Fuoco B. Fann is a post-structuralist and cultural theorist. He is noted for synthesizing Post-structuralism with American Literary Criticism, Intercultural Philosophy, and Material Culture Studies. He taught at Lanzhou Jiaotong University, China before moving in 1989 to the United States, where he guest-lectured at California State University, East Bay and UC Davis, and has since resided in California. Fann currently guest lectures at UC Berkeley. Fann's monograph on post-structuralism and intercultural philosophy, This Self We Deserve: A Quest after Modernity, was published in 2020.
Works
Post-structuralism, Intercultural Philosophy, and Continental Philosophy
The novelty of Fann's work advances four main arguments: (1) Modern knowledge seems to have lost its certainty and become precarious, an instability that results from a continuous "modern tradition" of thought that, in our time, "makes us malfunction in everyday life," and implicates many aspects of societies. (2) This instability of knowledge is compounded by the "modern phonetic language": while language in general is a copy of things, Fann demonstrates that phonetic-alphabetic language is a copy of a copy. Since phonetic writing copies the sounds of speech which in turn refer to ideas of things, in Foucault's words, alphabetic writing demands that "we place ourselves in the virtual space of self-representation and reduplication," and in its modern form, Fann argues, phonetic language "creates an abyss between self and reality whose edge can never be reached." (3) In this problematic "modern tradition," the foundational aphorism of western rationality, René Descartes' famed "I think, therefore I am," has reversed today into "We think, therefore We are." (4) Citing G.W.F. Hegel's thesis from The Philosophy of History that throughout history "the superior principle overcame the inferior," and displaying Hegel's derogatory remarks against Blacks in Africa—including accusations of cannibalism —and excluding "immovable" empires of Asia out of "the History of the World", Fann suggests that the "teleological, linear, and progressive Hegelian… conception of History" amounts to "ontological violence." Fann has been acknowledged as the first scholar to clearly articulate these four contentions together, suggesting that the Modern Imperial domination is deeply abetted by "Hegelian metaphysics and ethnocentrism."
Inspired by French poststructuralists Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and continental philosophy, Fann opens in This Self We Deserve with Foucault's account in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences of a rupture in Western knowledge around the turn of the nineteenth century. The traditionally established Christian worldview disintegrated and modern knowledge became fragmented; "modern man" emerged for the first time in history as an object of knowledge and also as a knowing subject. This subject is an "anthropocentric structurally overloaded subject" who is possessed by a futile "will to truth," seeking self-certainty amid already-uncertain knowledge. Fann asserts that any of us may be Foucault's modern subject:
Modernity—based on a paradoxical uncertainty (aporia) of the world but a logical certainty of modern knowledge—gives the modern speaking subject, the knowing subject—all of us—a power so that we can do the impossible. The impossible is that Man replaces God. This replacement, of course, uses not religion but the idea of modern knowledge.
