein was mainly concerned, however, with conditional rules or prescriptions; that is, rules or prescriptions whose binding power is conditional upon the subject’s decision to engage in a certain practice. I shall argue, though, that a culture construed as a web of practices requires not only conditional but also unconditional prescriptions; that is, prescriptions whose bindingness does not depend on the subject’s willingness to take on a commitment.

To motivate this view, I shall examine in ‘Unconditional Prescriptions and the Formation of the Subject’ how the idea of a subject is to be conceived of if we are to understand the fact that prescriptions, conditional or otherwise, are not private but determined within a social practice. The subject engaged in such practices cannot be approached as a Cartesian self that has direct access only to its inner events and decides after private deliberation what principles or rules should govern its life; an alternative view is required. Therefore, I shall outline a view of the identity of a subject as constitutively dependent upon the cultural context in which it has been formed; for this purpose, I shall draw some materials from Bernard Williams’ approach to the relation between sincerity and authenticity (Williams 2002) and Judith Butler’s performative account of the formation of the subject (Butler 2005, 2011).

Once, but no longer, Australia figured prominently in a ‘Great Game of the Airwaves’ (British Council 2013) played by nation states in an increasingly media-dense – though asymmetric – world. It is a game not only for great powers but also for lesser ones, executed via broadcasting and associated digital media platforms. The great states have the military and economic power to impose their will and shape the world order. By inverse proportion to their military and economic status, all others represent and defend their legitimacy and vital interests through influence and persuasion. They seek ‘virtual enlargement’ (Chong 2010, p. 384) by shaping and influencing the beliefs and conduct of other actors. Resorting to various forms of organised persuasive communication (Bakir et al. 2019), they have engaged not just other government entities and multilateral institutions but also politically significant publics and private persons.

Australia has operated state-funded international broadcasting platforms since 1939 – at first radio, later television and digital media – principally through the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Radio Australia at one time rivalled the audience reach and reputation of global behemoths, the BBC World Service (BBCWS) and the Voice of America (VOA). Radio Australia could reach audiences and prosecute Australian narratives even in jurisdictions where it was not wanted by local authorities. Despite Radio Australia’s reputed informality and its editorial independence from the government of the day, its core purpose remained intensely political. In the present state of disarray, where conflict is as much ideational as mate-rial, the diminished status of international broadcasting as an instrument of Australia’s discursive power warrants reconsideration.

Usage of the term ‘international broadcasting’ survives from the twentieth century when, as early as 1917, text-based messaging through Morse code and, later, voice radio transmissions (Nelson 1997, p. 1) demonstrated the capacity of state (and well-resourced non-state) actors to reach audiences regardless of geographic or political frontiers. The practice evolved to encompass the provision of state-sponsored news, information and entertainment, directed to publics outside the boundaries of the sponsoring state and delivered via electronic media (Price, Haas & Margolin 2008, pp. 152-153).

Mirza Abu Taleb Khan was born in 1752 in Lucknow to a family with Persian and Turkish roots. His father served as an assistant to Mohammed Culy Khan, the nephew of Abul Mansur Khan, better known as Safdar Jung who served as the nawab of Oudh (now Awadh) in the Mogul court between 1739 and 1754. Abu Taleb rose to be the Aumildar (tax collector) of Etawah and several other districts under the government of Asaf-ad-Daula (1748–1797), the nawab of Oudh. But after Asaf-ad-Daula died, Abu Taleb’s life in Oudeh radically changed. The new nawab, Hyder Beg Khan, turned against him because of an old rivalry between him and Abu Taleb. In this new political development in Oudh, Abu Taleb found himself unemployed and unable to provide for his family: ‘all my dependents and adherents, seeing my distress, left me, and even some of my children […] abandoned me. I was quite overcome with grief and despondency’ (Khan 1810: I, 5). At this point in his life, he tried to find patronage and employment in the East India Company (EIC), relying on his friendship with influential British officials such as Lord Cornwallis and Sir John Shore. But they did nothing for him apart from floating the idea that the EIC might offer him a position as a Persian and Arabic instructor to its civil servants.

