Recovering True Selves in the Electro-Spiritual Field of Universal Love

Recovering True Selves in theElectro-Spiritual Field of Universal Love

Nickola PazdericChaoyang University of Technology

Promises of success and specters of failure permeate public life in contempo-rary Taiwan. Simple comparison demonstrates the historical contingency ofthis condition. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nationalist Party (KMT), theruling party that had fled to Taiwan in 1949 following the communist takeoverof the mainland, exhorted the island’s population of nearly four million formerJapanese colonial subjects to reconfigure themselves as Chinese national sub-jects and recover the mainland. Two geopolitical events forced this prevailingdiscourse to change: in 1971, the United Nations gave its China seat to the Peo-ple’s Republic of China, and in 1979, the United States moved its Chinese em-bassy from Taipei to Beijing. With these shocks to its sovereignty, the govern-ment of the Republic of China would have found itself without a place in thefirmament of nations were it not for a dramatic economic take-off throughoutthe 1980s. Political and industrial leaders in the West lauded Taiwan’s techno-logical and social transformation as a miraculous yet exemplary instance of aspecifically Asian application of liberal (or free market) economic policies.The sign of economic success is what came to fill in the gap of recognitioncaused by the exclusion of the Republic of China from the status of nation-hood. Political leaders, whether they were members of the KMT or its chal-lengers (dangwai), quickly realized that the de facto independence of Taiwannow rested on its affirmation of liberal economic policy as a successful strat-egy for rapid development rather than on anticommunist symbolism—a subtlebut important difference inasmuch as the aim of capitalist development hadalso appeared by 1979 to be the goal of the Communist regime on the main-land. The ideological ether transformed accordingly, and over the next twodecades, success became the institutionalized and naturalized ethos of local ex-perience and global identity.

In the late 1990s, I conducted field research with engineers, managers,and other middle-class telecom workers who had intimate institutional experi-ence with this shift. As officials in a government bureau, they had enjoyed thebenefits of nationalist ideologies, policies, and power: job security, a growing

Cultural Anthropology Vol. 19, Issue 2, pp. 196–225, ISSN 0886-7356. © 2004 by the American AnthropologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, Universityof California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

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cadre of coworkers, and promises of state-sponsored retirement.1 In the early1990s, however, the demands of individual and collective success and the in-troduction of digital technologies for transmission and storage of data servedto further destabilize the lingering nationalist mythos of the KMT, its guaran-tees, and eventually its hold on power. For these workers, the change becameinstitutionalized on July 1, 1996, when the telecommunications bureau wasformally privatized as ChungHwa Telecom in response to U.S. pressure to openthe Taiwanese market to international investment and competition (Lin 1997).This reorganization was (and is) part of a transnational agenda for neoliberalrestructuring of individual economic and social responsibilities described byPierre Bourdieu (1998) as “a programme of the methodical destruction of col-lectives.” In 1996, telecom workers were keenly aware of their individualstakes in this restructuring and the new risks it presented to them. While theyno longer had to worry about the presence of Nationalist Party spies in theirworkplace, they knew that their stable middle-class lives depended on theirability to achieve individual and collective success, measured in terms of indi-vidual productivity and corporate market shares.

Of the many people I came to know in the company, an electrical engi-neer, who I will refer to as “Mr. Zhang” for the purposes of this study, becamemy foremost guide.2 I met regularly with him and his family and friends at hishome in a suburb of the city of Taichung, which is located near the geographi-cal center of the island in Taiwan. Through my conversations with Mr. Zhangand his circle, I discovered their nostalgia for a time when Taiwan had not yetbecome so successful, their sense of loss because of family cleavages resultingfrom success’s requisite failures, and their awareness of new consumer tastesmade possible by Taiwan’s sudden prosperity. I also learned of the emergenceof a quasi-religious practice called Heqi (written Hochi by practitioners inEnglish) that reflects and reinforces the mandates of individual success as itgenerates a new collective ethos within an electro-spiritual field (cichang) ofuniversal love (da’ ai).3

My initiation to Heqi practice occurred on Saturday, October 11, 1997, ata grade school located in a neighborhood where I had lived some years beforein the early 1990s. Like much of Taichung City, this area had only recently be-come incorporated into urban space. As late as the mid-1970s, rice fields,water buffaloes, and shrines dedicated to various spirits marked the landscape.By 1997, however, four-door sedans cruised in class struggle with motorcycleson a street that served the homes and businesses of nearly two million people.The school building was also expanding, and new wings were under construc-tion. Arriving that morning, I could see the Toyotas, Hondas, and Fords of Tai-wan’s successful yet anxious new middle class parked outside.

Inside, I found well over a hundred people talking in small groups on thedusty gymnasium floor. As I entered I could hear echoing in the hallways thehowling of those who, I later learned, had become so possessed by the love ofHeqi that they could not contain themselves (and were thus exiled to the halls).According to Heqi teachings, these wails voice the essence of one’s “heart”

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(xin), but it is a truth repressed and one that resides in the “subconscious” (xiayishi) (Chou 1996c). These cries, audible to all from an unseen place, para-doxically did not dampen the atmosphere but seemed to animate the entiregroup. I knew then that I was encountering something out of the ordinary. InTaiwan the burdens of daily life rarely allow the expression of powerful emo-tions.4 Yet here we were in a school gymnasium identical to thousands of oth-ers in Taiwan where children typically receive cultural instruction in pursuit ofacademic and economic success, and we smiled as cries echoed all around us.

In this article I seek to theorize the therapeutic effects of these sounds incontemporary Taiwanese life and in modernity more generally. I begin with ahistorical account of the promise and principles of Heqi as outlined by itsfounder in oral delivery and print media; then I describe the practice I observedduring five days of introductory classes that I attended in 1997. Instead of anexhaustive or comparative survey of the movement, I offer a critical discussionof Heqi’s promises and practices that have drawn over ten thousand practitio-ners in Taiwan (Chen 2001) by noting its effects on, and its efficacy for,friends and informants observed over a span of six years (1997–2003). In part,I hope to demonstrate through this analysis Heqi’s resemblance to psychoan-lysis, a therapeutic tradition to which it owes a great, although unrecognized,debt. The point is neither to inscribe nor apply a universal psychology. As ananthropologist of modernity, I historicize and contextualize explanatory dis-courses and curative techniques to make evident that recovered origins, calledHeqi true selves (heqi zhen wo), are very modern. By modern I do not meanthat my Taiwanese friends and informants consciously emulate a model ofmodernity from the West, although at times they do; instead, I show that proc-esses and products of modern identity formation (in particular those of self-identity) are intimately linked to the demand for success and to the technolo-gies that dominate modern life. This article is thus concerned with what MichelFoucault (1997) has called “technologies of the self” and how neoliberal logicsproduce subjects through technological mechanisms of transmission, storage,and playback to make possible a supposed true self, that is both under the illu-sion of freedom yet caught up in the imperative to succeed. I argue that as thenostalgic longings of Heqi practitioners are radically realized via audio feed-back mechanisms that relay the lamentations of opened hearts, a quintessen-tially modern subject is recovered. This subjectivity is one that has been knownin the West since Descartes; it served as the object of psychotherapy in theFreudian/Lacanian tradition, and it has become the universalized “heart” ofeconomic, social, and therapeutic preoccupations for many in Taiwan. Tomake this argument, I take my informants at their word and contend that an-thropologists and other theorists of cross-cultural personhood should do like-wise if we are to understand the intimate and universal effects of the demandsand operations of our epoch on ourselves.

