China's Modernity: Discourses of the Inbetween-Moment and the Apparative Media

本项目分析了1912年至1937年民国时期中国在哲学上以及艺术上和审美上的时间观念。它聚焦于全球标准化的、以时间和设备为基础的工业现代性技术媒体的本地挪用，以及它们与以前的中国艺术和媒体实践的关系。技术手段、审美实践和不同历史形态的话语在民国时期中国哲学家的文本生产中相遇，在相关的艺术和媒介表现方式中相互作用，产生了多个审美恰当的时代。因此，该项目着重于审美现代性的变化这一命题，这些变化来自于对遵循霸权西方模式的现代性的单一体验的概念的大量相互铭文和更新过程，或者缺乏可验证和分析的接触点和互动点的文化奇点的概念。哲学实践的分析主要集中在张东孙、梁启超、何琳、冯友兰、胡适、梁漱溟、熊十力、艾思奇等民国时期重要知识分子的开创性文本上。我们将探讨将时间概念化为时间，或者，在汉字直译为时间的意义上，时间与时刻之间的概念，并将检验它们在多大程度上参与了现代性交替的构建。除了认识论方面，分析将集中在现代性的文献学建构和新儒家关于知与行、伦理与领导统一的辩论的谈判，这场辩论在20世纪继续盛行。这些文本中确定的时间概念将与对同一时代中国艺术作品的平行分析联系起来。作为现代性的纲领性媒介，电影站在了这场考量的中心。本文将通过对电影文本的细读来分析中国对电影的挪用，并注意到技术上预定的时间线性与话语实践的关系。新兴的时间美学将与其周围的生产条件相联系，并就其与前技术媒体美学模式的相互作用进行探索。为此，该项目将考虑当地的戏曲和文学传统，这些传统塑造了中国电影的挪用，并反过来在工业现代性条件下经历了转变。该项目的目的是根据中国人的感知条件以及中国演员的哲学话语和艺术实践来重新评估输入的现代时间制度，并描述民族文化分界线内和之外的多样化和多历史的现代性。

This project analyzes conceptions of time in philosophic as well as artistic and aesthetic practices in the Republican Era of China from 1912 to 1937. It focusses on the local appropriation of the globally standardized time- and apparatus-based technical media of industrial modernity and their relationship to antecedent Chinese art and media practices. The interactions of technical apparatus, aesthetic practice, and different historically shaped discourses meeting in the text production of Republican-era Chinese philosophers as well as in correlating artistic and media-based modes of representation produce multiple aesthetic proper times. Therefore, the project stresses the thesis of alterities of aesthetic modernity emerging from a multitude of mutual inscription and updating processes over the notions of a singular experience of modernity following hegemonial western models, or of cultural singularities lacking verifiable and analyzable points of contact and interactions. The analysis of philosophic practices focusses on the seminal texts of significant Republican-era intellectuals such as Zhang Dongsun, Liang Qichao, He Lin, Feng Youlan, Hu Shi, Liang Shuming, Xiong Shili, and Ai Siqi. These will be explored regarding conceptualizations of time as chronos or, in the sense of the literal translation of the Chinese characters for time, between-moment, and it will be tested to what extent they are involved in the construction of alterities of modernity. Apart from epistemological aspects, the analysis will focus on the philological construction of modernity and the negotiation of the Neo-Confucian debate on the unity of knowledge and action, ethics and leadership, which continues to prevail in the 20th century. The conceptions of time identified in these texts will be put in relation to the parallel analysis of Chinese works of art of the same era. As the programmatic medium of modernity, cinema stands at the center of this examination. The appropriation of cinema in China will be analyzed in a close reading of filmic texts with attention to the relation of technically predetermined linearity of time and discursive practice. The emerging aesthetics of time are to be connected to their surrounding conditions of production and explored with regard to their interplay with patterns of pre-technical media aesthetics. For this purpose, the project will take into consideration local opera and literary traditions that shaped the appropriation of cinema in China, and in turn experienced transformations under the conditions of industrial modernity themselves. It is the aim of the project to reassess imported modern regimes of time with regard to Chinese conditions of perception and the philosophical discourses and artistic practices of Chinese actors, and to describe a diverse and polychronic modernity within and beyond national-cultural demarcations.