East Asian History - ANU

12LEWIS MAYO35 This is the succession traced in WeiYanshen's "Rhapsody on the goshawk,"which outlines the progress from capture inthe net to being tied with jesses andperforming the work of hunting. See Chuxueji, juan 30, p.731.36 Net work is something mobilised: a workthat is made mobile. At the same time themobility of the bird, passing from hand tohand (from the hawk catcher to the forces oflocal government to the emissaries to thereception agencies at the capital to theimperial hawk masters and to the emperorhimselD, mobilises a network of relationsbetween people, places, institutions andknowledge, things that otherwise remaindormant. The skills of goshawk handlers,understanding of diplomatic protocol,familiarity with overland routes (managingthe difficult journey through the Gansucorridor across the Yellow River and throughthe territories of Eastern Gansu and Shaanxi),and a grasp of the nuances of geo-politicalalignments and of the desires and intentionsof ruling forces-all of these things arebrought into play, and brought into contactwith each other, by a network of connections.are not found at its heart, just as Zhang Yichao's network of authority spreaditself outwards into the Ganjun shan, ordaining the capture of birds there.Once caught in these nets and networks, the goshawk is subjected toother power lines.35 In training the hawk and hunting with it, the most basicform of handling is the manipulation of the lines that tie the bird, its jesses,the lines whose tying (to the legs of the hawk) is one of the crucial marks andinstruments of its incorporation by human power, distinguishing it from wildhawks and from other captive birds which were not tied to people in this way(that is, birds whose ties to power were of a different, less visible character).While the skilful tying of these lines provides the foundation for the exerciseof power, the lines are only important because of their dialectical relationshipto the release of the bird into empty space.The movement of the birds overland from the Gansu corridor activatesthe network of relations between political centres and political forces(between Zhang Yichao and his headquarters at Dunhuang and Yizong in theTang capital) by creating a link across space, by joining what is separated bythe weakness of power and the strength of distance. Under these conditions,political authority is not a dense, even fabric as it is in areas of concentratedsettlement (as in centres of plant cultivation or cities, where governed livesexist in close proximity), but a fine and stretched mesh, something we seein the objectified diagrammatic form of historical maps of the communicationnetworks of medieval Central Asia, on which single lines join the points ofsettlement into a lattice, but the vast majority is blank space. At this abstractmacro-level, settlements appear as knots of power. The movement of thebird, its mobility, makes it an instrument for the creation of ties between thoseseparated by vast spaces, between ruler and governor who had never seeneach other in person-in other words, the tying of power knots into anetwork. 36The biological reproduction of the goshawks was not socially controlledor determined. As lives captured in the wilds, it was only through thereproduction of net works and networks that power over hawks could beexercised and reproduced. The birds marked capturing capacities-capacitiesthat were at the heart of politics, as the honour and ability of political powerwas registered in what it could catch. This is not merely because of theanalogy between politics (visible particularly in militarised contexts) andphysical strength, but because the capture of lives involved political skills ofdiverse kinds. Strategic competence played itself out in a network, and themanagement of a network required strategy. This extended from the captureand training of the birds to their transmission in a web of diplomatic relationsand their use in hunting-or their ceremonial release. Ties were formed andput into action: the strings knotted to constitute the net, the tying of jesses,the linking of hawk catcher and trainer to superiors, the joining betweencentres of power and their peripheries, and between one centre and another,the ties of ruler and subject. In all these links, bonds and knots of power, forceand thing joined indivisibly together.