198 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Heqi Physics and Metaphysics

Heqi practice began in the United States in the early 1990s, and its shorthistory relates closely to the history of its founder, Michael Chou (born 1957),who is called Teacher (laoshi) by his followers. A motorcycle accident in Tai-wan left him partially paralyzed from a spinal injury in 1980. While in the careof his mother, a martial arts teacher, he is said to have cured himself throughalternative means (linglei liaofa). This miracle is considered the origin ofHeqi. Following his recovery, he went to the United States to study Chinesemedicine. In the mid-1980s he began to teach a form of Heqi that he learnedfrom his maternal grandmother, herself a practitioner of Chinese spiritual arts.He called it xiantian qigong (First Heaven qigong). He brought his practice toTaipei in 1993, and in the following year, he changed its name to Heqi—a termthat one dictionary translates as “gentle, affable, agreeable, friendly, cordial,good-natured” (Liang 1971:130) and can also be translated as “harmonic at-mosphere” when applied to a group setting.5

Although the practice appeared in Taiwan in the wake of the NationalistParty’s martial law (1949–1987) and at the height of the economic boom, Icould find no evidence of these events in Heqi literature. Rather, its originmyth claims that Mr. Chou, under the directive of his maternal grandmother,felt that he had to pay the debt of recovery through a gift of enlightenment(qifa) by working tirelessly to extend Heqi’s scope. The story of Heqi’s suc-cess testifies to the personal charisma of the founder and to the dedication, or-ganization, and wealth of his followers. In 1997, there were permanent practicecenters in Los Angeles, San Jose, and Taichung City. By 2002, additional cen-ters had been established in Taipei County, Taoyuan, Taichung City, TaichungCounty, San Jose, and Los Angeles, and training programs were run regularlyin San Diego; Austin; Minnesota; New Jersey; New York City; Washington,D.C.; and South Carolina. The cost to join in the spring of 1997 was NT$18,000 (over US $500). But by that fall, roughly the same time that the gov-ernment began to crack down on religious groups in the name of financialfraud (Nickerson 2001), this initial fee was canceled. Other religious leaders inTaiwan had been commanding as much as NT$1,000,000 (approximatelyUS$33,000) per person to join them. Following the policy change, while notovertly encouraging members to contribute to the organization, the masterteaches that the universal love of Heqi will move them to respond with grati-tude, and many to this day do so. For example, Mr. Zhang’s next-door neigh-bors, who were the owners of a construction company that had been recognizedby the Ministry of Interior as one of the ten best in Taiwan in 1997 (Huang1997), built one of the two Heqi centers now operating in Taichung City as acontribution to Heqi.6

Heqi’s emergence has also coincided with the feverish popularity ofqigong (breathing and health exercises), practiced in parks, schools, and medi-cal institutions in Taiwan and China (Chen 1995). According to Jian Xu(1999:966), it is unclear whether ancient accounts of qigong practice from theZhou dynasty (1100 B.C.–770 B.C.) depict procedures similar to those known


today. What is clear is that, since the 1950s, the concept of qi (energy field) hasbecome an important term in Chinese medical discourse that seeks to synthe-size Western biomedical conceptions with traditional terminology.7

Heqi furthers this renaissance of qi as an understanding of embodied pow-ers. For instance, practitioners contend that the word should be understood inboth its metaphysical connotation of emotional atmosphere and the Chinesemedical sense of “life energy.” This conception of qi in terms of energy ac-cords with recently published and locally well-known studies of Taiwanesephysicists and medical researchers who argue that the qi that flows along bodymeridians (jinglo) is electrical and that acupuncture works through manipula-tion of these flows (Chen 1996a, 1996b; Tsuei 1996; Tsuei et al. 1996). Simi-larly, scientists in mainland China “speculate about qigong emanation’s capa-bility of affecting the biogenic field, decreasing the entropy of the human body,and working as ‘energy carriers of life informational waves’ ” (Xu 1999:977).Yet, although qi can be recorded and plotted as an oscillation, practitionersonly know the positive force of Heqi via partition from its opposite, liqi, whichcan be translated as “perversity, disharmony, irregularity” (Liang 1971:149)and that practitioners translate as either “negative energy” or “destructive qi”(Hochi 1996; Hochi Magazine 1996). Hence Heqi conceptions disavow purephysics to enunciate a symbolic code in which all beings and events are con-ceived in terms of a structuring binary discourse—only to return to the dis-course and forms of physics in the production of universal love.

Most generally, this structuring discourse offers that negativity dominatesthe social world. To realize personal liberation from this suffering and to savethe world, positive energy or love must be activated via the recovery of theHeqi or true self of each individual. By this logic, Heqi’s deliverance dependson an ideological synthesis at the level of the self that evidently resolves con-tradictions between tradition and modernity, self and society, culture and na-ture in a more uncontestable manner than do appeals to a universal truth (forexample, electricity) with Chinese characteristics. That is, Heqi departs fromNationalist rhetoric to proffer and produce a self and a qi more in tune withthose demanded by neoliberal logics while also seeking to heal the breachesneoliberalism has produced. For instance, in a Heqi doctrinal statement enti-tled “Heqi True Self,” the teacher writes seductively and in a way consistentwith his live therapeutic techniques (switching from the second person to thefirst person) to the longings of goal-driven practitioners for subjective cer-tainty in an original unity with the universe. As he does so, he repeatedly al-ludes to the chronic condition of middle-class people who properly “set newgoals, but . . . feel even more empty inside.” The cause of suffering rests withan unfulfilled need to find “me”—the inborn “Heqi true self” of “truth, com-passion, beauty, and love” (Chou 1996a). This self that awaits recovery(huifu), however, cannot be equated with an ego (ziwo), for the ego is a productof outdated formats (geju).

What is this ego? And how is it formatted? According to Lydia Liu (1995:7–10, 19–20, 336), the ego or self borrowed its modern Chinese linguistic form


from Meiji reformers in late-19th-century Japan who found in classical Chi-nese a term that they could use to translate the modern idea of self that theywished to import from Europe. Chinese reformers at the turn of the 20th cen-tury borrowed it back. As a result, Liu maintains that the concept can only beconstrued as a creation of modern translingual practice and not as a primordialChinese notion that presumably allows for ready cross-cultural comparisons.The Heqi use of ziwo to pinpoint and describe the chronic condition of modernpeople attests strongly, albeit indirectly, to this historical reading. Specifically,this ego that is called upon to perform remains as unaware of the causes of itssuffering as it is incapable of healing itself through conventional means be-cause the ego is formatted by forces that block or repress the ego’s connectionto the subconscious true love at the heart of the self. Practitioners themselvestranslate the crucial term, geju, as format (Chou 1997a). In Taiwan, geju typi-cally denotes the interior structure of a house or the playing formation adoptedby a sports team. It can also refer to the format of a book or computer disk. Itsnovel application to the individual highlights the uniquely modern status of theself; for the master teaches that the forces that format the ego and block theheart can be explained in terms of electromagnetic audio technologies of trans-mission, reception, and recording in this way:

The entire environment is in an ill condition. . . . What causes it? Each of us is likea small radio station continuously transmitting messages. These messages are ac-cumulated in the cosmos and in our bodies . . . because these many different smallradio stations continuously transmit various negative messages (complaints, ha-tred, resentment, and feelings of suppression and fear). These messages, accumu-lating in the outside world and within our own bodies, result in a very forcefulnegative effect. [Chou 1997c]

Negative messages (fuxiang xunxi or fumian xunxi) are thus relayed by in-dividual voices and picked up by other ears—formatting individuals. The basisof this reasoning accords with a parallel notion of Marshall McLuhan’s: “If thehuman ear can be compared to a radio receiver that is able to decode electro-magnetic waves and recode them as sound, the human voice may be comparedto the radio transmitter in being able to translate sound into electromagneticwaves” (McLuhan 1964:83).

McLuhan’s pioneering probes into the relation of technologies to subjec-tive experience make evident that subjectivity cannot be understood apart fromthe technologies of its production. For example, the shared imagining of mod-ern nationalism (Anderson 1983) is now considered in reference to the Guten-berg legacy of print capitalism. Moreover, McLuhan’s work makes it difficultto dismiss Heqi teachings as merely metaphorical expressions of subjective ex-perience in an era when the hope of digital communication appears ubiqui-tously as the sign of Taiwan’s successful economic transformation. In July2002, the Republic of China signaled the zeitgeist of this new era by printingthe image of a satellite dish on its NT$2,000 notes, its newest and highest cur-rency denomination (see cover image). Microwave technology has effaced the


prior images of the father of the nation Sun Yat-sen and his successor General-issimo Chiang Kai-shek to signify that Taiwan has become a properly ad-vanced and receptive economy.8

The linkages connecting audiotechnologies, energy, and the self were, infact, made by Sigmund Freud himself approximately 60 years before McLuhan,and they are thus contemporaneous with the dissemination of ziwo and otherpsychoanalytic concepts in modern China (Zhang 1992; Liu 1995:130).9 Freudreasoned that “an increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or workedoff in the normal way . . . must result in permanent disturbances of the mannerin which the energy operates.” Such a traumatic overload provides “a simpledeterminant for the onset of neurosis” (Freud 1977b:275). To treat permanentenergy disturbances plaguing bourgeois patients, Freud counseled beginninganalysts in terms of the emerging technology of telephony to “turn his own un-conscious like a receptive organ toward the transmitting unconscious of the pa-tient . . . as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone”(Freud 1989b:360).10

Friedrich Kittler (1997a, 1997b, 1999) follows McLuhan by arguing thatFreud’s readings of the energy operations of the “psychical apparatus” (Freudn.d.:75) suggests that psychoanalytic theory symptomatically expresses, morethan it explains, the condition of the modern self in a media environment ofdisembodied but nearly instantaneous audio relays. The operation of psycho-therapy works, just as Freud suggested, as “nothing . . . but an interchange ofwords” (Freud 1977c:17) or, more precisely, codified sounds:

The transmission medium in psychoanalytic treatment was a telephony whichtransformed sound or the patient’s unconscious into electricity or consciousspeech so that the unconscious could be transmitted, and then, through the syn-chronized vibrations of the attentive analyst, could be transformed back again intosound or the unconscious. [Kittler 1997b:134]

Heqi curative practice relies heavily on such a sound loop. But unliketherapy where feedback can be theoretically modulated, in the chaotic condition ofmultiple transmitters and receivers (that is, everyday modern life), electromag-netic waves force nothing less than repeated and even sickening recognitionsof one’s formatted place in the electromagnetic field of power. Specifically,powerful individuals generate “a negative force which is beyond what we canresist,” causing in turn anger, frustration, and gloom. These common conditions“illustrate how the positive, negative, strong, and weak magnetic fields [cichang]of ourselves and others interact and influence each other” (Chou 1997b).