Fann argues that we, as modern subjects, have been misled by Max Weber's celebration of Occidental "methodological individualism" to believe that "values are self-chosen and not grounded in a larger cosmic scheme." The "self-consciousness of one's freedom to power," which "is the paramount premise of the conception of modernity," is a pretentious modern fiction. Addressing Descartes' "I think, therefore I am," Fann draws from Foucault's contention that our modern épistémè is characterized by a "double movement proper to the modern cogito explains why the 'I think' does not, in its case, lead to the evident truth of the 'I am.'" If "I think" is uncoupled from "I am," Fann elaborates, "the best argument is that 'I am' has disappeared and reappeared as 'We are'…. The fundamental ramification of thought is: we think, therefore we are. I no longer think but we think." Demonstrating that "we have become more artificially rational than ever before," Fann observes that the knowing subject, empowered as the individual, nevertheless believes in the same values as everyone else (freedom, equality, and personal power), belongs to a larger system of "artificial rationalization" that " the human will and mental and physical power," and participates in the same processes of consumption (in Baudrillard, a systematic manipulation of objects-as-signs) that everyone else does. "We are no longer destined to be a specific 'individual' but to be 'individuals,'" hence individualism is undermined. By analyzing literary works such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and James Joyce's use of stream of consciousness, Fann suggests that the "modern phonetic language" theorized by Foucault takes on its own life as an "inner narrative of self." Fann examines the history of Chinese-European encounter to demonstrate that philosophers such as Vico and Hegel attributed what Foucault termed an "ontological status" to Western phonetic languages as opposed to Chinese script. Derrida would later create the term "logocentrism" to describe "the metaphysics of phonetic writing" which was always "nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism." According to sinologist John Lagerwey, since phonetic writing copies the sound of speech,
As Jacques Derrida well demonstrated, our civilization of Writing in reality is a civilization of Speech. It is through using a phonetic writing that we have been led to see in writing a simple duplication of the "living voice": speech—whether of man or God—has the power to create things, or to realize them; it alone can express the essence—the intention, the will—and it was thus naturally identified with what gives life, with the spirit, with the soul, and with the breath. "Writing," writes Derrida, "the letter, the sensible inscription, has always been considered by Western tradition as the body and matter external to the spirit, to breath, to speech, and to the logos."
Fann argues that this ontological status of phonetic language is problematic for many reasons. On the personal level, "the inner narrative of self creates an abyss between self and reality whose edge can never be reached." The ethnocentrism of the Western view of writing also has political consequences. Emmanuel Lévinas referred to Western philosophy as a form of "ontological imperialism" that reduplicates European colonialism; Derrida termed Western metaphysics "white mythology"; while for Baudrillard "History itself is a product for Western export."
Kirkus Reviews states: "To understand the present, seems to assert, readers must first expand their scope; only then can they begin to investigate the past." This Self We Deserve unfolds a variety of reversals: of artistic modernism (represented by Munch's The Scream) into postmodernism (represented by Warhol and Koons); of traditional consumption into "post-consumption" (for Baudrillard, the participation in a sign system of objects); of Western aesthetics into "post-aesthetics"; and of First World nations into States of Indebtedness. Fann apprises the danger of the Hegelian ethnocentric view of history as a linear progression of "the superior principle the inferior." Rather than considering the worlds in terms of dialectical conflict, Fann envisions the worlds fusing in the cultural diversity of mutual interdependence and reversibility.
Curated Artifacts Exhibitions and Shows
Fann co-curated the following exhibitions in the 2000s:
- Spiritual Vessels: Chinese Teaware by Modern Masters of the Zisha Tradition, a Selection of Masterpieces from Major American Collections, University Art Gallery at California State University, East Bay 2009.
- The Lion's Roar, the Tibetan Tangkas from the Sakya (Mark Levy Chog Dorje Catalogue), Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University 2001.
- The "Mark Levy Chog Dorje Collection" has been a part of the permanent collection of Himalayan Art Resources hosted at the Rubin Museum of Art since the 2001.
- The Lion's Roar, the Tibetan Tangkas from the Sakya, University Art Gallery at California State University, East Bay 2000.
References
- Fuoco B. Fann, This Self We Deserve: A Quest after Modernity (Berkeley: Philosophy & Art Collaboratory, 2020), https://www.worldcat.org/title/1322088967 in library collections at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Harvard University, Princeton University, The University of Chicago, UCLA, New York University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
- Edmund Mendelssohn, White Musical Mythologies: Sonic Presence in Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), 20-21. "In This Self We Deserve: A Quest After Modernity (2020), Fann embarks on an incredible project, drawing together Derrida's critique of the west's logo/phonocentric metaphysics; Foucault's narrative of the archaeological mutation that produced the figure of Modern Man (l'homme) through the 'dangerous intermediaries' of the modern human sciences; Jean-François Lyotard's characterization of 'postmodern' knowledge as 'discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical,' 'producing not the known, but the unknown'; Lévinas's contention that western philosophy has most often been a form of 'ontological imperialism'; Gilles Deleuze's declaration that 'we have become simulacra,' forsaking 'moral existence in order to enter into aesthetic existence,' which, in his view, is a positive alternative to the metaphysical dualisms that have long burdened western aesthetics (i.e., original/copy, true/false, God/ man); and Jean Baudrillard's contention, contra Deleuze, that simulacra and simulation signal an ever-deeper alienation (in a Marxian sense): the vast landscape of consumer goods and the 'dizzying whirl of reality' on screen convey a fictive sense of communal warmth when in fact we moderns are more alienated than ever.... In short, the instability of our present knowledge runs deep."
