Hallucination or Vision?

Response to Jo Winters

I have just finished reading your piece on China. I will have to read it again with a dictionary as some of the language in it was unrecognisable to me, i assume this is because i am not a philosopher. But i think i got the general gist of it. The parts of it i feel i did understand i found very interesting, although i was unsure whether the word "hallucination" was exactly what you meant, or whether there is another interpretation of the word that i'm not aware of. I wondered whether the word "vision" was a more apt interpretation of what you and the other theorist meant?

Get back to me on this one. I am intrigued to find out what your response is. This is because of my understanding of what an hallucination is. I know there are people in the world who believe that an hallucination is someting other worldy but i suspect that this is not what you mean, i may be wrong.

The choice of the word "hallucination" in the title is surely not motivated by its literal meaning but by its connotation to some literature about Westerners which are writing about Chinese writing without any native knowledge of the writing in question. Since Moliere, thus, we know that the use of a language is not yet the knowledge about its use. Our poor Mr. Jourdain didn't know at all that what he did all the time when he was speaking is called "prose". He was speaking "prose" and not French. Very intriguing. But Han-liang Chang knows both. He is Chinese and he is English educated. His English text "Hallucinating the Other: Derridean Fantasies of Chinese Script" was very inspiring for me to hallucinate my own text, voluntarily. Neither being a Chinese nor an English native speaker. I like to be in the in-between of "neither/nor". Thus the choice of this word was motivated by some subversive pleasures which I didn't wanted to neutralize.

My pamphlet may not be in prose but a literary textual montage with complex connotations and references. Some I try to "enlighten" with my annotations and links. To put it in a more prosaic form, say for translation, the word "hallucination" could be replaced by vision , phantasy , hope or similar terms. Not being prose, it is nevertheless not a "mind-fuck". Stylistically I would be happy if my textual adventure wouldn't be in any case a "journalistic essay". I'm not writing a report about China. Sorry, I know you want to become a journalist. But there are different ways of writing, elsewhere, too.

To chose the term "vision" would force a very different text. Today, every company has a vision and even a mission statement. The vision strategy comes as "I have a vision!". With emphasis on both, "I" and "vision". "Pay me properly, and I will solve all your problems, thank to my vision." OK, I don't have a vision. What I'm writing is not so much depending on me or my personal phantasy or vision, but on the possibilities to compose texts given by other texts. Maybe, that's my "vision"?

Hallucination in the context of my pamphlet (flyer) referring to "Derrida", the "other" and "script" is not part of a psychological or psycho-pathological terminology but "melanged" with the French "post-structuralist" or "deconstructivist" way of "playing" with words and intellectual traditions. There is nothing "other worldy", I was writing "wordly", in my use of this word because its action is involved in a "kind of an experimental hallucination capable of permanent self-deconstruction". Again, "self-deconstruction" could be replaced by "self-critics". But this would open up, again, not another story but a different textual undertaking. As far as I know, the Chinese don't have an "other worldy" world like a Christian or Muslim Heaven. But they have their Dragons.

Han-liang Chang, Hallucinating the Other: Derridean Fantasies of Chinese Script
http://www.lttc.ntu.edu.tw/academics/changhl/hallucinating.pdf

Thanks for your reponse, it's brilliant and intrigueing. Your right, there are many other "worlds" out there, many other ways of describing things, and many other angles to see life from, and i, as you so rightly pointed out to me, am seeing the world from a literal point of view, like a reporter, rather than a philosophical or literary point of view, or both. I think i should use up part of my time before i go to university reading more of a variety of writing. You've inspired me!