Of Marxism, Marketing, Cyborgs and Women
Whether we consider it in a codified and hierarchical fashion (sic), or as part of a postmodern and eclectic soup, subversive or neutered, the readings this week all point to the power of the aesthetic in literary, and political, discourse. The discussion of postmodernism as a cultural trend in dialogue with that of Nationalism in the case of Taiwan (and I would argue elsewhere: to be conscious of hybridity, borrowing and irreverence one has to some extent to be aware of the cultural baggage and limitations of a nation or other determined imagined object) and of Taiwan (note “she”) as a (female) cyborg that is engaged by Sebatian Lau is informative both of the literary work we examine from this sphere this week, but also the discussion of Marxist Aesthetics, their role and function in the Mainland Chinese context. Lau argues a distinction between a “apolitical” postmodernity that is purely aesthetic, and notably self-consciously put beyond the realms of the political, and the use of postmodernity by a politically aware and motivated avant garde. Although I feel that this distinction could be of use some limited use in the political environment of the Taiwan of the day, in effect it robs postmodernity of precisely its subversive power: that is its power to move between the political and the apolitical seamlessly, and irreverently, to erase the difference between the form and content.
Zhu Tianwen’s Fin de Siecle Splendor is precisely an example of a postmodern style that exists in Taiwan that is fairy congruent with postmodernism as it is touted in the West, when any attempt is made at touting it all. Moving between romantic description and list-like elaboration of the latest fads, we are presented with that cold cyborgian confusion of surface and depth, at once compelling and disturbing.
One question that comes to mind is whether it is possible to have a postmodern aesthetics that is also Marxist. Naturally, an aesthetic system as schematized as that present in Marxist practical political life and theoretical discourse provides fruitful grounds for a superficial revolution along postmodern, consemerist lines, I would argue, however that despite the distinctions made by Ban Wang between a western idea of the aesthetic as superfluous, superficial and false, aesthetics are equally schematized n western literary and popular discourses, simply through different means, and this latent quality allows for certain different sorts of manifestation to occur in the re examination of same when it comes to the advent and spread of postmodernity as a phenomenon. Certainly, if we take indifference, or use, misuse and appropriation of emotional response to be one of the hallmarks of postmodern thought in the west and elsewhere, the writings of many “avant-garde” authors of china in the 80’s/90’s would seem to qualify, including Ge Fei.
The question we return to regards the limitations of “postmodernism” if they exist, and if they do, whether they exist along culturo-national lines. Taking a suitably postmodern stance I conclude that I, cyborg, have no conclusion to offer as yet.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Goodbye to All: ThatThe spirit of '68 still lives on in some quarters of the left
Too bad -- there are much more effective ways to be an opposition party than by reliving the past.
With conservatism dominant in every branch of government, it is clear that liberals are an opposition party. We have to think, act, and strategize like an opposition party. That means figuring out ways to articulate what we stand for while not alienating those who may disagree with us but can be persuaded to see things our way. That’s a difficult balancing act. Of course, the postwar left has been in opposition before, and that’s a historical fact that can be turned to advantage -- there’s a track record to examine and think through, and a set of political styles and strategies for change to reflect upon. Examining this history can mean recycling good ideas and tactics. But what if it means recycling bad ones?
No doubt, some progressives will be drawn to the protest movements of the 1960s to inspire opposition today. There are good reasons for this. The world that existed before the ’60s is one that no one wants to go back to. The decade witnessed enormous victories for African Americans, women, and the poor. The civil-rights movement -- with its pioneering use of nonviolent and grass-roots “direct action” -- prompted these advances. It also gave birth to a new form of politics that championed the energy of ordinary citizens and that carried on within the peace movement’s struggle against the Vietnam War. College students, through the teach-in movement, learned how to connect their learning to political engagement. The decade seemed a golden age of political idealism.
Remembering the ’60s as a time of heroic activism -- when ordinary citizens changed the terms of politics -- suggests we might be able to recycle those protest styles today. Younger activists are doing that as they march on Washington, against the Iraq War or in favor of abortion rights. The left is often identified, in the press and in popular imagination, as a series of marches. Protest has become an easy way to express dissent. It’s often highly visible and focused in terms of time and resources. When people mass in the streets -- as they were known to during the 1960s -- it appears something is wrong in the country that demands attention. And because protest activists are the most vocal element of the left, they attract the energy of young idealists yearning for a way to express their political disaffection. Take it from someone who’s marched a lot in his life: There’s an emotional appeal to massing with others you share solidarity with.
But there’s also a limit to protest. With its emphasis on criticizing rather than building, it nurtures a narrow conception of opposition. Of course we need to criticize, especially with this administration in power. But for the long term, it’s far more important at this historical moment that we build. The left needs to think about long-term and broader ideas of change. Protest doesn’t help here; it’s too fleeting and spasmodic.