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 29. See Mendelssohn, White Musical Mythologies, 21. "Through the course of Fann's exegesis, one gets the sense that western metaphysics is premised on something that does not exist, the fictive 'now' that has been written into being in Derrida's sense and that Fann incisively links to the fictive self-assurance of the modern subject, one who is gifted with a kind of ontologically endowed speech to say what is. This 'modern speaking subject, being self-conscious of one's freedom,' nevertheless stands on empty ground."
- Michel Foucault, "Language to Infinity," in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. II, ed.James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1998), 91.
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 118.
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 90; see Mendelssohn, White Musical Mythologies, 21. "In one of many striking reversals described in This Self We Deserve, Fann suggests that Descartes's famed cogito, ergo sum should be recast today as 'We think, therefore We are': this modern subject, who 'uniquely simulates a self-projected autonomy as the individual,' winds up thinking, speaking, and consuming the same mass-mediatized images, the same inner narratives, and the same salable goods and ideas as everyone else."
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (1899), http://sqapo.com/CompleteText-Hegel-PhilosophyofHistory.htm
- Hegel, The Philosophy of History. "Tyranny is regarded as no wrong, and cannibalism is looked upon as quite customary and proper. Among us instinct deters from it, if we can speak of instinct at all as appertaining to man. But with the Negro this is not the case, and the devouring of human flesh is altogether consonant with the general principles of the African race; to the sensual Negro, human flesh is but an object of sense—mere flesh."
- While Hegel denigrated Africa as the "land of childhood… exhibiting the most reckless inhumanity and disgusting barbarism," he claimed that East Asia was a land of "Despotism" and that "the History of the World out of China to the West in order to realize its telos." Hegel, The Philosophy of History, quoted in Fann, This Self We Deserve, see pp. 53-56.
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 56.
- See Mendelssohn, White Musical Mythologies, 34. "It seems strange to me, especially given our present-day sensitivity to such matters, that while every PhD student in the humanities must gain some familiarity with Hegel, simply quoting Hegel's words from The Philosophy of History—who does this?—is enough to uncover the epic, teleological, and dialectical progression of the Spirit that becomes itself through a heroic propulsion across time and space as something of an ontological cartoon. Hegel's Philosophy of History lays out the empirical 'evidence' for the abstract claims he makes in his Phenomenology: the movement of the Spirit encountering its other, clashing with it, finally internalizing or sublating alterity, has a real-world correlate. This dialectical movement structures the whole of Hegel's Philosophy of History, in which the Greeks sublimate the Persians, the Romans sublimate the Greeks, the Germans eventually sublimate the Romans, and so on: in each case, Hegel wrote, "the superior principle overcame the inferior," a universal principle that he termed an "a priori proof." Fann quips: "t sounds like 'gangster proof,' but is indeed an ontological proof that has dominated the world since the nineteenth century."
- Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd ed., Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 27-28. "Suddenly, according to Foucault's story, somewhere at the end of the eighteenth century there occurred one of the most dramatic of those epistemic shifts which Foucault's archaeology is designed to chart. A 'profound upheaval,' 'an archaeological mutation' (OT312) occurred which signaled the collapse of the Classical Age and made possible the emergence of man…. an, as we know him today, makes his appearance and becomes the measure of all things."