As with the appearance of qi, ego, and the subconscious in Heqi discourse,the teacher’s use of the term cichang is also not entirely new. People in bothTaiwan and in China (Kipnis 1997:185) use the term to express the atmosphereof social relations and one’s sense of connection to a place. Yet the teacheravers that this “concept was originally used in physics” (Chou 1999), not intraditional medicine. As he explains the magnetic field as the essence of bothlife and social power, any comforting conception of cichang in its familiar


sense is transmuted into a dire discourse in which life depends on a universalelectromagnetic field that can make people sick but can also be accessed to“strengthen one’s physical condition and release one from limitations” (Chou1997b).

However, Heqi practitioners began to seek this power directly in waysthat detracted from the spiritual goals of Heqi. As a result, in the January 23,1999, e-mail edition of Heqi magazine, the teacher announced that because theconcept of electromagnetic field “implies more physical characteristics thanspiritual ones” and because practitioners had begun “to shift their focus on ob-taining metaphysical perception, increasing energy levels, or even longing foracquiring magic power,” he changed the name of the essence of Heqi universallove to “the compassion field” (Chou 1999). Such a conversion appears, how-ever, much more definite in English than in Chinese. As the teacher himselfwent on to explain: “the two words ‘compassion’ [cixin] and ‘magnetism’ [cixing]share the same pronunciation in Chinese” (Chou 1999). What is more, thephrase coined to denote the compassion field (cichang) and the common termfor magnetic field are strictly homophonic in Chinese. The latter term is sooften used to describe both the atmosphere of social relations and the field pro-duced by electronic currents that native speakers and readers of Chinese oftenmistake the written form of compassion field with that of the magnetic field,perhaps because the first character in both binomials share an element in com-mon and are differentiated through the displacement of the “heart” radical forthat of “stone.”

A close reading of Heqi teaching materials produced since 1999 indicatesthat the electromagnetic properties of Heqi universal love continue to permeatethe field just as they infuse everyday discourse in Taiwan about the power oflove. For example, an attractive woman can be known as a dianbo meinu (anelectric-wave beauty); a lover found on the internet is called a dianzi qingren(an electronic lover); and to fall in love is to lai dian (to receive an electricalcharge) or bei dian dao (to get hit with an electrical charge). To provide butone similar example from Heqi, a December 13, 2000, e-mail memorandum ad-vocates the efficacy of an overseas telephone call for Taichung area practitio-ners engaged in a Recharge the Battery Group Practice (chongdian tuanlian).In this memo, the teacher uses the language of electricity to describe how aweekly telephone call allows a broadband connection (kuanpin de lianjie) ofmaximum width (zuida jixian) through which one can download (xiazai) hismessages (Chou 2000).

These messages allow practitioners to promote (tisheng) their power (liliang)for purposes of personal transformation (zhuanhua) and growth (chengzhang)(Chou 2000). Insofar as these four Chinese phrases find use in Taiwan to de-scribe, in turn, corporate climbing, political/economic power, evolutionarytransformation, and economic growth, they also demonstrate that the hope forworldly power persists within the electro-spiritual field of Heqi. But even moreimportantly, the reading of universal love as an electro-spiritual field main-tains that the elimination of negativity and the proper reception of universal


love’s frequencies (pinlu) can produce a bio-photon emanation. Called aguangshu (beam of light) (Chou 2000) in Heqi parlance, the resulting lumi-nous body (faguan ti) of the properly tuned practitioner marks and proves theindividual (wo) as a part (fenzi) of universal love. I refer to guangshu as a bio-photon emission to draw this analysis back once more to the literal character ofHeqi discourse; for, according to the well-known work of Taiwanese energy-medicine scientist Julia J. Tsuei cited above, “the basic premise of energymedicine . . . is that energetic processes, vibrational resonance, and bio-photonemission, are essential to life processes” (1996:54).

But before a global revolution can be achieved through the transformationof sound to light, the old formats of the ego must be suddenly smashed or bro-ken through (tupo) in a process of both overcoming (kefu) and transcendence(chaoyue) (Chou 1997a).11 The terms kefu and chaoyue find frequent andsomewhat similar expression in both in Heqi teachings and Taiwanese society.These two terms for overcoming or transcendence are, moreover, rarely re-moved from each other in their common usages. Kefu frequently refers to thecapacity to transform, outwit, and surpass obstacles, including the hardships ofupbringing and the machinations of competitors. While chaoyue also expressesovercoming, it conveys a slightly different process that paradoxically necessi-tates a return to the personal struggles or traumas supposedly left behind oreven forgotten.12

The paradoxical process of overcoming via the smashing of old formats tosecure their true recoveries resides at the heart of Heqi practice, just as it per-vades a society that knows it must overcome its miracle-era manufacturingbase of small, family-centered businesses with large-scale, value-added com-puter, telecommunications, and bio-technical production, if only to maintainits status as an independent node (i.e., Taiwan), in the world network of trade.In this way, the promise of Heqi dovetails with the mandates of what is oftencalled globalization but which Heqi practitioners conceive, not unrealistically,in terms of the simultaneously spiritual and electro-biochemical evolution ofthe world. The teacher puts this dual purpose squarely: “What is it that we arecultivating for? It is for the continuous growth of life. The evolution of life de-pends on how we are able to transcend ourselves [chaoyue ziji]” (Chou 1997a).

And so the predilections of Heqi are not removed from evolution, render-ing the transformations of Heqi practice not only natural but also essential forthose who intend to remain within the natural history of the world.

Opening Hearts to Universal Love

These explanations and their promises draw people to their first founda-tion classes.13 At every session I attended in 1997, approximately 150–200chairs were arranged in a semicircle facing the stage of the auditorium. At thecenter of the stage curtain, purple Chinese characters encompassed within alarge pink heart announced: “Heqi da ai [The universal love of Heqi].” Sur-rounding the heart hung banners that proclaimed in official fashion: “The Con-ference for Promoting Heqi in the Republic of China” and the phrase “Walk


with Heqi, Meet in the Heart of Universal Love.” Equipped with flowers, mi-crophone, and writing instruments, the teacher’s table was placed beneath theheart. The table for high-level disciples, mostly from the United States, restedstage left. An analog sound system and board, various traditional medical in-struments (including moxibustion equipment), photographers, water, waterglasses, stacks of glossy Heqi magazines, extra chairs, children playing, andstaff who watched the door and organized the flow of events constituted thevisible periphery.14

Depending on the length of the total session, much of the first day or twowould be given to instruction and testimony. During these periods practitionersgave witness to the efficacious and even miraculous transformations they ex-perienced because of Heqi and their association with the teacher. For instance,practitioners who had recovered from cancer while practicing Heqi spoke. AndMr. Zhang, taking me as a potential convert, introduced me to a number of peo-ple, including a nurse of former President Chiang Ching-kuo, who found theirlives and health transformed through Heqi. In turn, initiates were prompted totalk about why they chose to attend.15

The repetition of key popular songs generated an emotional atmosphereconducive to universal love. Foremost among them was “Ganen de xin [Thank-ful heart]”—a theme song for a television show, A-xin, about a woman who en-dures and overcomes hardship.16 This song can be translated as follows:

I come unexpectedly like a speck of dust,Who can see my weakness? Where do I come from?Where do my feelings belong? Who cries out for me in the next moment?Although heaven and earth are vast, this road remains yet difficult to walk.I see frustration and bitterness between people everywhere.How much love do I have? How many tears?Let the Heavens know I don’t admit defeat!Thankful heart. Thankful for you,Companion for my life, let me have courage to create myself!Thankful heart. Thankful fate,Flowers open, petals fall,I am as precious as they.

