Landscapes and Balance and Big Thoughts

Holding Marxism and Taoism up together to see what I can see

I was sitting on the porch the other day, talking with a student/colleague/friend about a really interesting project he’s working on, which involves analysis of some images of traditional-style Chinese landscapes appearing in Yellow Earth, a mid-80s film. When we headed into the kitchen to make some coffee, I realized that - conveniently enough - I had exactly that kind of landscape hanging on the wall because Nicole sources some of her Chinese herbs from a company that sends promotional calendars with images like this one. It’s like the greasemonkey calendars that suppliers sent the full-serve gas station I worked at as a kid, but . . . y’know . . . traditional Chinese landscapes . . .

Image courtesy of Evergreen Herbs

The ecological balance is the important thing in images like this - the scale of the mountains looming over the miniscule clumps of trees, the house nestled in among the cliffs, the small streams running toward a larger collective river flowing near the bottom, and the juxtaposition of people taking it easy in the foreground and active further in the background (is one standing still, contemplating, while the other is doing qi gong or something like that?). The elements themselves as balanced, with the water running down out of the mountains, through earth, nourishing trees, and rising into mist that’s cut by the heat of the sun.

This kind of imagery is rooted in an understanding of the world as a fluid interaction of Yin and Yang, with everything clearly connected to everything else, and the constancy of change emphasized in each part. Ted Kaptchuk describes this kind of balanced totality in his discussion of another similar landscape in The Web that Has No Weaver, probably the best introduction to Traditional and Classical Chinese Medicine:

The scene depicts a vast range of elements, from the towering mountain to the little trickling stream. Nature is shown as a balance of the yielding Yin (foliage, water) and the unyeilding Yang (rock, trees). There are the dynamic (water, people) and the quiescent (mountains, houses); the slow (trees) and the fast (mist); the dark and the light; the solid and the liquid. All things contain both Yin and Yang. The water, for instance, is both yielding (Yin) and dynamic (Yang).

The picture is a totality, and each detail takes on meaning only insofar as it participates in the whole. The mountain is immense by virtue of its smaller foothills; the people are small by virtue of the vastness of nature. All things are imbued with interactive qualities and dynamics in their relationships to the things around them.

The idea of this kind of unity is interesting because I’ve been re-reading some bits of Marx’s Grundrisse lately and it’s the first place that he really starts solidifying his own materialist ideas of “the totality” - the idea that production, distribution, circulation, and consumption are little unified distinctions in the broader dynamics of capitalism. They all work together or they don’t work. This is the most fundamental idea driving his analysis of capital.

But Marx’s discussion of the relationship between distinct little bits and the totality isn’t limited to his discussion of capital. His materialist dialectic applies to everything. It’s like he says in the introduction, about the relationships of individuals and society:

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society – a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness – is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.

What makes people individuals is that they are part of a group, with particular roles and relationship with that group, and what makes that group possible is the collection of individuals doing what they do. The parts collaboratively create the whole, but those parts wouldn’t have any meaning for each other if it wasn’t for the existence of that whole. It seems to me that there are a lot of conceptual overlaps between Marx’s dialectical discussion of the relationship between the piece and the totality and the taoist understanding of the interactive balance between yin and yang.

As I was thinking about this all, it occurred to me that I have another image hanging in my kitchen, a photo Nicole took when we were kids, exploring western Kansas and getting shots for a project she was working on about housing collapses in the past, in dialogue with the ones that loomed on the horizon (this was a few years before the 2007/08 collapse - her critique was pretty brilliant and prescient, if I do say so myself).

Nicole McCarty, circa 2005. Slight glare and tilt, courtesy of Ryan McCarty, who was too lazy to take the picture out of the frame to capture this image.

I’ve always thought that this was a quintessentially American(a) photo. The solitary farmhouse standing alone on the broad plains is the rugged individual image done to perfection. This is a picture of that individualism (and its failure) in practice. Obviously, it fits this bill because the people who struck out for the plains were often looking for this kind of isolation. They believed that virtue is a matter of going out and wrangling for yourself.

But it’s that belief that makes this a starkly-American image, not the material reality of isolation on the plains. There is nothing natural about humans being removed from each other instead of collaborating. And - I would argue - everything about this image still shows the relationship between the individual and the whole, the cycles of production, circulation, and consumption in the totality of capitalism. It’s only through the American rugged individual imagination that this house and the family in its can really be seen as standing along by itself. The purpose of that giant farmland is not to help the family subsist. It’s to create commodity crops. That farmhouse is absolutely in dialogue with a broader capitalist market. It just isn’t shown. Even the existence of the house itself necessitates a broader market because the lumber had to have come from somewhere far far away. But, again, the idea of an individual in isolation obscures that reality. When looking at this kind of house, we’re encouraged to forget that this house was deeply connected to other people, houses, towns, banks, and commodity markets (which is why Nicole balanced this image with others like the closed-down American Hoist factory in Bay City, MI and the wide swaths of new subdivision construction outside of Kansas City, KS).

It’s too simple to just say that Traditional Chinese understandings of the world and its inherent balance is superior to the capitalist-individualist myth we’re tempted to read in images like Nicole’s. First, it would be inaccurate, since her work was more broadly critiquing that myth by showing the relationship between all the different kinds of capitalist exploitation of working people, past and present.

But second, I think it’s much more interesting to use this as an opportunity to think about what a taoist yin and yang perspective of balance can bring to analysis of that kind of capitalist myth. If we understand all phenomena in the material world as shifting back and forth between yin and yang, always in balance and inseparable from each other, then any moments that can be read as the absence of balance in this image prompt a lot of questions, right? It requires you to zoom outward more and see the broader totality, including the source of lumber, the failed market for produce, the banks that foreclosed on the land, the people who fled the land to try to survive elsewhere, etc.

And, because yin and yang also contain elements of each other - internalized contradictions that show how everything is always changing into something else - we’re encouraged to think about not just this broken down house as it stood in 2005, but about the whole flux of time and change it’s a part of. The yielding and fertile land (yin) was actively farmed to bring forth lots of produce (yang) until that activity reached such an apex that it burned out - the dust bowl didn’t just happen, as we’re sort of taught in school - and started to shift into stillness (yin) while the potential for future changes builds up. Even the house itself has moved from the active yang of use to the quiescent yin of returning to the earth. In this way, we can really see how Marx’s historical dialectic and a taoist yin and yang understanding take us in similar directions.

So that’s really what I’ve been thinking about - the idea of what a Marxist-Taoist line of thought and practice can do for my understanding of . . . things.