To romanticize protest and the decade of the 1960s cuts us off from rethinking -- with a cold, analytical eye -- the decade’s lessons. The spirit of the ’60s has something to teach us, for sure, but it’s a mixed message, one that lives on in the activist wing of today’s left in troubling ways. We need to search out styles, dispositions, and ideas that can inform our present sense of being an opposition party -- and we need to widen what we choose from. We also need to recognize how the past’s influence precludes more productive strategies for the present, how what might have worked in a previous context no longer works today. To get a sense of this, we need to travel back to 1968, to a time when the decade’s meaning crystallized, a time that seems far gone at first but whose images and memories live on in disturbing ways today. Remembering the past critically allows us to be a more effective opposition in the present.
Protest and Confrontation as Politics Both internationally and in the United States, 1968 remains one of the most evocative years in the history of the left. The spirit lives through images of protesters massing in the streets and Molotov cocktails zinging through the air. Protest and anger aren’t the only tendencies from the time, but they are certainly the most evocative. Mark Kurlansky, in his book 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, explains the allure: “People under twenty-five do not have much influence in the world. But it is amazing what they can do if they are ready to march.” Breaking from the limitations of the sidewalk into the streets now conjures a feeling of exhilaration and radical accomplishment.
No occasion in American history symbolizes this more than Chicago’s Democratic convention during the summer of 1968. Memories of Chicago come easy due to its highly charged political theater. Abbie Hoffman’s organization, the Youth International Party (Yippies), planned to protest the Democratic convention with a “Festival of Life” that would nominate a pig picked up from a local farm for president. Protesters were refused permits but insisted on marching, while Richard Daley, the mayor of Chicago, did all he could to spark a fight. Chicago became a pressure cooker, a leading Yippie calling it “a revolutionary wet dream come true.” When the riots occurred and the police clubs started swinging, protesters chanted, infamously, “The whole world is watching.” Unfortunately for the protesters, America watched, all right -- and cheered for the working-class cops of Chicago, for the “man” sticking it to the longhairs in the streets. Protest, confrontation, and outrage didn’t elicit the intended sympathetic response. Anger killed strategy.
It may be easy to overstate the resonance of such tactics today, but a romanticism about them does exist among those who still believe in street protests. When Rick Perlstein interviewed organizers of the 2004 protests at the Republican convention, he found them championing direct action and confrontation as a tactic. Check out the A31 (August 31) Action Coalition, an organization based in Brooklyn that was angry at New York City’s permitting system that confined protesters to certain areas. A31’s leaders hoped to “transform the streets of NYC into stages of resistance ... .” They called for people to “sit down and refuse to move,” and to ignore the limitations of “protest pens” set up by police. To make the connection to 1968 crystal clear, they posted a recent op-ed by Tom Hayden on their Web site -- no surprise, as Hayden had argued in 1968 that Chicago symbolized a move toward “direct action and organization outside the parliamentary process,” language remarkably similar to that used by A31.
This was not the only organization that recycled protest styles of 1968. There was Dontjustvote.com and the old peace movement organization, The War Resisters’ League (WRL), both celebrating action in the streets, no matter the consequence. A leader of the WRL told Perlstein, “We need to do what we think is right to do, and not so much worry about, ah, ‘Well, what if this? What if that?’ I think we need to do what our conscience tells us is important to do … .” When Perlstein asked if this might alienate the wrong people, the organizers shrugged. These activists seemed in the clutches of 1968, transported back to Chicago and prepared for the worst. Fortunately, this time, the “whole world” wasn’t watching.
It’s remarkable how much these protesters live in another era. Over and over, they use Martin Luther King Jr.’s words to justify their actions. They especially like the following quote (seen on numerous Web sites) from “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail” (1963): “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create … a crisis and establish such creative tension so that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” Plucked out of context, the quote suggests thoughtful political strategy. After all, these activists are appropriating America’s best political thinker on nonviolence and democratic change.
But in plucking the quote, these activists ignore its context. Go to the rest of the document and you find much more. King was explaining how a minority, African Americans, could struggle to make a moral appeal to a majority. He believed black Americans had to highlight “the best in the American dream” in order to be heard. And civil-rights protesters had to rule out other options before embracing the challenging ethic of nonviolent direct action. You had to have moral merit on your side -- what Reinhold Niebuhr called a “spiritual discipline against resentment” -- before rushing into the streets.