It is very difficult to overestimate the affective sway of this song in turn-of-the-millennium Taiwan. While the song first became a hit in 1994, I heard itas late as February 2001 at an elementary school assembly to promote schoolspirit. A well-known Taiwanese radio host and songwriter, Chen Lerong, pennedthe lyrics. Chen is also celebrated as the author of spiritual self-help books, in-cluding the thematically appropriate Chaoyue jinri de xuexi (Transcending thelearning of this life), published in 1997.

Advocates of Taiwanese cultural and national independence have insistedto me that the song proved integral to the Nationalist Party’s presidential vic-tory in 1996. In this first island-wide election for president in Taiwanese his-tory, the Taiwan-born and Cornell-educated agricultural engineer Lee Teng-hui won office in competition over candidates who respectively promoted


unification with, or independence from, the mainland. Many Chinese national-ists left the increasingly middle-class and technocratic Nationalist party toform a unification party in the early 1990s. The song served Lee’s electioneer-ing strategy through its representation of a universally recognizable self thatovercomes in the name of a self that knows itself, by its very determination andcapacity to reject defeat. In this way, Lee’s campaign successfully transcendedthe ethnic division between Taiwanese and Mainlander.

The song’s lyrical content develops this sentiment dramatically. Begin-ning with the quiet announcement of a self of insignificance, weakness, andpurity within a vast, unwelcoming universe, it moves through swelling cre-scendos toward recognition of a positive self, endowed with love and gratitude.The song suddenly returns to its tranquil beginnings as it repeats its lyrical andmusical progression, moving once again from determination to self-recogni-tion, self-creation and, finally, self-awareness of a vulnerable place in the natu-ral order.

During classes, expressive gestures to accompany the song were taught tothe group by senior disciples. Leaders directed practitioners both new and oldto surround them in a circle behind the semi-circle of chairs yet facing thefront. Arms and hands rose to the ceiling at the crescendo and returned to touchthe heart at the diminuendo. Once they had rehearsed and perfected the motions,practitioners gave into the feeling, singing arm in arm in a hypnotic repetitionof the song. The teacher, tall and handsome, calmly stood smiling in their midst.

The songs, gestures, and stories created an appropriate atmosphere forwhat was to follow. As the group retook their chairs for group sharing andteaching, the command issued from the loudspeaker and all would stand qui-etly, face the teacher and bow. According to the teacher, standing quietly al-lows “[us] to center ourselves. This requires no special understanding or reor-ganization of the mind. Merely focusing will help us to reach the proper state, astate of calmness where we no longer feel desire for some sensation or action.Our minds are open and completely relaxed. We have surrendered to the practice.”

Following surrender, practitioners executed 18 bows. The teacher ex-plained: “Why 18? This number has important significance. In Hebrew, 18means life, and in the Yijing [The book of changes], 9 represents pure yang,and 18, the doubling of 9, brings forth a doubling of life’s energy. Thus the 18bows get us in touch with the energy that mobilizes life.” In pursuit of a dou-bling of life’s energy within a system of mobilizing sacred numbers, theteacher further emphasized that during the counting of sacred bows muchcomes to mind that should not be repressed:

While we do the bows, a stream of thoughts will come to mind. Do not attempt tosuppress them, for they have greater importance than mere random thoughts. Theyare records from our deepest subconscious memory, i.e., our worries, our fears, is-sues that we don’t want to face, or events that we have forgotten. These may bematters whose accumulation has caused damage to the various corresponding sys-tems of the body. [Chou 1996c]


Popular television comedians play on this common sense of emotionalsuppression through teasing mispronunciation and purposeful misconstruals,giving full play to the myriad connotative associations produced through theintensely homophonic character of the Chinese language that parallel the prin-ciples of displacement and condensation at work in the unconscious.17 Thispractice of the free association of numbers occurs also in economic theory andthe local lottery. In economic theory, signs of gain and loss realize their forcefrom the very confusions literally at work below them, and in picking lotterynumbers, it is well known in Taiwan that players rely on dreams to identifynumbers that will be lucky for them. Similarly, Freud, who conceived of thebalancing of “psychic play of forces” (Freud n.d.:75) in terms of an “economicview of mental processes” (Freud 1977b:275) but who warned against the follyof “attempts to discover from dreams the numbers drawn in a game of lotto”(Freud 1977a:86), found numbers useful as he asked his patients to “surrenderto free association while keeping an idea in mind as starting-point” (Freud1977e:106).

Heqi initiates and practitioners seemed to have an intuitive understandingof Freud’s original insight and were more than willing to comply and makepublic the associations that would surface in their minds. At one session an in-surance salesman took a leading role by speaking to the audience through a mi-crophone:

I’m the fifth son. My father is a teacher. All my family members have high de-grees. I’m only a college graduate [weeping]. I passed the government exam, butI quit. I went to work at an insurance company for money 17 years ago. But my par-ents are never satisfied. Although I make a lot of money, the family doesn’t acceptme. My wife had three daughters but no sons. The pressure is very great [begins tosob]. I feel like I’m losing face.

Here the demand for success finds its local articulation: scholastic achieve-ment, official status, financial wealth, and sons. The expressed failure toachieve these signs proves the ironic but necessary basis for entry into the fieldof universal love just as “unreflecting self-observation” (Freud 1977d:287) ofa rather predetermined form remains central to psychoanalytic treatment. To-ward this end, the teacher kept the flow of associations running as he brokebarriers of affect attached to conventional gender boundaries, counseling:“Men and women all cry. Crying releases pressure of both men and women. Itcan relieve your burden. If you can’t cry, your heart is dead.” The salesmancontinued: “My parents’ hearts never opened. But in Heqi, I have found an-other goal. I can truly see my own heart. I could not see clearly like this inYiguan Dao [a religious sect]. So, I thank the teacher and all practitioners.”18

The teacher elicited confessions through the idiom of opening the heart(dakai xin). He would assert, for example, that “no matter what, the heart mustbe opened in order for it to be cured; it is only a question of who will open it.”Perhaps not surprisingly, due to its capacity to turn sound into electrical current,the microphone proves crucial to this operation. The teacher would continue:


“Have your hearts opened? When your hand holds the microphone, you will bemoved by Heqi.” Such declarations had their effects invariably, and the micro-phone became a charged object for relaying the excitations and perturbationsof success and failure that, when amplified within a harmonic atmosphere, be-come love.

Always holding his at his chest, the teacher made occasional commentsthat guided practitioners as they took turns speaking into the three circulatingmicrophones. Sharing would continue from 45 minutes to a couple of hourswith no shortage of speakers telling similar stories.19 The teacher further in-cited the group:

If you are brave enough to express your true heart, your true belief, if you’re onehundred percent sure, then walk the road with me. If you’re not certain, you canstill think about it. But, if you can’t open your heart, you’ll have to recognize it inthe future. If you are certain. If you are ready to become an angel.

Following such a challenge, expectant with the promises and dangers ofspiritual and natural destiny, one of the regular disciples would ask the groupthrough the microphone: “Are you willing or not?” In every instance the groupanswered in the affirmative: “Yuanyi [willing].”

Transmission and Reception of Heqi

During the immediate moments before the transmission (chuan heqi) andreception (bei chuan heqi) of Heqi, chairs and tables were cleared away and thetalk and songs were brought to an end. Formality followed. First, the gender di-vide was reasserted with men lining up on one side of the room and women onthe other. Second, the distinction between initiates and practitioners was reas-serted. Third, all instruments and persons deemed capable of producing nega-tive messages were eliminated, including bystanders, photographic equipment,watches, and jewelry.20 Fourth, the colored armbands worn by practitionerstook on new significance because those with armbands would work as guidesto the initiates during the dangerous moments that followed.

Once the participants were in position, the teacher walked with delibera-tion down each row, slowly waving his hand in front of the face of each initiatebefore tapping them on the head. Assistants stood behind each initiate, armsand hands ready, to make certain he or she did not collapse from the jolt.

Once tapped, each initiate would begin to gurgle, sigh, or even laugh hys-terically. As the teacher worked the rows, those touched began to move moreexpansively. Some jumped, others waved, and a few teetered. The teachereventually got even those who had at first been unmoved to begin twirling, un-til they too began to spin. When the entire group had received Heqi, the pitchintensified. Some of the initiates began to wail. Others jogged with eyesclosed. Their assistants took care that they did not crash into each other. Somefell to the floor and began to roll. Their tears mixed with dust. More advancedpractitioners guided them by gently holding their knees while the roll of their


torsos took them in new directions through other, often similarly blinded, initi-ates.