His Scottish friend David Richardson, an officer in the EIC, convinced him to travel to Europe and offered to bear all the costs of the journey. Abu Taleb accepted the offer. On his way to Britain in 1799, he stopped at Cape Town in South Africa and visited Dublin and Cork before reaching London where he stayed until June 1802. On the way back, Abu Taleb visited Paris, Genoa, Istanbul, Diarbekar, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra where he joined an EIC ship departing for India. He wrote a travel account about his journey to Europe by sea and back to India overland. The Persian manuscript was circulated originally among his friends and acquaintances upon his return to India in 1803.

Introduction

What constitutes understanding another culture? Wittgenstein’s philosophy provides us with several tools to elucidate the question of intercultural understanding. Throughout his work, he emphasizes the activity of interactively engaging with an interlocutor (what I shall refer to as ‘interactional engagement’) as a philosophical resource for altering our philosophical practices, modifying our dispositional attitudes and potentially, more broadly, transforming our lives (Tejedor 2015, 158–160). In the Tractatus, this notion is supplemented with those of nonsense as self-stultification and clarity as dispositional attitude, and, in his later writings, with those of family resemblance, aspect seeing and perspicuous representation (Tejedor 2015, 156–166).

In this chapter, I argue that, although most of these Wittgensteinian tools can help elucidate the ethico-epistemic process of intercultural understanding, it is the former two – interactional engagement and nonsense as self-stultification – that are, in fact, most useful. In particular, I shall argue that privileging perspicuous representation, when this is understood as the unilateral, one-directional mapping of the concepts and practices of another culture, can actively distort the process of intercultural understanding.

In ‘Intercultural Understanding: Preliminary Considerations’, I present some preliminary considerations on the notions of culture, understanding and knowledge. In ‘Intercultural Understanding and Epistemic Interaction’, drawing partly on Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice and José Medina’s work on epistemic resistance, I argue that interactional engagement between epistemic subjects is central to the process of intercultural understanding. In ‘Polyphonic Cultures and Epistemic Resistance’, I revisit Medina’s notion of polyphonic culture and question the notion of oppositional epistemic resistance within the context of intercultural understanding.

Intercultural Understanding: Preliminary Considerations

The notions of culture and understanding are among Wittgenstein’s recurring preoccupations. As an initial, preliminary approximation, I shall take the term ‘culture’ to encompass linguistic and other collective practices, as well as collective habits and dispositions (affective, relational and behavioural), all of which are partly the result of training and therefore have a clear normative dimension. A culture both conditions and enables one’s life: it provides the framework within which one’s actions, bodily expressions and speech acts become imbued with standards for correctness and meaning (Sanfélix 2019). As I have argued elsewhere, for Wittgenstein, this notion of culture aligns itself with that of ‘form’, which, in the Tractatus, emerges as part of his discussion on representational and scientific principles, and, in Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, develops into the notion of ‘form of life’ (Tejedor 2015b).

Leo Marx recounts a story, told to him by the eminent British literary historian Richard Hoggart, of an encounter in the mid-1950s between Hoggart and a young Fulbright scholar who identified himself as a teacher of American Studies.

At this point, Hoggart understood completely just what the young man meant, although he also noted that no British scholar would ever be heard saying, “I believe in Britain!”

The anecdote is representative of the degree to which American Studies, as practiced by Americans in the United States at least, developed out of the political (and personal) convictions of its adherents. Although certain aspects of its work could be tied more directly to this or that program that is explicitly in the service of national and international political aims, such as the CIA’s involvement with literary magazines or the operations of UNESCO, it is clear that American Studies as a whole was always already ideological. As a disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) field, American Studies functions not only to study America, but to promote it: it being the idea of “America” itself, something that was not coextensive with the political or geographic entity known as the United States. Contrary to the many accusations by revisionist critics or even apologias by supposed traditionalists, the early practitioners of American Studies were not blind adherents to a particular government or political policy (far from it!). Rather, they were or became something like disciples of a new religion, one whose system of belief they were in fact helping to create.

