Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts in an Age of Global Information Revolution

This dissertation explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—the effort to phoneticize Chinese language and/or simplify the writing system—from its inception in the 1890s to its demise in the 1980s. These reforms took place at the intersection of industrialization, colonialism, and new information technologies, such as alphabet-based telegraphy and breakthroughs in printing technologies. As these social and technological transformations put unprecedented pressure on knowledge management and the use of mental and clerical labor, many Chinese intellectuals claimed that learning Chinese characters consumed too much time and mental energy. Chinese script reforms, this dissertation argues, were an effort to increase speed in producing, transmitting, and accessing information, and thus meet the demands of the industrializing knowledge economy. The industrializing knowledge economy that this dissertation explores was built on and sustained by a psychological understanding of the human subject as a knowledge machine, and it was part of a global moment in which the optimization of labor in knowledge production was a key concern for all modernizing economies. While Chinese intellectuals were inventing new signs of inscription, American behavioral psychologists, Soviet psycho-economists, and Central Asian and Ottoman technicians were all experimenting with new scripts in order to increase mental efficiency and productivity. This dissertation reveals the intimate connections between the Chinese and non-Chinese script engineering projects that were taking place synchronically across the world. The chapters of this work demonstrate for the first time, for instance, that the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1920s and 1930s was intimately connected to the discipline of behavioral psychology in the US. The first generation of Chinese psychologists employed the American psychologists’ methods to track eye movements, count word-frequencies, and statistically analyze the speed of reading, writing, and memorizing in order to simplify and “rationalize” the Chinese writing system in an effort to discipline and optimize mental labor. Other chapters explore the issue of mental and clerical optimization by finding the origins of the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), the mother of pinyin, in hitherto unknown Eurasian connections. The CLA, the pages of this work shows, was the product of a transnational exchange that involved Ottoman and Transcaucasian typographers as well as Russian engineers and Chinese communists who sought efficiency in knowledge production through inventing new scripts. Situating the Chinese script reforms at this global intersection of psychology, economy, and linguistics, this dissertation examines the global connections and forces that turned the human subject into a knowledge worker who was cognitively managed through education, literacy, propaganda, and other measures of organizing information, all of which had the script at the center. The search for efficiency and productivity—the core values of industrialism—lay at the heart of script reforms in China, but this search was inseparable from linguistic orders and political ambitions. Even if writing, transmitting, and learning a phonetic script could theoretically be easier and more efficient than the Chinese characters, the alphabet opened a veritable Pandora’s Box around the issue of selection: given the complex linguistic landscape in China, which speech was a phonetic script supposed to represent? There were myriad languages spoken throughout the empire and the subsequent nation-state, most of which were mutually incomprehensible. Mandarin as spoken in Beijing was different from that spoken in the south, and “topolects” or regional languages such as Min or Cantonese were to Mandarin what Romanian is to English. As a linguistic life-or-death issue, phonetic scripts stood for the infrastructural possibilities and limitations in the representation of speeches. Some scripts, such as Lao Naixuan’s phonetic script composed of more than a hundred signs, were capable of representing multiple Mandarin and non-Mandarin speeches; whereas others, such as Phonetic Symbols that only has thirty-seven syllabic signs, represented only one speech, i.e., Mandarin. Using Mandarin-oriented scripts to transcribe non-Mandarin speeches was like writing English with fifteen letters, hence the acrimonious disputes that fill the pages of this dissertation. Succinctly put, it was at the level of script invention that Chinese and non-Chinese actors engineered different infrastructures not only for laboring minds but also for the social world of Chinese languages. The history of information technologies and knowledge economy in China was thus inseparable from the world of speech and language, as each script offered a new potential to reassemble the written matter and the speaking mind in a different way. “Codes of Modernity” thus conceptualizes the script itself as an infrastructural medium. A script was not merely a passive carrier of information, but an existential artifact. Building on an expanding literature on infrastructures, it endorses the observation that infrastructures, technologies, and the social world around them work in a recursive loop. An infrastructure is not just the physical object that permits the flow of information, goods, ideas, and people, but a sociotechnical product that enables the experience of culture, while imposing constrains on it at the same time. Like electricity grids, transportation systems, and sewage canals, the experience of scripts as infrastructures is the experience of thought worlds. After a long tradition of structuralism and poststructuralism that sought to understand the world through the semiotic prism of language, “Codes of Modernity” argues that it is time for an infrastructuralism that excavates the indispensable media that enable the production of language and thought