The teacher wandered slowly and purposefully across the floor, attendingto each practicing pair and emitting an occasional staccato baritone “Ho, ho,ho”—his pitch falling away at the end. At times he would echo the most in-tense yells with hushed sounds to provide guidance to the practitioners whowere taking care of the newcomers. After approximately an hour, the vocalizedcue was given to line up again. People hugged happily and took their positionsin the order. Appearing dazed and relieved, everyone bowed again to theteacher.

After order was reestablished, a second session was initiated by theteacher, this time with even greater effect. Initiates began to spin convulsively,and some began to vomit. Those who heaved were given plastic bags, whichwere held to their faces by assistants as their bodies writhed. White towelswere provided so they could clean their faces. The well-known businesswomanwho lived next door to Mr. Zhang told me she filled two bags at her first foun-dation class.

While watching one session, I sat with a hospital nurse who said that shecame at the behest of a friend who had breast cancer and who believed thatHeqi would cure her. As we sat dumbstruck, the nurse said at last, “It’s like go-ing back to the womb.” I was thinking the same. The physical and emotionalintensity, coupled with absolute trust, suggested this construal. I asked: “Howdo you know?” She replied: “I know. I deliver babies.”

The Name of the Father

The second session continued for 45 minutes before order was calledagain. The group bowed three times to the teacher to mark their formal recep-tion (shougong) of Heqi. After everyone proclaimed in unison “Thank you,teacher,” the group burst into congratulatory hugs. Tears streaming from theireyes, they ran from person to person, sometimes searching for someone in par-ticular, to hug, caress, and congratulate. The teacher smiled, unmoved butmoving. A vegetarian lunch-box dinner followed. When finished, practitionersset up chairs, faced the teacher, bowed, and began to testify in ways that hadnot been possible after the initial reception of Heqi—that is, within the uni-verse of everyday speech—to the new selves they had become.

Taking the microphone, one middle aged woman proclaimed:

I love you Teacher! I love all of you! My life was hollow. Heqi changed my life inonly three days! The first day I was strongly motivated. The second day I felt ashortage of motivation. The third day I realized I needed it. It is good to be part ofuniversal love. I feel like I’ve almost forgotten the last year. My husband treats mevery badly. His voice always contains negative messages.

I come from an unfortunate background. My parents always fought. The noisefrom the fighting would wake me up. I treat people badly because I come from thiskind of family. I got married, but I never felt anything. Four years ago my husband


left me with four children. I’ve raised and fed my children by myself. I haveresponsibility to my children.

But now I’ve stood up from the no way. I’d like to follow universal love into thefuture. This will change my attitude toward my customers. I’m a clothing salesper-son with my own store. Several years ago I tried to find time with communitygroups to help unfortunate people. But it was never concerned with unfortunatepeople, really. But today I’ve found what I wanted to find.

In turn, another woman also found what she wanted to find:

My father never hugged me. Today I feel very warm because I can hug practitio-ners entirely, just as I wanted to do with my mother and father. I met a practitioner,but I didn’t know him. We hugged together very tightly; then I cried because thisman looks like my father [she crossed the court and hugged him again crying]. . . .Maybe this hug can repay my feelings of loss and pity.

Although Freud’s conceptions of the self and its therapy permeate Heqi prac-tice, his critical and controversial ideas about the libidinal nature of infantileexperience and the bourgeois denial of it have found no place in Heqi or Tai-wanese society generally.21 Freud contended that the idea of innocence is de-rived from, as it is sustained by, the forgetting of the experiences of childhood.These experiences, relived after the transmission of Heqi, according to the de-livery-room nurse, include the intense experiences of rolling, vomiting, scream-ing, and hugging. In this way, the recovery of true selves is, as the Englishword recovering so aptly expresses it, a paradoxical one in which the sought–afterand repressed truth of the self recovered after the reception of Heqi is recov-ered yet again as the most desired, innocent, and true Heqi self appears.22

When I talked with Mr. Zhang about this recovery of lost innocence, hetold me about another advanced class he had attended.

All the practitioners said Heqi really opened their hearts. . . . By the fifth day allpractitioners became innocent like children; they showed themselves entirely; thatmeans they all opened their hearts before the class ended. I talked about how Heqitakes people back to childhood or infancy with some practitioners, and they allagreed. Actually, Heqi creates a situation to let practitioners go and find some-thing they lost before.

A story published in English in a Heqi periodical (Ding 1996) reveals asimilar pattern. A professional woman, moved by Eric Clapton’s hit song,“Tears in Heaven,” recounts how she defied her father, who had been a famousradio talk-show host during the Nationalist era, to such an extent that her “re-bellious seventeen stage not only started early but did not end until after” sheleft Taiwan. In a gesture that reaffirms patriarchy and her subjective position-ing within it, she attributed her suffering “to no one but my father.”

When she was a student in the United States, many of her friends fromTaiwan struggled with “the logical patterns of thinking, humor, and cynicismof Americans.” She, however, felt “released” and “reborn,” finally free of herfather. But occasionally thoughts would, in her words, “pop up” from her


past—for example, stories, tellingly associated with both immediacy and cul-ture, of her father taking her to the Beijing Opera when she was a child: “I wasvery little, three or four years old. . . . He’d sit me on his lap . . . and tell me thecontent of the stories.” As she pursued her “active life” in the United States,she gradually came to the conclusion that her success in her studies was “in-stalled in me from my early childhood, I, in fact, could never have been freedfrom anything—even in a place where nobody knew me.”

Not coincidentally at the time that she was discovering her father secretlythrough memory, “the authentic, knowledgeable, rich but mundane radio pro-grams and their hosts faded away.” It was at this time that she decided shewanted to “let him know that I now understood him and respected him despitethe fact that society and his children didn’t seem to need him any more.” Atthis nostalgic moment her “strong frustration and intolerance . . . dissolved andvanished.”

As she prepared in the style of emotive display that troubled some of herless-adaptable and determined Taiwanese friends to “confess to him all ofthese things . . . so we could have a real cool relationship,” she learned that hehad died of a heart attack in Taiwan—a coincidence that bespeaks the conspir-acy of History: the disappearance of the real father at the moment that an imag-ined father rose to provide, if not a confessor, then a single point of constitu-tion for her and her unconscious, but at last recovered memory. She asked, as ifasking of herself: “Can there be anything more sarcastic in life than this? Canthere be any joke more cruel than this?” During a five-day group practice inTexas she “grieved and screamed . . . tumbled around and crawled on the floor.. . . My eyes were so swollen. . . . I couldn’t help hearing myself burst out aloud cry of Father!”

Her longing for a return to an imagined pure childhood was a desire for amoment when the demands of the times do not necessitate the ruin of what sheis or what she was attached to—that is a moment when the self was indeed true,neither responsible for, nor consciously transformative of, the world. Yet thistrue moment that comes via prolonged feedback of tales of failure and intensespinning remains a moment so overwhelming that, in an act of recovering, thename of the father emerges, simultaneously signifying certainty and taking therap for its impossibility. The teacher appears to understand this moment well,giving it a formalized structure in the call to bow, followed by confessions ex-pressed within the idioms of the times that only he or his chosen substitute caninterpret because he is the new father, free from negative energy and hence aperfect object of love.

In psychoanalytic language, such a return gift of the psychic energy calledlove is known as positive transference. Jacques Lacan defined transference asthe attribution of affect and knowledge to another “who is supposed to know”(Lacan 1981b:232). Such an attribution occurs throughout Heqi practice; infact, the very willingness to attend suggests such transference. But it is only af-ter formatted egos get smashed that the teacher takes on, in a most immediateand intimate way, a fatherlike status to his literally just-delivered devotees.


Yet, while classical psychoanalysis can be said to differ from Heqi insofaras it provides a couch or, at least, a chair for opened hearts, the therapeutic op-eration of Heqi depends once again on a fundamental process of psychoanaly-sis—one that Lacan found to be Freud’s most radical but misunderstood inno-vation. Lacan spent a career arguing that cures that set about to adjust oractualize the ego in relation to the world misapprehend the revolutionary pointof Freudian psychotherapy: via feedback of “impediments, failure, [and]splits” (Lacan 1981c:25), the subject of analysis can come to know itself assomething other.