In “Science Fiction,” a 1965 essay later included in his Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, Kurt Vonnegut complained of having been unjustly labeled a science-fiction writer. He said that reviewers had placed his work in that generic category primarily because machines featured so prominently in his first book, Player Piano, although Vonnegut himself insisted that the novel was based loosely on the real persons, places, and events he witnessed while working at a General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, in the early 1950s. True, Player Piano included some extrapolations from then-current technology, and it was set in the near future; as noted in the foreword, it was “not a book about what is, but about what could be.” That distinction itself might be enough to move one’s writings from the genre of literary realism to that of science fiction, but then the postwar period in which Player Piano appeared was time when, in the United States especially, people were very much concerned with the nation’s possibilities, not merely its quotidian realities. Hence, one might argue that the theme of the book was quite timely indeed. But the question is not so much whether a sort of realism or a more speculative form was better suited to capture the spirit of the age; rather, for Vonnegut, the question was whether one form of writing could be taken seriously at all. In his essay, Vonnegut lamented that, by referring to his work as science fiction, literary critics had consigned it to a category which would assure that it could not be viewed or valued as literature. “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer label ‘science fiction’ ever since,” Vonnegut declared, “and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

The humorous, thoroughly Vonnegutian comment reveals his anxieties about being pigeon-holed as a genre writer, and he goes on to concede that, in most science fiction he knows, the actual writing is pretty bad. However, in the same essay, he predicted that so-called science fiction would become increasingly part of the mainstream as more writers incorporated the effects of technology into their literary fiction.

Commonly, those who comment on international politics and diplomacy associate international broadcasting with concepts of soft power and ‘public diplomacy’. Soft power is said to be a form of influence founded on the non-coercive force of attraction (Nye 1990). Joseph Nye proposes that ‘smart power’ arises from the deployment of ‘hard’ military and economic assets and non-coercive ‘soft’ power resources in appropriate combination (Nye 2009). Government-aligned public diplomacy occurs when an international actor seeks to facilitate relationship building with other state or non-state actors (Cull 2009, p. 210; Melissen 2005, p. 176). I argue that both terms – soft power and public diplomacy – are useful as abstractions and for making shorthand references to certain aspects of statecraft. But they have limited operational value when shaping the strategic function and tactical application of international broadcasting.

For a broadcaster, the reliance on such abstraction risks a failure to acknowledge its core function as political communication. The intended effect of political communication is to modify, enable or disable the agency of other actors (Chadwick 2013, p. 207). This constitutes the ‘third face’ of power in shaping, influencing or determining other peoples’ beliefs and desires (Lukes 2005a, pp. 485-486). For a government concerned with media management, the use of imprecise terminology allows it to frame the broadcasting function simplistically, as a form of image promotion akin to international public relations. Neither perspective is adequate in the context of Australia’s geostrategic and geo-economic circumstances in the Indo-Pacific.

In this chapter, therefore, I examine critically the concept of non-coercive power before identifying the function and properties of international broadcasting in relation to other agents of foreign policy propagation. Whether described as ‘soft’, ‘hard’, ‘smart’ (Nye 2009), or ‘sweet’, ‘sticky’, ‘sharp’ and ‘hegemonic’ (Mead 2009), the operative word in service of the state’s foreign policy is power. In Australia, references to soft power often preference the word ‘soft’ over ‘power’, thus trivialising the concept or limiting it to certain forms of attraction. With regard to the latter, for example, the nation’s screen development agency asserts the soft power relevance of Australian film and television industry exports, which, it argues, forge ‘a sense of relatability as they communicate Australian culture and values to the world’ (Screen Australia 2016).