Social Poetics of the “Public Space”: Teahouse and Rural life in Southern Sichuan

基于拉图尔对“社会”的本体论批判以及赫兹菲尔德的“社会诗学”理论，本文对一个川南集镇的茶馆生活进行了民族志考察。不同于既有的“公共空间”范式，本文认为中国茶馆并非一个表征自治、理性和反抗精神的政治空间；相反，茶馆作为人们相互交往的“表演空间”、打牌消遣的“游戏空间”、谈论是非长短的“话语空间”，其首要特征在于诗性（poetics）而非政治（politics）。茶馆不仅蕴藏了丰富的表演技术、游戏形式和话语策略；同时，作为联结自我与社会、结构与阈限、话语和实践的诗性空间，中国茶馆所表征的公共性与西方理论中的公共领域亦有着重要区别。

Building on Bruno Latour’s ontological critique of the “social” and Michael Herzfeld’s conceptualization of “social poetics”, this paper explores teahouse as a way of life in a marketplace in southern Sichuan. To challenge the existing “public space” paradigm for the study of teahouse, I argue that teahouse in China is not a “public space” in the political sense, which highlights autonomy, rationality and resistance. Instead, as a “space of performance” for self-representation and sociality, a “space of playing” for gambling and passtime, as well as a “discursive space” for arguments and arbitration, the local teahouse is characterized by its poetic rather than political nature. The teahouse is not only a container of multiple performing skills, game tricks and speaking tactics, as a poetic space bridging the self and society, structure and liminality, discourse and practice, but also the bearer of a specific， embedded publicity that is distinct from the western public sphere.

宋靖野

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