Today’s protesters ignore King’s reflections on his own historical context. Consider that John F. Kennedy was president when King wrote his letter, and that King was one of Kennedy’s most astute critics. King believed in 1960 that candidate Kennedy “had the intelligence and the skill and the moral fervor to give the leadership” the civil-rights movement had “been waiting for.” Soon, though, King realized Kennedy had “the political skill” but not “the moral passion.” Nonviolent direct action, with its intention of creating conflict to expose tension, was precisely the tool to jump-start that moral passion. King saw an opening that the movement could prod, and this got him the legislation he desired: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The year 1963 was its own time, distinct from 1968 and certainly 2004. George W. Bush is no John F. Kennedy, and today’s Republican leadership in Congress is a far cry from the Congress of 1963–64. The chance that Bush and congressional Republicans would be prodded into some kind of action by such protests is zero (unless, indeed, protest moves them to act more forcefully in the other direction). The protesters at the Republican convention of 2004 might have imagined themselves as working in the tradition of King. But the context had shifted so drastically that their actions fell on -- quite literally -- deaf ears. It wasn’t even clear what they hoped to accomplish. And when the goals aren’t clear, protest means little more than expressing rage. That’s why it often takes the form of political theater, which too often encapsulates those who make it in their own hermetic world; it replaces explanation of political ideas and policies with in-jokes and references that confirm pre-existing opinions. If you know a pig stands for a white guy with power, you get it; if not, you don’t.
There’s a recent, evocative documentary, The Yes Men, that focuses on two activists inspired by the French Situationists (intellectual forerunners to 1968 France) and the Diggers (politically minded hippies before Hoffman). They pose as representatives of the World Trade Organization and attend business gatherings exhibiting a television monitor that polices workers and pops up like a phallus in a blow-up suit. They get applause in rooms of 30 people, although it’s not clear why. The movie winds up showing these “activists” as all-knowing lefties snickering at their opposition. The climactic scene involves their presentation to a college classroom, where students protest their idea of turning human feces into McDonald’s hamburgers sold to citizens of the Third World.
Unlike political humor that entertains, political theater has a pretense of changing public life. The Yes Men think of themselves as activists, but the tendency to laugh at their opposition rather than engage it betrays their project’s limitation. Asked about the “mind-set of the corporate man” who might resist their jokes, these activists call them “ready to goosestep.” Generally, people are “easy prey for the ideas of the corporate decision-makers.” The Yes Men characterize their opposition as “dumb asses” who wouldn’t “listen anyhow.” “Criticizing those in power with a smile and a middle finger” is what they intend. Expression trumps strategy.
Expressive Anti-Politics Indeed, guerilla theater and protest as outrage suggest another legacy of 1968: expressive anti-politics. This element of political style draws from pop existentialism and participatory democracy. Once again, it crystallized in Chicago, and specifically in Tom Hayden. By 1968, Hayden was disenchanted with electoral politics and supported urban riots and Third World guerilla fighters. Chicago ratified his break from electoral politics, especially when Eugene McCarthy’s supporters spilled out of the convention and into the streets. The left had literally split -- those inside the hotel symbolizing electoral politics (the fogies), and those outside practicing direct democracy in the streets (the youth). Here can be found the essence of expressive anti-politics and its long legacy of liberal powerlessness.
The impulsive nature of direct action -- its immediacy -- is precisely its major appeal for today’s activist left. L.A. Kauffman, an organizer involved with United for Peace and Justice (a leading anti-war organization that formed in the last few years), explains, “Direct actionists devote little if any energy to lobbying or passing legislation; if they interact with the government, it’s almost always by raising a ruckus.” Here’s a curious embrace of protest over power -- the bizarre idea that a presence in the streets can substitute for a presence in the halls of government, or that reacting to government action is morally superior to initiating it. The sentiment is echoed in the ideas of Dontjustvote.com, an organization that was created for protests at the Republican convention of 2004 and a clear inheritor of the spirit of ’68. As its Web site explains, the organization embraces “the power of direct action” and “direct democracy as a viable alternative to representation.” This is the political theory of street action or, put more positively, “participatory democracy.”
The idea’s salience arises from its respectable lineage in American political thought, which stretches back to Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey. Dewey believed democracy required a home in the local neighborhood where discussion and association took place. When members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gathered in Michigan in 1962 to write the famous “Port Huron Statement,” they outlined the demands of participatory democracy and invoked Dewey’s ideals. But they also invoked a jargon of authenticity taken from existentialist philosophy. While embracing “a democracy of individual participation,” they hoped to find “a meaning in life that is personally authentic.”
But there’s a problem with proclaiming both of those as goals: Authenticity of the self and actually living in a democratic community with other citizens who hold varying opinions are two very different -- if not, in fact, irreconcilable -- demands. In Chicago, the two ideals clashed, and authenticity won out. Protesters pitted themselves against the inauthentic masses -- the police, those who believed in the Vietnam War, the “pigs.” When this occurred, participatory democracy no longer supplemented representative democracy but replaced it; authenticity displaced the challenge of deliberating with other citizens who might disagree. To be authentic meant to give direct expression to desire rather than to work through a longer process of changing representative institutions. It focused on what George Cotkin, the historian of American existentialism, called “catharsis.”
