ABSTRACT
British planning and urban policy-making has long had an engagement with Chinese culture. The status of this relationship, however, is one that is difficult to pin down, as what often arises is a sense where Chinese culture is held, on one hand, as a source of inspiration and, on the other, in contempt. Yet perhaps one way that it is possible to make sense of this uneven, fractured acceptance of difference is through considering an essay entitled Of Grammatology as a Positive Science, by Jacques Derrida (1976). As way of summary, one of the main points of discussion in this essay is a dossier collated by Madeleine V. David, in which Derrida questions the conditions in which a grammatology is possible. In his reading, Derrida cites three 'prejudices'. They are the 'theological prejudice', the 'Chinese prejudice' and the 'hieroglyphist prejudice'. Read together, they demonstrate an ethnocentric appropriation of the other which, Spivak (1999: 280) suggests, comes 'from the appropriate ideological self justification of an imperialist project'. Simplifying somewhat, the theological prejudice takes it for granted that writing has transcended from the hand of God. This prejudice considers writing as a given and, in doing so, relegated a science of language as unnecessary. However, according to Derrida, it is with the legibility of nonoccidental script that Western philosophers began to accept the possibility of a multiplicity of writings, thus fracturing the theological prejudice as a universal writing system. Derrida's argument then goes on to discuss Leibniz's praise for Chinese script via Descartes. The argument posed here is that Chinese writing offered a blueprint - but only a blueprint - for a philosophical writing (or what he called 'Characteristic') that was able to make up for 'a lack' of a 'simple absolute', which Derrida tracks to the logos of a Judaeo-Christian God. In other words, Derrida's observations concern the way a de-centring other, in the form of a Chinese writing, becomes understood by Leibniz as a 'domestic representation' and, furthermore, mobilized to re-centre a logocentric position. For Derrida, this ethnocentrism reiterates throughout the twentieth century:
The concept of Chinese writing ... functioned as a sort of European hallucination. This implied nothing fortuitous: this functioning obeyed a rigorous necessity. And the
hallucination translated less as ignorance than a misunderstanding. It was not disturbed by the knowledge of Chinese script, limited but real, which was then available ... The occultation, far from proceeding, as it would seem, from ethnocentric scorn, takes the form of an hyperbolical admiration. We have not finished verifying the necessity of this pattern. Our century is not free from it; each time that ethnocentrism is precipitately and ostentatiously reversed, some effort silently hides behind all the spectacular effects to consolidate an inside and to draw from it some domestic benefit (Derrida, 1976: 80).
