Sixiang Wang recently asked me to share an introduction to a conference paper comparing Korean and Vietnamese book histories so that he could cite my analogy, on birds and bats. Rather than waiting for it (and me) to slog through peer-review and revision, I’m just going to make the opening section available here. Cheers!
When I was a child, I was a maniac about bats. I had bat t-shirts, bat books, and bat stuffed animals. I would routinely sit on our deck in the evening twilight to watch little brown bats, the most common species of bat in the Northeastern United States, gobble mosquitos. My adoration did not extend to birds. They were entitled to dry crusts and McDonald fries, but no further consideration. Birds didn’t quite capture the wonder of bats. Flying mammals were something special.
As I was thinking through the history of printing, bats and birds became a useful analogy to think about comparative histories of print. Although birds and bats are superficially similar, they’re comparable only in their ability to fly and being warm blooded. Biologists and material scientists compare their wings and their particular characteristics in flight, but no one ever decries bats as a failure for not living up to the avian potential for laying eggs. Superficial similarities allow for only certain types of comparisons – and bad comparisons can lead scholars on fruitless searches for bat eggs.
The history of printing, in contrast to work on birds and bats, routinely mistakes superficial similarities in books to ask questions analogous to the rather absurd question just posed. In the case of print history, the comparison often circles around print and movable type, and egg scholars are looking for something leading to a type of modernity associated with the world created by the European printing press.
Today, rather than looking for eggs, we’re going to consider bats, as I attempt to provoke this audience by thinking through ‘woodblock modernities,’ something I see as a significant factor in contributing to the emergence of East Asian hegemonies in our modern world. Woodblock modernities is proposed in homage to Woodside’s ‘Lost Modernities,’ in which he considers the role of the Sinitic modes of bureaucratic governance as part of an overlooked suite of contributions from autochthonous East Asian traditions to the modern world. Woodside illustrated how the techniques of bureaucratic governance first developed in China and later used in Korea and Vietnam allow us see longue duree continuity, influenced the development of governments in the West, and provide some foundation for understanding an East Asian competitive advantage in state building. The precocious bureaucratic tradition he describes is still alive and well.
A woodblock modernity, on the other hand, has quite different implications. Except for in the fine arts, woodblock printing no longer play an important part in any modern East Asian information systems. But, we need to remember: neither does movable type. Moreover, we should not forget that movable type, even in the 20th century, was a fleeting phenomenon in much of East Asia. Observing woodblock printing in different contexts with different chronologies allows us to appreciate how distinctly woodblock printing prepared different places for different aspects of modernity….