Critics noticed the dangers at the time. As Christopher Lasch wrote soon after the Chicago convention, “The search for personal integrity could lead only to a politics in which ‘authenticity’ was equated with the degree of one’s alienation, the degree of one’s willingness to undertake existential acts of defiance.” Bayard Rustin agreed, arguing that the participatory ethic of protest threatened the importance of doing actual politics, which required coalition-building and compromise, and wound up pitting leftists against liberals in a dangerous internecine warfare and mutual alienation. But clear as this might have been to some back then, the idea’s appeal lives on in the activist left’s disposition to political action combined with a lack of realism -- a disposition apparent today when expression trumps effectiveness. Go back and read the statements of Naderites in 2000, or the shriller ones from 2004. You can hear moral fervor trumping political responsibility -- the idea that voting is about expressing conscience rather than influencing policy. When The Progressive interviewed the few remaining Naderites working in the swing state of Wisconsin in 2004, the publication confronted purist sentiment. Supporters explained that they were “principled” while those supporting the Democrats were “muted.” One went so far as to say, “It’s not important who’s sitting in the White House, it’s who’s sitting in.”
This is the ugly legacy of 1968: the authenticity of conscience pitted against the requirements of a pluralistic and conflicted society, the ethic of expression winning out against all other aims, including practicality. “Direct nonviolent action” no longer means what King believed it meant; it now means remaining pure by turning “Your Back on Bush,” as recent protesters did at the inauguration, even if the result wasn’t anything more than making them feel better. Expressive anti-politics is the last refuge of the powerless. Impulsive, it bursts like a flame and then burns out, to be felt only in the heart of the participant while the ruling class, unperturbed, goes on its merry way.
The Right(’s) Lessons from the ’60s Burnout is a constant theme of 1968. We’ve heard the refrain about “tired radicals,” and the one about Yippies turning into yuppies. Even while appreciating the social movements from this time, Paul Berman (who was a part of it all) admits, “The uprisings proved amazingly unproductive in regard to conventional political or economic change.” The historian Alan Brinkley comments, “The new radicals” of 1968 “never developed the organizational or institutional skills necessary for building an enduring movement.”
Meanwhile, of course, an enduring movement was being built during the ’60s -- but it was on the right. Historians of the decade used to focus on left-wing organizations, writing books about sds, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, typically culminating in the tumult of 1968 and thus telling a story of factionalism and decline. Today, however, historians are growing more interested in documenting the right and telling a tale not of decline but of ascendance. James Miller, who wrote a marvelous book about sds, explained to the magazine Lingua Franca a few years back that “in terms of the political history of this country, the New Left just isn’t an important story.” Focusing on the left, he explained with a certain irony about his own historical work, evades “the extraordinary success of the forces that first supported [Barry] Goldwater, then [Ronald] Reagan as governor of California, and then [George] Wallace. I can’t help but see that absence in the historiography as integral to the mythologization of the Sixties.” Miller echoes the argument of M. Stanton Evans, a leading conservative intellectual and popular writer, who wrote, “Historians may well record the decade of the 1960s as the era in which conservatism, as a viable political force, finally came into its own.”
When Evans wrote that line he was discussing an organization that still grabs the attention of young historians today: Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). YAF’s membership was always more stable and often larger than SDS’s, but more importantly, the group created a longer-lasting infrastructure. It engaged young people philosophically, through a ringing endorsement of liberty and individualism; but it also engaged them with well-organized chapters on campuses that cultivated long-lasting skills for activists (Richard Viguerie, for instance, pioneered his direct-mail tactics through YAF). YAF worked with the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists to coordinate lectures of right-wing thinkers and circulate conservative books to students. It linked up with Goldwater and Reagan, supplying an army of young volunteers for their campaigns. Did it engage in protest? Certainly not. During its “heyday in the early ’60s,” Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin point out, YAF members went to “the lectern and the party caucus more than into the streets.”
The networks of YAF were replicated for adults in places like Orange County, California. Here, there were chapters of the John Birch Society that supported local school-board candidates and institutions like the Orange County School of Anti-Communism, where conservatives could fraternize, learn about boycotts of corporations selling products to communist countries, and hear Reagan speak before he even considered a run for governor. There were also barbecues, coffee klatches, and discussion groups that congealed a conservative animosity toward the federal government and liberalism. Churches and right-wing bookstores helped provide “movement centers,” and the infrastructure was especially impressive considering the decentralized, suburban setting.
