on biographical readings

"Whereas psychologists have assumed universality, many scholars in other fields believe that Westerners and East Asians have maintained very different systems of thought for thousands of years...most who have addressed the question hold that European thought rests on the assumption that the behavior of objects - physical, animal, and human - can be understood in terms of straightforward rules. Westerners have a strong interest in categorization, which helps them to know what rules to apply to the objects in question, and formal logic plays a role in problem solving. East Asians, in contrast, attend to objects in their broad context. The world seems much more complex to Asians than Westerners, and understanding events always requires consideration of a host of factors that operate in relation to one another in no simple, deterministic way."

- Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought

In most cases, I have little patience for purely biographical readings in relation to literature or other arts. occasionally, bringing in knowledge of an artist's personal background to inform one's understanding or interpretation of their work makes perfect sense. For instance, it is a perfectly legitimate (and perhaps necessary?) strategy to take individual and social identity heavily into account for artists who choose to specifically engage with these issues.

However, I have never been convinced that assessing my own work in regards to femininity or feminism (with the accompanying baggage of such terms) was a valid strategy. Nor am I particularly interested in the specificity of a first generation Chinese-American's experience. That being said, while I can't deny that these factors have played an immeasurable part in my development as a human being, and subsequent interests as an artist, it also seems reductive to scrutinize the work solely through the lens of personal identity.

The Geography of Thought was published in 2003. In the six years that have passed since its publication, psychology as a field seems to have lost quite a few of the old suppositions that Nisbett described (if my personal experience studying psychology at the university is any sort of accurate barometer). There is no longer quite as vigorous debate across dichotomies - not only in fundamental oppositions such as nature versus nuture, but even in the way that "disorders" are viewed, assessed and treated. The movement away from thinking about the world in terms of clear boundaries also implicates an increased awareness of spectrums over discrete catagorizations. The literature that I have been exposed to have always carefully emphasized the possibility of unforseen interactions, and complicated relationships between events, individuals, and their environment. Put in the context of the The Geography of Thought, (which is admittedly a bit abbreviated in the way that popular non-fiction books can sometimes be), it appears as if Western and Eastern ways of thinking are starting to converge.

Though the above discussion may seem tangential in some ways, it occurs to me that the "Eastern" worldview demonstrated in my interest in examining complex relationships between numerous elements is also directly reflected in my reluctance to have my work read, (or to read the work of others) by a particular biological or sociological standard.

As simplistic as Nisbett's definitions can be (given, the above quote was from the introduction), there is something interesting about setting up the compulsion of categorize and isolate in opposition to thinking about relationships between things in holistic context. Just looking back at previous blog entries, scribblings, and notes that I keep, there is quite a noticeable presence of obsessive list-making and other structured attempts of description, which interestingly contradicts my self-professed interest in representations of the world as dependent on context. An interesting thing to discover, given my ostensibly American upbringing by immigrant parents. Point is, I suppose you should never presume that you know everything about yourself, which I suspect may be the key to becoming wise.