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 26; see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1987), 261. "… the modern form of knowledge is determined by the unique dynamism of a will to truth for which any frustration is only a spur to the renewed production of knowledge. This will to truth, then, is for Foucault the key to the internal nexus between knowledge and power. The human sciences occupy the terrain opened up by the aporetic self-thematization of the cognitive subject. With their pretentious and never redeemed claims, they erect a facade of universally valid knowledge behind which lurks the facticity of a sheer will to cognitive self-mastery, a will to a boundlessly productive increase of knowledge in the wake of which both subjectivity and self-consciousness are first formed."
- Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narrative of Modern China (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 82.
- Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2002 ), 353.
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 86.
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 90.
- Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 200. "Consumption is not a material practice, nor is it a phenomenology of 'affluence'. It is not defined by the nourishment we take in, nor by the clothes we clothe ourselves with, nor by the car we use, nor by the oral and visual matter of the images and messages we receive. It is defined, rather, by the organization of all these things into a signifying fabric: consumption is the virtual totality of all objects and messages ready-constituted as a more or less coherent discourse. If it has any meaning at all, consumption means an activity consisting of the systematic manipulation of signs."
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 90.
- Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2002 ).
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 140-141.
- Michel Foucault, "Language to Infinity," in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. II, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1998), 91. "Writing, in Western culture, automatically dictates that we place ourselves in the virtual space of self-representation and reduplication; since writing refers not to a thing but to speech, a work of language only advances more deeply into the intangible density of the mirror, calls forth the double of this already-doubled writing, discovers in this way a possible and impossible infinity, ceaselessly strives after speech, maintains it beyond the death which condemns it, and frees a murmuring stream. This presence of repeated speech in writing undeniably gives to what we call a work of language an ontological status unknown in those cultures where the act of writing designates the thing itself, in its proper and visible body, stubbornly inaccessible to time."
- In Edmund Mendelssohn, "Ontological Appropriation: Boulez and Artaud," Twentieth Century Music 18, no. 2 (2021) , 295, Mendelssohn cites Fann and states: "Even as Artaud disdained the metaphysics of phonetic writing, he still relied implicitly on this metaphysics. According to this metaphysics – which Derrida famously termed logocentrism – the presence of voice, of vocal sound, grants western forms of writing a privileged ontological status."
- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 ), 3. "… logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic writing (for example, of the alphabet) which was fundamentally—for enigmatic yet essential reasons that are inaccessible to a simple historical relativism—nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism."
- John Lagerwey, "Écriture et corps divin en Chine," from Charles Malamoud and Jean-Pierre Vernant, eds. Le Temps de la réflexion vol. VII (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1986), 275. Fann's translation, This Self We Deserve, 7-8
- See Mendelssohn, "Ontological Appropriation," 284
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 118.
- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979).
- Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy" (originally published 1971) in Alan Bass's translation, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 213.
- THIS SELF WE DESERVE | Kirkus Reviews.
- Baudrillard, The System of Objects
- Donald Kuspit, The End of Art (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 159-161. "In short, art these postmodern days seems to have become another depressing way of passing time rather than of reaching beyond time, which is what it was for van Gogh…. Today's postart seduces us to death, not life. Warhol is the ultimate postmodern postartist, for he neither knows nor cares whether his business art—or is it art business?—is more art than business or more business than art…. The void left by the absence of faith in art is filled by the presence of money."
- Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 1994).
- Hegel, The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1901.
- Fann, This Self We Deserve, 211.
- "University Art Gallery". www.csueastbay.edu. Retrieved 2023-08-02.
- Center, Cantor Arts. "Cantor Arts Center - White Tara (Tara of the Seven Eyes)". cantorcollection.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2023-08-02.
- "Collection of Mark Levy & Chog Dorje". www.himalayanart.org. Retrieved 2023-08-02.
- "UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY". www.csueastbay.edu. Retrieved 2023-08-02.