These networks explain the passion and long-lasting influence behind Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964. Traditionally, the campaign was seen as a right-wing disaster. Goldwater’s convention speech in favor of “extremism” still sounds scary. But now, more remarkable is the infrastructure that stood behind Goldwater. A strong network of activists worked hard to push the Republican Party toward the right, away from centrists like Nelson Rockefeller. It wasn’t enough to win the presidency in 1964, but that same infrastructure -- YAF, John Birch Society chapters, and general right-wing networks -- helped Reagan become governor of California in 1966. As Isserman and Kazin explain, conservatives “sustained morale and kept expanding their numbers for years after the young radicals had splintered in various directions.”
We can link this scholarship about conservative grass-roots activism to something already well-known: that throughout the 1960s, the right was developing ideas that would come to fruition much later. Leading this initiative was the well-known (now at least) American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Though founded in 1943, it changed form during the 1960s. Its leader, William Baroody, believed it should not just reflect the right’s primary “special interest” -- corporations -- but develop bigger ideas. Baroody “understood,” as Sidney Blumenthal explained in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, “that without conservative theory there could be no conservative movement.” Baroody forged alliances with the Goldwater campaign quietly, behind the scenes. He focused on long-term goals so that, when the excesses of the ’60s erupted, there was a place neoconservative intellectuals could go to develop their ideas during the ’70s. The AEI articulated both particular public policies and a broader philosophy of the free market -- something that undergirds conservative political action today. And, of course, it provided a model for other conservative think tanks during the ’70s.
The power of YAF, grass-roots networks, and think tanks like the AEI show that the right focused its energy on infrastructure and ideas during a time when the left focused on protest. The right’s tactics weren’t loud or theatrical. Its activists operated under the radar to lay the groundwork. They worked almost entirely within the system, changing the Republican Party from moderate to conservative precinct by precinct. And their story challenges the left-wing narrative of idealism during the decade. That’s precisely why it should inform the way liberals think about the future. To win real power, liberals need to think about infrastructure, institutions, and ideas. And they’re not going to get these if they look to the late ’60s for inspiration.
The Spirit of 1948: New Ideas in the Old This is especially true for ideas. Who now reads left-wing books from 1968? Just try Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It or Woodstock Nation. Or try Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, a puff piece about the “non-intellective” exploration of “visionary splendor” and “human communion.” Or read the prognostication of “revolution” of “consciousness” in Charles Reich’s The Greening of America. Read even the otherwise smart Susan Sontag, who praises the worst elements of Third World revolutions in Styles of Radical Will (she later stood down from many of those positions). All of these books reflect a utopian hallucination not dissimilar from the style of protests on the streets of Chicago in 1968.
Younger thinkers today are going further back than the ’60s to rediscover good ideas. It’s been the Cold War liberalism of the ’40s and ’50s that has garnered the most interest. Books like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center or Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History or John Kenneth Galbraith’s American Capitalism seem much more interesting than The Making of a Counter Culture. There’s good reason for this, because though we might feel closer to the ’60s chronologically, our own age is much more parallel to the ’40s. Then, as now, liberals faced an international enemy -- Niebuhr’s “children of darkness” -- willing to murder for salvation. Then, as now, liberals confronted conservatives who entertained dangerous ideas of launching preemptive wars abroad while slashing social programs at home. And, if we take the ’48ers up to 1952 and the election of JFK in 1960, then, as now, liberals were often an opposition party.
The ’48ers knew they had to articulate a public philosophy, the way conservatives would later. They sketched out broad principles that transcended liberal interest groups. Those principles grew out of their faith in the American nation as a community of citizens sharing mutual obligations to one another -- the sort that they saw during World War II and that they hoped could live on afterward. The ideas of national greatness and patriotism grounded their political thought. They upheld a public purpose that highlighted the weaknesses of the libertarian right and led them to criticize the “social imbalance” of a society enamored of consumerism and markets, and not America’s civic fabric. Politically, they supported the idea of a “pluralist” government with many voices participating, not just those of business and privilege. They wanted influence on the inside, not protest from the outside. In The Vital Center, Schlesinger wrote, “Our democratic tradition has been at its best an activist tradition. It has found its fulfillment, not in complaint or in escapism, but in responsibility and decision.”
The ’48ers, so far as I know, never marched against American actions abroad. What they did do was construct a framework for a liberal foreign policy, a robust alternative to conservative emphasis on military action and “rolling back” the enemy. The idea of containment was not simply a doctrine of realism but a moral disposition toward the demands of national power. America certainly had a strong role to play abroad, the ’48ers argued, but it had to do so with a sense of “humility.” So, for instance, Niebuhr, drawing upon Christian ethics (not yet the sole property of the right), argued against “preventive war.” Those who articulated such an idea “assume a prescience about the future which no man or nation possesses.” He went on to explain, “We would, I think, have a better chance of success in our struggle against a fanatical foe if we were less sure of our purity and virtue.” Learning this lesson required America to work with others to “reconstruct” poorer economies as much as engage with military power. This was to be a war of ideas as well as guns.
