Lecture | China Seminar
Immersion without Mimesis: Song-Dynasty Cybernetics, the Game of Go, and Autopoeisis in Premodern Chinese Literature
- Date
- Wednesday 18 October 2023
- Time
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48
Description
In this talk, I investigate the curious contradiction found at the heart of (contemporary) strategy games, the immersive power of imaginary worlds that are produced without mimesis. To do so, I trace a lineage from the computational attractions of video-games to the use of basic binaries in Song-dynasty and Ming-dynasty cultures of both games and poetic composition. In particular, I focus on the work of one of the more famous poets and “go” players of the age, the neo-Confucian philosopher Shao Yong (1011-1077). Rather than seeing literary text or strategy game as a copy of reality, Shao Yong regarded the binary play with black and white stones as the basis of endless productive powers, immersive attractions, and, ultimately, insight in reality. The logic of Shao Yong’s auto-poesis and philosophy sheds light on premodern Chinese literary aesthetics, early forms of cybernetic culture, as well as the attractions of contemporary video games.
About the speaker
Paize Keulemans is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His research interests are focused on the interaction between early-modern literary texts and other media. His book, Sound Rising from the Paper: 19th-century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination pursues this topic from an acoustic angle, investigating the way a plethora of sound effects turn the silent pages of printed novels into a lively acoustic spectacle. His second book project, Print Hear Say: Informal Information Networks in 17th-Century Chinese Literature, investigates the uses of gossip and rumor in 17th-century operas, novels, and histories to explore the relationship between aesthetic structures and imperial politics. His latest project, Old Novels, New Games, explores the relationship between Ming dynasty vernacular masterworks and contemporary video-games, employing categories from 21st century digital culture to re-examine the category of the novel and the boundaries of the premodern text.