Lacan maintained that “Freud’s method is Cartesian” (1981a:35) inas-much as it was Descartes who described a procedure of extreme self-doubt thatled to the dissolution of his positive identity. In his Meditations (1960), pub-lished in 1641, Descartes, with the help of an imagined evil spirit, methodi-cally subjected himself to suspicion about the truth of his being, the veracity ofhis perceptions, and even his own corporeal/spiritual origin in a caring (and,for Descartes, perfect) God. At the nadir of his experience, when “so discon-certed that I can neither plant my feet on the bottom nor swim on the surface”(1960:23), Descartes posited a self that knows itself as a thinking being despiteand because of its uncertainty and, in an quintessential act of transference, aperfect creator that gave origins to his longing for a more perfect being. SlavojZ +iz =ek considers the Cartesian experience central to both modern subjectivityand philosophy—likening, in fact, the disconcerting descent that precedes theappearance of an indubitable self and perfect origin to Hegel’s description ofthe “contraction-into-self” and subsequent “eclipse of (constituted) reality”:

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in itssimplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which nonebelongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the inner of nature, that ex-ists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it,in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition, sud-denly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night whenone looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful. [cited inZ +iz =ek 1998:258]

I submit that Heqi practitioners undergo a similar experience after theirformats are smashed and their perceptions are dissolved and that this experi-ence remains crucial to its functioning as therapy. It is, to be sure, strong medi-cine. And it is best delivered by the Heqi teacher who continually and urgentlycounsels beginners against trying the procedure alone at home; similarly, La-can, speaking as an analyst, candidly told his January 22, 1964 seminar: “Be-lieve me, I myself never re-open it without great care” (Lacan 1981c:23).

Slavoj Z +iz =ek contends that to open the unconscious, as dangerous as it istherapeutic, also proffers political hope. For the opening of “the abyss of free-dom” (Z +iz =ek 1997) allows people to “articulate” their “truth” (Evans 1996:215) and thereafter act irrespective of the demands for subjective conformitythat impinge on the self in the binary form of the signifier (Lacan 1977). In the


cases discussed here, the signifier takes the following binary form: either nega-tive energy/failure or universal love/success, or in the universe of Descartes,either a deceiving spirit or a perfect God. Although both Heqi and Cartesiantransferences end in the affirmation and assumption of positive identities,something other apparently remains. Descartes wrote, “I do not yet know suffi-ciently clearly what I am, I am sure that I exist” (Descartes 1960:24). Beyondwords, this other is thus beyond value. But being beyond value and hence be-yond the dominion of conventional hierarchies, conventions, and commandsdoes not mean that this remainder cannot be assimilated to modern systems,just as, Kittler suggests, Descartes discovered imaginary numbers to bring thisnegativity into calculation:

Descartes’s innovation (going beyond Cardano) lies precisely in his giving a nameto imaginary numbers like [the square root of -1], thus assuring mathematics thatone could quite simply incorporate them into further computation. Just as in theMeditations, where thoughts in dreams are as indubitable as the act of thinking, thevery “conception” of imaginary numbers is sufficient to their being used in mathe-matical operations, “without determining their values.” [Kittler 1997b:136]

With the unthinkable imagined and incorporated as roots into equationsthat principally describe the angles (that is, the individual character) of wave-forms, the other or root of the recovered true self, discovered by Descartes anduniversalized by Hegel, became by 1900 the object of psychoanalysis in whichthe analyst “feeds the parapraxes back to the patient, thus triggering new asso-ciations and parapraxes, which once again are fed back, and so on until an egoin control of speech has been dethroned and unspeakable truth can be heard”(Kittler 1999:87).

It is a defining therapeutic assumption of Lacanian psychoanalysis that forthe truth of this other to ring out, the analyst must be careful not to provide thesemblance of certainty supplied by transference (Evans 1996:39). From the La-canian standpoint, therefore, it may be argued that Heqi’s political potential isshort-circuited. Nevertheless, Kittler, himself a student of Lacanian teachers(Griffin and Hermann 1995) and aware of Lacan’s capacity to open the uncon-scious of even his students, describes transference at work in Lacan’s seminarsin a vocabulary of love and electronics that would also seem to apply to Heqipractice:

The word of love is sent forth, is received, is sent out again by the receiver, pickedup again by the sender, etc., until the amplifier reaches the point that, in studies ofalternating current, is called oscillating amplitude, and, in the contemporary dis-course is called love. Because no one in the seminar attempts to protest, or, in otherwords, to produce inverse feedback, these provocations fulfill their inten-tion—love has become a resonant (oscillating) circuit. [Kittler 1997a:53, 54]

Such an oscillating loop of love between father and devotees does not sig-nal the end of Heqi’s story, however. For in concurrence with the waning of thediscourse network of nationalist fathers—that is, a network where all discourse


begins and ends with unmoved but moving dictators—the Teacher gave arche-typical expression to the Heqi procedure in a November 4, 1999 e-mail as heconfessed his own open-heart oscillation between the poles of success and fail-ure in service of universal love:

One night in the middle of writing e-mail, I experienced sudden, sharp pains in myarm. My arm had been bothering me for a while now, I think from many years ofholding the microphone, but it never hurt like this. . . . The accident I had in thepast wasn’t even this painful. . . . It kept getting progressively worse and so mymother gave me a treatment. . . . As part of the treatment, my mother used a heatlamp and thought I would turn the lamp off myself when the time was up, but I wasbeing the patient and not thinking like a doctor. With inflammation and infection,low-grade heat can only be administered for a very short period of time. As I satunder the lamp, the more I thought about it, the more it didn’t seem right. I forgotI’m a doctor and by the time my mother returned, asking why I was still using theheat, it had been way too long.

That night, I was in excruciating pain. I cuddled my arm as I tried to sleep, un-able to even slightly turn or gently move my arm muscle in any way. I resorted totaking pain medication, which I had never taken before. . . . But it didn’t help atall. . . . I remembered the example of a practitioner with end-stage cancer that Ioften use. Near the end, when the pain was unbearable, he turned his mindset to theHeqi state and the pain diminished.

Realizing that I had to personally experience this, I began to ask myself why.The arm is representative of our extension and growth into life. . . . I felt responsi-ble and blamed myself for not being a good teacher. I had failed as a teacher. . . . Ispiraled downward into self pity and loathing from here. . . . I kept blaming myselffor our not extending Heqi and the negativity kept accumulating till it explodedand manifested itself physically. . . . I had done a good job, but within my heartthere was a very angry response. . . . I was conversing with myself, and I found itvery difficult to love myself. I was not the least bit adorable and I was totallyworthless. . . . In accepting how unadorable I was, I realized how strict I was withmyself and how high my expectations were of myself. I had never realized howbadly I treated myself. . . . At the same time my pain subsided.

Does not this narrative, complete with a candlelike light, resemble that ofDescartes? One difference rests with the cause; for in the case of the Teacher,the spiral through self-doubt occurred, not as an experiment in theoretical re-flection roughly concurrent with Descartes’ own investigations into magnet-ism but via the moving power of the microphone, finally felt by the Teacherhimself. Yet, as with Descartes, the end of the spiral occurred with an accep-tance of his own deception. For with the recognition of his own unadorableself, he began to have a conversation with himself when he realized the cer-tainty of, if not himself as a thinking being, then at least as a self “with high ex-pectations” for “myself.” With this recognition, also occurring under the unac-knowledged effects of an anti-inflammatory drug, both his uncertainty and hispain subsided.

Thus, properly recovered, the Teacher then announced in an ingeniouslyindirect way his even greater yearning for the universalization of Heqi’s love:


This was such a precious experience for me and I am grateful for it. I opened layerby layer, and I feel it was a very important process for me to go through before re-turning to Taiwan. I know that if I didn’t turn myself around, I would have un-knowingly carried within my heart very heavy-duty expectations. I would havebeen judging and feeling everyone’s actions were too slow and that they didn’t doa good job, no organization can compare to Tzu Chi.

As in the song “Ganen de xin,” the Teacher’s longing returns to a quiet re-flection of the self’s place in the natural course of things. In the flow of Tai-wanese religious currents this means that, regardless of the Teacher’s desire,Heqi still claims only a fraction of the followers of Taiwan’s most popular re-ligious organization, Tzu Chi. A Buddhist organization headed by the nunZhengyan, it claims nearly one-tenth of the entire population of Taiwan asmembers (Jones 1999:208) and has, since 1998, broadcast its own brand ofcompassion on its cable-television network named “Da ai” (universal love).23

But even with this articulation of Heqi’s place, the impossibility of comparisonindicates its continual assertion. In this way it is the very recognition of Heqi’sinsignificance vis-à-vis Tzu Chi’s broadcasting signal that forces a discipliningof his frustrated voice. At the same time the acknowledgment of frustrationprefigures yet another crescendo of personal transcendence that serves the uni-versal extension of Heqi.