These thinkers didn’t just think; they put ideas into action. They attended international conferences of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, where they argued that America stood for more than a prosperous consumer economy. (Richard Nixon had made this assertion to Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, displaying a gleaming American kitchen to the Soviet leader at an exhibition fair; Galbraith chided Nixon’s equation of democracy with consumer triumph as a “simple-minded and mechanical view of man and his liberties.”) The ’48ers also befriended politicians. Unlike our own age, when politicians hire overpaid consultants with few ideas, during the ’50s, politicians turned to intellectuals. In 1953, Galbraith formed the Finletter Group, which collected papers on topics by scholars and writers, crafted speeches, and found ways to have ideas inform public debate. Most famously, Americans for Democratic Action became an organizational forum where intellectuals and politicians could formulate foreign and domestic policy together. In this and other ways, they found outlets for ideas that could become a source of opposition as well as inspiration.
These strengths shouldn’t allow us to ignore their limitations. These thinkers took things for granted, including their privileged status as white, highly educated men. They sometimes had a hard time accepting the activism of the ’60s, and they were slow to see how their own anti-communism, legitimate though it was, could descend ineluctably into the disaster of Vietnam. Their experience of the staid 1950s, when bureaucratic corporations accustomed themselves to the welfare state, made them take Keynesian policies for granted. In going back to these thinkers, we need not romanticize them. Indeed, one of their central weaknesses, taking the welfare state for granted, should inspire our thinking today.
The Past’s Lessons for the Future This quick tour through postwar history gets us closer to what it means to be an opposition party today. First, we need to question the legacy of protest politics and political theater, which makes activists feel good but alienates and confuses others. We need to build a grass-roots infrastructure, like that developed by the right. We should also start reconstructing liberalism by going deeper into the past, while recognizing the limits any set of ideas from the past naturally have. These are some good first steps to take, but obviously they are just the beginning, and mostly about looking backward, not forward.
If we take these lessons seriously, our biggest challenge moving ahead is how to articulate our opposition to the right’s well-developed agenda while simultaneously developing a public philosophy like that of the ’48ers. The need for this became abundantly clear in the last presidential election. John Kerry lost because Americans didn’t understand what he stood for. They understood him as an opposition candidate but not as someone who had “values” that could be articulated and explained. This wasn’t just Kerry’s problem; it is the problem of liberalism generally. The public perceives liberalism negatively, due to the long war the right waged against it from the 1960s onward. Unlike the ’48ers, we cannot assume that our ideas resonate; we need to make them resonate.
To rearticulate liberal ideals while acting in opposition is not as hard as first appears. Take Social Security. Clearly, Bush is surprised by the backlash against privatization, as he scrambles around the country garnering support. This appears a dream come true for progressives, but it’s much more. It’s a challenge to articulate not just opposition but a public philosophy that can explain what liberals stand for. We shouldn’t defend a program inherited from the New Deal in a rearguard fashion but should reiterate the idea of a shared national purpose based on collective sacrifice.
Nor should we turn this into a demographic issue and bank on the elderly supporting Democrats; that’s interest-group politics, not a long-range public philosophy. We need to explain what Social Security teaches the nation about deeper principles. Why do Americans react against the term “privatize”? Because there is still a sense of shared obligation to one another, and it’s up to liberals to articulate that public philosophy while they oppose the president. We can show how the president’s proposal reflects the “social imbalance” the ’48ers perceived, the elevation of the self’s interest above the common good. None of this requires protest. It requires public argument. The time for protest may come, but it will undoubtedly rely on a change of leadership first and serious thinking about strategy later.
The same needs to be done on foreign policy. It’s not good enough to protest the Iraq War. Occasionally, Kerry articulated an alternative, albeit muted, to Bush’s foreign policy that embraced the ’48er idea of national humility and a critique of hubris. Today, we need to articulate this liberal foreign policy more forcefully. Its central message should be that American responsibility abroad shouldn’t rely on guns alone or a sense of superior moral virtue. Liberals should argue for nurturing civil society and democratic institutions throughout the world, envisioning an equivalent of the Marshall Plan for the Middle East and elsewhere. Liberals need to emphasize that the war against terrorism is a war of ideas as much as a war of military power and intelligence. Like the ’48ers, liberal intellectuals should define America abroad as more than just its well-known Hollywood films. We need not allow Bush to expropriate the rhetoric of democracy and freedom; we need to reshape these ideas in a more responsible and meaningful manner.
