Wu Qi: This came up in Global “Body Shopping” as well. When you were explaining the reasons behind Indian tech workers’ migration abroad, you basically started from a political economy standpoint, and paid less attention to choices having to do with religion, culture, or individual feelings. In the preface to the new volume, you yourself admit that you perhaps overlooked emotional factors.

Xiang Biao: In fact, a woman friend of mine from Australia pointed this out, and said I wrote as if the tech workers were all like Dr. Spock in Star Trek, always calculating, without feelings. Last week I was reading the biography of the Oxford philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–1989), and the author wondered if Ayer perhaps had autism, because it seems he understood nothing about other people’s feelings. Maybe I have a little of this. It is strange, and I still don’t quite understand it. When I went to Oxford to study anthropology, I didn’t get along that well with the other students, because most students of anthropology have romantic feelings about people from different cultures, and really want to understand those people’s lives and feelings, but I don’t share that feeling at all. I have no romanticism.

Wu Qi: Over the course of all your years of study, reading, writing, researching, and teaching, you never completely identified with a particular group, an academic school, or an ideology?

Xiang Biao: That’s true in a sense. So how do I think, if I don’t engage with theory? This takes us back to the subject of my gentry temperament because what I always want to do is to observe and poke around, looking to see if there are any problems. The fact that I don’t feel particularly attracted to any one theory is surely not because I am unusually independent, or that I decided that I was different after thoroughly examining the theory in question. I don’t really know much about theory, and don’t care that much; my mind just doesn’t work that way. Of course, the ideal situation would be to be able to think like that, but also to link up with different schools of thought, to push theory ever further along.

Wu Qi: You talked before about your lack of mastery of the scholarly literature, and when we look at your writing, especially the preface I just mentioned or later pieces, you seem to be conscious of a certain distance from theory, in a way that scholars rarely talk about. How did this consciousness develop?

Xiang Biao: There may be two levels to this: spontaneity and self-reflection. Avoiding theoretical language means privileging direct description, describing things as they are rather than describing them through theory. I work this way because I have a spontaneous interest in directness, at least aesthetically. Looking from another angle there is nothing unique about this; ninety-five percent of people are like me and prefer directness, so the question is, why did other people later move away from directness? From my final years at Beida through my initial years at Oxford, this kind of directness did not seem to be a problem, and my Ph.D. dissertation was very direct too. After I finished my dissertation, it was maybe ten years ago that I felt that I needed to change and engage more with theory. After that, I became self-consciously direct, because I know now that I am incapable of doing anything different. Then I also became more appreciative of directness. To be direct there has to be substance. As I mentioned before, the pop music of the 1960s and 1970s was often direct, but with strong content, because without it, directness simply feels uncouth. So what John Lennon and Bob Dylan wrote was very direct, for instance, “Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too.” These lyrics are really revolutionary and powerful. There are also examples like John Berger and Xu Bing.

I find Xu Bing’s art interesting, and his explanations are even more interesting. He uses very direct language to explain the quite complicated thinking behind his art. His explanation of how he did “A Book from the Sky” left a deep impression on me. The work is philosophical, and the feeling you get is that of tectonic plates moving. In “A Book from the Sky,” the Chinese characters look entirely familiar, but when you look at them closely, you realize that you don’t know them, and all of a sudden you feel a distance between yourself and writing, or between yourself and your cultural existence, but you can’t put your finger on what the distance actually is. In fact, Xu Bing achieved this through a direct, simple life experience. When he was a boy, his mother worked in the Beida library, so he would look at books there all day, and he later got interested in binding and engraving. He engraved all of the characters for “A Book of the Sky,” using a Song dynasty process. He says the basic idea of creating a lot of imaginary characters was sort of a joke, but to make the joke into an art form that made people think required taking it seriously, he had to engrave all the characters, one by one, with utmost seriousness. He spent an entire summer engraving the imaginary characters. And that’s all he said. He did not add complicated theory. Why is it serious and not a joke? Because only after you’ve invested labor in something does the contrast between true and false, real and fake, familiar and unfamiliar became a serious question.

Another of his works, “Phoenix,” consists of two enormous birds constructed out of things that had been discarded or abandoned at construction sites; he insisted that all of the materials be these. In his imagination, this was China: a rising phoenix, beautiful and majestic, but wounded inside, because, on the work sites, people had died, or were still waiting to be paid.

