癖嗜文化: 論晚明文人詭態的美學形象

Pi (the obsession, the idiosyncratic habit, the hobby, the addiction)-the illness of not-being-ill, the taste of the degenerate taste, the supplement of being, and the useless habit for the social existence-becomes the indispensable condition of existence for those who have pi. It is perhaps a cultural appendix to the literati culture, but it is also a sine qua non for the construction of their figures. The attitude toward pi of Chinese literati had an obvious transformation in the Ming era. This transformation could be explained by the hypothesis to consider pi as the self expression of individualism in their social practices. This article examines this hypothesis by viewing the literati itself as a work of art, which is a cultural commodity produced in the socio-cultural field. In the Ming-Ching era (1500-1800), a mass of ”unofficial literati” failing in civil examinations formed a particular social class. Together with the officials and the merchants, they emulated the cultural taste and competed with one another, and thus a new scene in the cultural landscape was created.
These literati, whose cultural capital came from their cultural literacy, rivaled the officials by showing their amateur ideal of leisure aesthetic on the one hand, and rejected the merchants by negating their good will of culture learning on the other. They cultivated their pi in order to identify themselves and to maintain their privilege status. This practice of ”cultivation of pi” revealed the competition of taste. In one way, the cultivation of pi distinguished the literati from the common people with its unproductive uselessness. In the other way, the literati's pi displayed a symbolic cultural capital which distinguished the elegant from the vulgar and the true from the false. Thus, it further distinguished themselves from the merchants. Finally, they had to let their taste degenerate and become as grotesque as possible, and this uncanny aesthetic could separate the literati from the current culture dominated by the titled officials without leaving the mainstream culture. In this way, pi, which in Chinese also means ”to separate, to avoid, and to clear a path,” created another dominant taste.
This article tries to draw a history of the culture of pi and discusses the problematic of how the Ming- Ching literati performed their figure through their focus on pi? How did they, through the cultivation of pi, create themselves as a work of art? What image did this work of art have? What political and aesthetic actions did they display? Finally, when the civilizations of old society of the Ming and Ching Empires collapsed, what change was brought to this culture of pi?