Liberals must also talk about shared sacrifice during wartime. This shouldn’t be about getting the military vote, even if that wouldn’t hurt. The tradition of national greatness expects shared sacrifice from all members of our society. As JFK quipped, “Ask what you can do for your country.” Only liberals will make it clear that the wealthiest elements of society should provide for the common good, so that we have enough to pay veterans’ benefits and provide other services. None of this will come from protest marches against the war, which to date have accomplished little more -- as unfair as this might seem -- than to permit the partisans of the right to raise questions about the left’s patriotism.
The problem with what I outline here is the lack of places to build articulate ideas and have them inform the thinking of Democratic politicians. Now is certainly the time for progressives to invest in building an infrastructure -- the only alternative to spasmodic protests in the streets. The term “progressive infrastructure” seems to spark interest among some funders today, especially considering how the quickie infrastructure built in 2004 -- notably America Coming Together -- didn’t quite do the trick. It’s time for institutions that can approximate what Americans for Democratic Action did during the Cold War -- provide a space where thinkers and politicians meet -- and build local networks. Of course, this requires that Democratic politicians stop relying so heavily on overpaid consultants, and that wealthier progressives pony up money for institutions without immediate impact.
This leaves open the question of how to relate to the “actually existing” protest left today. The ’48er spirit was recently invoked to call for a purge of the protest wing of the left today. Writing in The New Republic, Peter Beinart suggested that MoveOn should be pushed out of a more responsible left. While I think MoveOn deserves criticism for its pacifism and teaming up with hard-left dinosaurs like ANSWER, it doesn’t merit a purge (purge from what, exactly?). What MoveOn needs is an articulation of the principle of “responsibility” that Schlesinger set out against the spirit of alienated protest. There’s reason for hope on this front. After all, Mother Jones described MoveOn’s young leader, Eli Pariser, as a “scruffy indie-rock fan who not long ago was chanting anti-globalization slogans and confronting riot police at World Bank meetings.” At one anti–International Monetary Fund protest, though, he talked with police and, in his own words, “realized that the scripted confrontation of attacking and antagonizing them wasn’t going to get us anywhere. It changed the way I was thinking, tactically.” This idea of laying groundwork for an infrastructure also came out in MoveOn’s work during the last election; it didn’t succeed, but with a little help from a stronger intellectual infrastructure in the future, it might.
My tempered hope about this comes from a sense of urgency about the Bush administration. Such a sense threatens to degenerate into protest theatrics and expressive anti-politics. Instead of embracing those styles from the past, liberals should take their lessons from the right during the 1960s. Liberals will never be as powerful as the right. That’s not just because the right is richer but because the liberal faith is, by definition, weaker. Unlike evangelical Christianity, liberalism can never provide absolute zeal or commitment. We can draw some inspiration from the “fighting faith” of the ’48ers’ liberalism, but we also face challenges that they never faced, especially the infrastructure the right has built over the last few decades. With this said, liberals don’t need to be as weak as they are now. We need not recycle protest and alienation from the past. Liberals have been in the opposition before, and they’ve managed to win back political power. But it took care and precision and some serious thinking about strategy. That’s our charge today.
Kevin Mattson teaches American history at Ohio University and is the author, most recently, of When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Kevin Mattson, "Goodbye to All That", The American Prospect Online, Mar 28, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
No doubt, some progressives will be drawn to the protest movements of the 1960s to inspire opposition today. There are good reasons for this. The world that existed before the ’60s is one that no one wants to go back to. The decade witnessed enormous victories for African Americans, women, and the poor. The civil-rights movement -- with its pioneering use of nonviolent and grass-roots “direct action” -- prompted these advances. It also gave birth to a new form of politics that championed the energy of ordinary citizens and that carried on within the peace movement’s struggle against the Vietnam War. College students, through the teach-in movement, learned how to connect their learning to political engagement. The decade seemed a golden age of political idealism.
Remembering the ’60s as a time of heroic activism -- when ordinary citizens changed the terms of politics -- suggests we might be able to recycle those protest styles today. Younger activists are doing that as they march on Washington, against the Iraq War or in favor of abortion rights. The left is often identified, in the press and in popular imagination, as a series of marches. Protest has become an easy way to express dissent. It’s often highly visible and focused in terms of time and resources. When people mass in the streets -- as they were known to during the 1960s -- it appears something is wrong in the country that demands attention. And because protest activists are the most vocal element of the left, they attract the energy of young idealists yearning for a way to express their political disaffection. Take it from someone who’s marched a lot in his life: There’s an emotional appeal to massing with others you share solidarity with.
But there’s also a limit to protest. With its emphasis on criticizing rather than building, it nurtures a narrow conception of opposition. Of course we need to criticize, especially with this administration in power. But for the long term, it’s far more important at this historical moment that we build. The left needs to think about long-term and broader ideas of change. Protest doesn’t help here; it’s too fleeting and spasmodic.