If you don’t look closely, all you see are two birds, and it’s not all that interesting. In terms of the form of the objects, he could have achieved the same visual effect with any other construction method. But the reason he could explain what he did in such simple, direct language was because behind the visible art is the content Xu Bin brings—his labor and his understanding of China.

John Berger is more classical, and his directness comes from his depth. The strength that you feel from his writings comes from the effort that he invests in seeing, and the earnest interest and concern he expresses, which is how he achieves his directness.

Wu Qi: When I started reading your books, I felt a strong sense of rebellion, a kind of rebellion against the mainstream theory. Maybe this comes from the same sort of effort that Berger invested in his projects.

Xiang Biao: This evolved over a long period of time. Do you mean that what I write is different from what other people write? Or that I am going against current discourse on purpose?

Wu Qi: I felt like you were completely aware that what you were doing was different.

Xiang Biao: Maybe so. But my rebellion was not a conscious expression of opposition to current discourse, but was motivated by a more general spirit of rebellion. This is a spirit of seeking self-awareness and developing one’s own voice, which is something I emphasize in my courses, the idea that all of social science is about cultivating a sense of agency. Having a sense of agency does not mean thinking “I’m fantastic” or “I’m special,” nothing like that. Instead, it has to do with being a person in the world, and your relationship with that world, what you see when you look at the world. Even if what you see is not necessarily right, you still need to be clear about your way of thinking.

Professors at Oxford were on strike last semester. When I was talking with the students about whether they should support the professors, I quoted something Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) said in an interview. She said that she thought it was problematic that German students had taken to the streets to protest the Vietnam War. Her point was that you need to think clearly about what your relationship to that war is. Why did the war provoke such a strong reaction in the United States? One important reason was that at the time, people were drafted into the army, which meant that a lot of middle-class kids went off to war, which got everyone all worked up. After the war, the liberal economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) suggested making military service voluntary instead of mandatory, a way of solving employment problems. At first, this looked like a simple technical adjustment, but it wound up having a huge impact on world politics. In a volunteer army, the soldier is paid wages. It is like a militia, and this kind of army cannot be a revolutionary force. When the draft was in place, soldiers were citizens first, and then warriors, and were in a position to discuss the idea of the war, a problem that went away when the army became voluntary. What Arendt meant was that, prior to this change, young Americans were protesting because they might have to go to war the next day, which made them think about the war and about protecting their own lives. What did this have to do with young people in Germany? I feel like this was a gutsy question to ask. Even if their opposition to the war was sincere, what material interest was in play in the case of the German youth? Only if you can give a clear answer to this question will your conduct be meaningful. The same logic applies to research, in that it is important that you be clear on your relationship with the world. So I told the students that they could not support the strike simply because they agreed with the professors. They first needed to be clear on their own relationship with the professors and to the principles supported by the professors.

As for how to make a method out of “directness,” it means: first, there must be content; second, there must be a certain punch or impact; and third, you have to write straightforwardly. So first, you need a rich accumulation of things to say about a subject; it won’t do to make superficial, general statements. In your understanding, you need to explain how your subject matter is constituted from the inside out. In class, I make a distinction between “explaining” and “explaining away.” “Explaining away” is self-contained; the goal is to settle something once and for all. A classic example might be the “push–pull theory” in studies of population movement or the relation of supply and demand in economics: there’s supply and there’s demand, so things happen. This doesn’t explain things, but rather explains them away. A true explanation asks where does the demand really come from? It’s the same for supply—where do you get the resources? You have to look inside to see how things happen and where the conflicts are. Once you capture the inner dynamics of things, your writing will have more punch. John Berger has a book called King: A Street Story, which is about homeless people who have a dog named King, and Berger writes about the world of these homeless people through the eyes of the dog. There is a kind of mutual dependency between the people and the dog, a kind of tenderness and love. It’s sad, but the homeless are not depicted as completely helpless victims, but rather as people who build their own world, of which the dog is a part. This made me understand things differently. It is very direct, because Berger starts with the most obvious experiences of the homeless men and uses no theory at all, but the result has a powerful impact.

Third, you let your thoughts flow from the inside out, and vividly describe your feelings of discovery. Straightforward writing cannot be just a style of writing. Medical instructions are straightforward too, but they don’t have the same impact. So, you have to convey to the reader what you felt as you worked through things.