For the Love of Robots: Posthumanism in Latin American Science Fiction Between 1960-1999

Posthumanism—understood as a symbiotic relationship between humans and technology—is quickly and surely becoming an inextricable part of daily life. In an era where technology can be worn as an extension of—and an enhancement to—our bodies, traditional science fiction tropes such as robots and cyborgs resurface and reformulate questions on critical aspects of human experience: who are we and what do our (imagined) technologies say about our world? Such questions are far more complex than they appear. Their answers should not come from one source alone, as humanness is experienced differently across time and cultural systems. In this sense, it is imperative to focus critical attention on works beyond the English-language canon in order to discover alternative readings of the posthuman, understand how varying historical, social, and economic contexts give new meanings to robots, cyborgs and hyper-technological imaginaries, and provide balancing perspectives to the ideas presented in canon posthuman science fiction from the developed world. To this end, this study centers on posthuman science fiction from Latin America. The primary works included here are limited only to Mexico, Chile, and Argentina—three of the countries with the greatest science fiction output in the region. This study explores the intersections of gender, sexualities, and posthumanism, as well as the underlying sociopolitical implications of such narratives. They exhibit an undeniable influence of canon Anglophone science fiction in terms of tropes (robots as mates for humans, cybernetic doppelgangers, technological utopias and dystopias) as well as problematic representations of gender, sex, and race. Yet, at the same time, posthuman elements in these Latin American narratives exhibit distinct local traits. Moreover, robot and cyborg figures enhance and renew discourses of political corruption, dictatorial trauma, surveillance, social and ecological decline. This study aims to outline the ways in which Latin American posthuman science fiction stands apart from the canon and proves itself as a legitimate genre. Simultaneously, this project seeks to supplement the nascent critical corpus on Latin American science fiction. It is my hope that this study’s insights will contribute to the field’s growth and success with scholars and readers alike

Using the Jesuits’ Accommodation Experience in China to Guide Change in Chinese Organizational Settings Today

In the late 1970s, China’s party leaders realized that China was not able to develop in isolation. Their aim of “learning from advanced countries” also implied bringing change to China on all business-related levels. However, both Chinese and Western practitioners and scholars agree on the inappropriateness of any change approach alien to Chinese specification. To bridge this void, this research directs its interest towards a substantive theorizing upon the Jesuits’ Accommodation approach in China (1583-1742). To do so, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, rooted within the Utrecht School and following Max van Manen, establishes a renewed contact with the Jesuits’ Accommodation experience outside its traditional research environment. Grounded in an exhaustive description of the Accommodation phenomenon along its meaning-units, a reflective analysis into the structural aspects of the Jesuits’ lived Accommodation experience allows eight essential themes to be abstracted. Becoming the building blocks of a substantive Theory of the Unique, these themes summarize all requirements that are reflected in, and/or concern Context, Course, and Content of any Sinicized change approach able to in-culturate/accommodate (foreign) persons|change-agents, (unfamiliar) ideas|concepts, and (alien) approaches|international bestpractices into a Chinese environment. As a result, research into the Jesuits’ Accommodation approach provides Chinese and Western management practitioners and scholars with one new substantive approach to act towards the Chinese Others with thoughtfulness and tact in a fresh and systematic way. Further conceptualized and Sinicized, applying The Chinese Change Concept—The 3C-Approach in a contemporary Chinese organizational environment finally allows to effectively manage change in Chinese organizational settings today