The Pleasures of Discourse

During a visit in December 1999 to the electro-spiritual practice center(cichang) built by Mr. Zhang’s neighbors, Mr. Zhang began to demonstrateand describe to me his advanced practice:

For advanced Heqi practitioners, the practice consists mostly of spinning. Whenyou spin, you really become one with the Way (dao). According to Laozi, the greatemptiness precedes the one. When spinning one is nothing, absolute emptinessand totally one with nature (tianren heyi). It is like being in a typhoon—calm in thecenter but world spins in a blur around it. . . . I really can’t explain it too much be-cause words can’t express the true dao, and my words can only hinder your ownexperience of the true and original nature of the universe.

As the full-time attendant, who had recovered from blood cancer whilepracticing Heqi, processed papers in the adjacent office, I asked Mr. Zhang tobe more specific about the self in the midst of this typhoon. “Actually whenyou lose yourself completely, you also know that you are there. Something isspinning, and it is you but not you. You are your own void; but it is both noth-ing and everything; and when you’re really deep in the practice, you know youare completely one with the universe.” This experience remains as much one ofenergy equilibrium or attunement as metaphysical transcendence, for these en-counters produce balance and “an elevated level of energy” for Mr.Zhang—both are necessary because, at the age of 45, he was working at an op-erations management center during the day and was studying during nights andweekends for a master’s degree in electrical engineering that he began in fall


2001 due to pressure from his employer to upgrade his skills. These new de-mands on his spirit are supported by his daily Heqi practice, which he per-forms, as an advanced practitioner, within one square meter on his tiled, town-house floor.

Such containment and attunement are certainly necessary. By all stand-ards of decorum, Mr. Zhang and other Heqi practitioners must carry on as“Heqi true selves” as they carry out their evolution without spinning out ran-dom signals at work or elsewhere. In this manner their therapeutic experienceis similar to that of other Taiwanese who view nightly televised reports ofcriminals, disasters, and other failures, lined up one after the other and pre-sented, for example, as the report of the entire world (quanqiu baodao) on Tai-wan’s popular network, CTV. With stories of failures, disasters, and loss fedback with intermittent success stories every night, ordinary people can be as-suaged via memory reformatting of the excitations of failure and success andprepped for another day, all while sitting safely on chairs and without leavingtheir flats or townhouses. As McLuhan put it: “The medium is the massage”(McLuhan 1967).

But it is not the cure, because the medium is also the message, and thatmessage says function. Thus Mr. Zhang, a dear friend and a contemporarypractitioner of the spiritual arts, is very much in tune with the incoming energywaves of the universe. True to form, his account of his spinning experience ac-cords profoundly with Lacan’s following cryptic conception of the self in themidst of a whirling discourse: “The contemporary disc(ourse), in other wordsthe record, spins and spins, to be precise, it spins around nothing” (Kittler1997a:54).

What does Lacan mean? He means that the self is nothing; yet it spins—spinning out, from mechanisms not under its control, sounds and songs en-coded or formatted on it for other ears similarly attuned. (It is beyond wordsbecause it is, from its revolving point of origin, pure sound pressure waves—that is, a hum, a cackle, or even a howl.)

Maybe some will find this conception of the self overly mechanistic, con-ceived without regard for models of personhood that account for multipleforms of resistance, structures, intentions, meaning and exchange. But does notLacan’s statement—or, for that matter, the Heqi master’s teachings—makesense here? Are not true selves both spinning and spun, experiencing above allthe playback pleasures of speaking and singing of an overcoming self who,when vocalizing within the codes of neoliberal discourse, oscillates betweenthe poles of success and failure (+/-) to produce a current of universal transfor-mation in the name of love? Should we not recognize, therefore, that even aswe, as university-stationed selves, deny the false consciousness of therapeuticindividualism, we too spin as selves “with high expectations” for ourselves un-der stabilizing feedback systems as the nothings that Lacan taught are tied upin knots (Evans 1996:18–20) and around which discourse spins the lies thatconceal from us nothing but its very spinning—that is, as Heqi teaches and aswe all know, modernity is nothing if not spinning out of control?


And in the end there is love. The soundtrack issues from digital versionsof analog records, CDs, read via illuminating lasers and broadcast over radio, micro-wave, and fiber-optic transmitters. The selling difference between the old andthe new: the sound of CDs is devoid of background noise and, according tocontemporary logic, true to the original. Thus, despite and, no doubt, becauseof the teacher’s trepidations, Heqi universal love seems assured potential ex-tension as part of an even greater discourse network in which middle-classfunctionaries are directed to revolutionize the world in the image of their en-lightened selves. Toward this end, Mr. Zhang’s current job description de-mands that he not only manage a digital exchange system that turns analogtelephone calls into digital signals for fiber optic transmission (and back again)at an approximate rate of three-hundred-thousand calls per day but that he alsosell mobile telephone and broadband internet technologies to at least 18 newcustomers during the year.24 Like earlier transformations of Taiwan, the aim ofMr. Zhang’s professional responsibility appears as nothing short of total revo-lution. For mobile phones that modulate interpersonal exchanges fraught withemotional volubility, unconscious tensions, and other negative messages asthey up the frequencies of transmission and reception are already registered tonearly 14 million of an approximate adult population of 16 million Taiwanesewho, in fact, own a combined total of 23,421,000 cellular phones as of August2002 (Monthly Bulletin of Statistics of the Republic of China 2002). Broad-band Internet connections that make possible instant transmission of illumi-nated electrical messages, digital file transfers, and media streams are similarlyregistered to a higher percentage of the Taiwanese population than that of anyother country, save South Korea and the special administrative district of HongKong (Bosnell 2002).25 Moreover, in the United States, as Jeremy Howell andAlan Ingham note: “Lifestyle consumer oriented strategies focusing on ‘con-sciousness’ in the form of ‘finding one’s authentic self’ are rapidly appearing.The ‘new’ healthy you has to be the ‘true’ you” (2001:343). Taiwanese are to-tally up-to-date, perhaps a step ahead. And with reception possible anywhereon the globe, Heqi practitioners and other true selves, wherever they may be,can frequently and finely attune themselves to these (radio) waves to spin out ahumming and indeed universal field of love.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I thank many friends in Taiwan for their help, most especiallyMr. Zhang and his family. I also thank the participants in graduate seminar in Anthropol-ogy and Technology, Yale University in spring 2000. I am also grateful to Stevan Har-rell, Clarke Speed, Peter Cuasay, Clyde Warden, and Kevin Fitzpatrick for theirreadings, to Ann Chen for research assistance, to Johnson Wang for tutoring me in thebasics of telecommunication science and mathematics, to the anonymous reviewers forCultural Anthropology for their careful comments, and to its editor Ann Anagnost foracuity, firmness, and faith.

1. From the perspective of my informants, more co-workers meant more friendsand security within a relatively flat wage structure throughout the period 1960–1990.


2. My research began at the Telecommunications Bureau because I had taughtthere in the early 1990s; thus, my contacts were good—allowing me to expand in net-works of friends and acquaintances to pursue my research into the influence of the dis-course of success and failure in contemporary Taiwan. My discussions with Mr. Zhangand his circle began in the spring of 1997 and continue to this day.

3. I use pinyin to transliterate most Chinese expressions. However, when a word,phrase, or name is known by another form of transcription, for example Taichung orChiang Kai-shek, I will use the more commonly recognized though technically incorrectform. Please note also that certain difficulties attend the choice of transliteration of Heqi.Practitioners in the United States use Hochi. In the text I employ the pinyin version ofthis term because analysis of Heqi terminology is crucial to the analysis, and this termi-nology often makes use of the term heqi. Interested scholars are directed to Hochi mate-rials through use of its common English name in the reference section. Heqi practitionersprovide translations of Heqi terms, although in some cases I provide translations that Ifind more telling of meanings that are, I feel, repressed in the translation or that conveylocal connotations. The English translation of Chinese terms is followed by pinyin ro-manization, except in the case of translations of reported speech from the foundationclasses. These translations were made on the spot and recorded in my notebook by mewith the help of Mr. Zhang. I call Heqi “quasi-religious” because the teacher believesthat Heqi transcends the dogmas and limitations of ordinary religious practice.

4. For account of the circumscribed place of crying in mainstream Taiwanese so-cial life, see Huang 2003.

5. In 1951, the soldiers who had fled in 1949 with the Nationalist party to Taiwan,where they were instrumental in establishing the KMT’s social dominion over the localpopulation of nearly 4 million people through militarized terror, were entreated by gov-ernment cartoon teaching aides to “treat people with heqi” (Bullard 1985:186). Ratherthan consider this historical reference, people in Taiwan generally prefer to ponder itsmeaning by breaking it down into its parts: he denotes harmony and qi atmos-phere—hence the plausible translation of harmonic atmosphere, as expressed in the Chi-nese New Year greeting, heqi shengcai (fortune comes from harmony). Please note thatthere is another Heqi practice common in Taiwan, called Heqidao. Although in bothcases Heqi is pronounced the same, in Heqidao he is translated as cooperation, as inhezuo (cooperation). The Heqi teacher considers Heqidao as primarily a bodily disci-pline similar to qigong.

6. The year of construction was 1997, the same year in which their company wascommended by the Ministry of Interior.

7. Such a synthesis has been the aim of Chinese nationalists since the early 20thcentury. For an example of Heqi’s synthesis of medical conceptions, see Chou 1996b.

8. I asked Mr. Zhang whether he believed the master’s teachings to be metaphori-cal or actual. While Mr. Zhang denied the literal connection at first, as we discussed thequestion in terms of his daily activities in ChungHwa Telecom, he found this interpreta-tion to have merit. “Very profound [hen shen],” he said.

9. For a discussion of the pervasive extent of psychoanalytic conceptions in West-ern thought, see Gay 1989. According to Liu (1995:130), psychoanalysis was “translatedand introduced to Chinese audiences” as early as 1907. Leading literary figures such asLu Xun, Yu Dafu, Pan Guangdan, Zhang Jingsheng, and Shi Zhecun employed its con-cepts in their writing.

10. For a historical account of the emergence of energy theories of communicationin the 19th century, see Peters 1999.


11. Here I offer two translations for tupo, “suddenly smashing” and “break-through.” English readers will more readily recognize the latter than the former. How-ever, tupo also connotes a sudden violence that the latter term fails to convey in theconventional English sense of “scientific breakthrough.”

12. For instance, the title of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud’s treatise ontranscending the realities and pleasures of ordinary life through the intensely pleasurablereturn to traumatic memory, is translated as Chaoyue kuaile yuanzi (Freud 2000). As willbe explored below, the therapy of Heqi depends on a similar procedure as that found inFreudian psychotherapy. When practitioners seek to overcome the suffering caused byelectromagnetic imbalances, they are made to “re-experience some portion” (Freud1989a:602) of their traumatic failures or losses “as a preliminary of . . . joyful return”(Freud 1989a:600).

13. I attended three sessions and five days of classes during the fall of 1997. Foun-dation classes provide initial training in the principles and procedures of Heqi. Prior toattending the foundation class, people are expected to attend Heqi informational meet-ings. After finishing the foundation sequence, practitioners may proceed through a hier-archy of developmental courses that would take them from advancing their practice tobecoming an instructor. Since I did not personally undergo the rituals that I describe, Icould not attend these classes. But according to Mr. Zhang, the sessions I witnessed con-vey the features of Heqi that are fundamental to higher levels of training.

14. New members came at the invitation of established practitioners. Distinguish-able by their clothing, newcomers wore ordinary attire, while regular practitioners worethe uniform of Heqi practice. The teacher, prior to the transmission of Heqi, ceremoni-ously presented tops and pants to initiates.

15. Vegetarian lunch boxes were served at noon and in the evenings. But unlikeother group activities in Taiwan that usually follow a strict schedule, Heqi practice wasnot run by the clock. Guided by the teacher, the flow of events had an impromptu feel,although meals were regularly served and a palpable sense of destiny was an importantaspect of the ethos.

16. Other songs included “Ganxie tian, ganxie di [Thanks to god and earth],”“Fenxiang [Share],” “Pengyou [Friend],” “Dingzuo yige tiantang [Build a paradise],”“Wo weilai bu shi meng [My Future is not a Dream],” and “Ai de zhen di [The true es-sence of love].”

17. In casual conversations people are quick to laugh at slips, especially with for-eigners who, by virtue of this incomplete assimilation, are often considered to be likechildren.

18. It may be tempting to interpret expressions of such a loss of face solely in termsof the family drama. But such an interpretation occludes the fact that familial expecta-tions are themselves fundamentally conditioned by the demands of the times. The sales-man’s loss of face thus signifies a failure vis-à-vis his family and the general society,each of which demands an internalized sense of failure to discipline the subject to its de-mands and structures. Heqi partakes of this structure as well—though it does not makeuse of Freud’s idea of the “super-ego” (Freud 1989c:637–645) to describe the contradic-tory injunction to be and not be like one’s parents. Rather an unstated but nonetheless un-derstood operation predominates in which to lose face in the ambiance of Heqi practicethrough expression of failures means to begin to gain, through the gift of laying bare hissuffering, if not face, then a new status as a true self who speaks within a discourse of or-dering love presided over by the teacher who becomes the teacher by this very gift. Yetlike the family and other institutions in Taiwanese society that produce conformity


through an internalized sense of abjection signified as loss of face, the propensity ofHeqi’s hope to correspond with the demand that Taiwan successfully transform guaran-tees conformity to the notion that Taiwan and Taiwanese selves must not fail. Thus, inthe case of Heqi, to lay bare a traumatic moment was and is to recover a self-constituting,traumatic memory that allows for the certainty of failure (damaged selves from powerfulwaves, etc.) necessary for radical (smashing structures) overcoming and evolutionarytranscendence within a prevailing discourse of love that promises health, happiness, andpower.

19. For Heqi universal love to enter the hearts of practitioners, a channel must bephysically opened to their hearts by way of a technique entitled “the hand of universallove,” conducted prior to the sessions of group sharing. Despite the training required forits use, its operation appeared to be quite simple—beginning with pats to the back fol-lowed by deeper rubs across the entire back. Heqi practitioners would then begin toshake, sweat, and sway as they became possessed by the positive force of Heqi.

According to the teacher:

We are delivering the messages of universal love through our hands. The energy of universallove will enter directly into a person’s heart. Our Heqi universal love cultivation is through ourbodies; once our hearts are opened, the body will spontaneously become well. . . . Universallove is an inborn characteristic of each person. It is only because this wonderful channel is notopen that we are lost in the bondage of our own formats and we get lost in all kinds of distrac-tions. [Chou 1997d]

20. Mr. Zhang specifically requested of the teacher that I be allowed to view thepassing of Heqi. See Pazderic (in press) for a discussion of the negative feedback possi-bilities of photographic equipment. Items that produced the greatest negative messagesare those items most indicative of one’s social status.

21. Freud wrote in a way that precisely captures a prevailing preconception andprohibition: “Children are pure and innocent, and anyone who describes them otherwisecan be charged with being an infamous blasphemer against the tender and sacred feelingsof mankind” (Freud 1977f:312).

22. In her study of middle-class Thai spirit mediums, Rosalind Morris writes of theconsciousness of the nostalgic that “finds difference in the place of origins, but seeks,compulsively, to heal over the breach of that original alterity by theatricalizing origina-tion” (2000:4). A similar process is certainly at work in Heqi.

23. The concept of da ai (universal love) appears to have become popular only re-cently. Charles Brewer Jones (1999) makes no mention of it in his study of Buddhism inTaiwan. A Tzu Chi committee member claimed, in conversation with Mr. Zhang (April19, 2002), that the first use of da ai occurred with the advent of Tzu Chi practice in Tai-wan in 1966—a moment that coincides with that of the love of Lacan (Derrida 1998). Imake this provocative connection in the spirit of what Johannes Fabian (1983) and ReyChow (1995) have referred to as “the coevalness” of cultures caught up in a modernitywe all share.

24. Specifically, Mr. Zhang and other employees of ChungHwa Telecom, includ-ing his wife, who is an operator, have been asked to sell nine mobile phones, nine ADSLservices, five traditional phone services, and five regular Internet services during thecourse of the year.

25. ChungHwa telecom, according to Mr. Zhang, had 5.6 million mobile telephonecustomers in April 2002.


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A B S T R A C T In Taiwan, the quasi-religious practice of Heqi revealsa complex relationship between the neoliberal demand for success;conceptions of energy and love; technologies of audio transmission;reception, and recording; and the production of modern selves. Atransnational coalescence of psychoanalysis and Heqi as both theoryand practice produces modern, properly cultured subjects fully in tunewith the prevailing demands of global capitalism. Furthermore, thesetherapies and their explanatory discourses reflect, as much as theydescribe, globally salient audio technologies (such as radio). [Neolib-eralism, Taiwan, psychoanalysis, audio technologies, the self]


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