To romanticize protest and the decade of the 1960s cuts us off from rethinking -- with a cold, analytical eye -- the decade’s lessons. The spirit of the ’60s has something to teach us, for sure, but it’s a mixed message, one that lives on in the activist wing of today’s left in troubling ways. We need to search out styles, dispositions, and ideas that can inform our present sense of being an opposition party -- and we need to widen what we choose from. We also need to recognize how the past’s influence precludes more productive strategies for the present, how what might have worked in a previous context no longer works today. To get a sense of this, we need to travel back to 1968, to a time when the decade’s meaning crystallized, a time that seems far gone at first but whose images and memories live on in disturbing ways today. Remembering the past critically allows us to be a more effective opposition in the present.
Protest and Confrontation as Politics Both internationally and in the United States, 1968 remains one of the most evocative years in the history of the left. The spirit lives through images of protesters massing in the streets and Molotov cocktails zinging through the air. Protest and anger aren’t the only tendencies from the time, but they are certainly the most evocative. Mark Kurlansky, in his book 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, explains the allure: “People under twenty-five do not have much influence in the world. But it is amazing what they can do if they are ready to march.” Breaking from the limitations of the sidewalk into the streets now conjures a feeling of exhilaration and radical accomplishment.
No occasion in American history symbolizes this more than Chicago’s Democratic convention during the summer of 1968. Memories of Chicago come easy due to its highly charged political theater. Abbie Hoffman’s organization, the Youth International Party (Yippies), planned to protest the Democratic convention with a “Festival of Life” that would nominate a pig picked up from a local farm for president. Protesters were refused permits but insisted on marching, while Richard Daley, the mayor of Chicago, did all he could to spark a fight. Chicago became a pressure cooker, a leading Yippie calling it “a revolutionary wet dream come true.” When the riots occurred and the police clubs started swinging, protesters chanted, infamously, “The whole world is watching.” Unfortunately for the protesters, America watched, all right -- and cheered for the working-class cops of Chicago, for the “man” sticking it to the longhairs in the streets. Protest, confrontation, and outrage didn’t elicit the intended sympathetic response. Anger killed strategy.
It may be easy to overstate the resonance of such tactics today, but a romanticism about them does exist among those who still believe in street protests. When Rick Perlstein interviewed organizers of the 2004 protests at the Republican convention, he found them championing direct action and confrontation as a tactic. Check out the A31 (August 31) Action Coalition, an organization based in Brooklyn that was angry at New York City’s permitting system that confined protesters to certain areas. A31’s leaders hoped to “transform the streets of NYC into stages of resistance ... .” They called for people to “sit down and refuse to move,” and to ignore the limitations of “protest pens” set up by police. To make the connection to 1968 crystal clear, they posted a recent op-ed by Tom Hayden on their Web site -- no surprise, as Hayden had argued in 1968 that Chicago symbolized a move toward “direct action and organization outside the parliamentary process,” language remarkably similar to that used by A31.
This was not the only organization that recycled protest styles of 1968. There was Dontjustvote.com and the old peace movement organization, The War Resisters’ League (WRL), both celebrating action in the streets, no matter the consequence. A leader of the WRL told Perlstein, “We need to do what we think is right to do, and not so much worry about, ah, ‘Well, what if this? What if that?’ I think we need to do what our conscience tells us is important to do … .” When Perlstein asked if this might alienate the wrong people, the organizers shrugged. These activists seemed in the clutches of 1968, transported back to Chicago and prepared for the worst. Fortunately, this time, the “whole world” wasn’t watching.
It’s remarkable how much these protesters live in another era. Over and over, they use Martin Luther King Jr.’s words to justify their actions. They especially like the following quote (seen on numerous Web sites) from “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail” (1963): “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create … a crisis and establish such creative tension so that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” Plucked out of context, the quote suggests thoughtful political strategy. After all, these activists are appropriating America’s best political thinker on nonviolence and democratic change.
But in plucking the quote, these activists ignore its context. Go to the rest of the document and you find much more. King was explaining how a minority, African Americans, could struggle to make a moral appeal to a majority. He believed black Americans had to highlight “the best in the American dream” in order to be heard. And civil-rights protesters had to rule out other options before embracing the challenging ethic of nonviolent direct action. You had to have moral merit on your side -- what Reinhold Niebuhr called a “spiritual discipline against resentment” -- before rushing into the streets.
Today’s protesters ignore King’s reflections on his own historical context. Consider that John F. Kennedy was president when King wrote his letter, and that King was one of Kennedy’s most astute critics. King believed in 1960 that candidate Kennedy “had the intelligence and the skill and the moral fervor to give the leadership” the civil-rights movement had “been waiting for.” Soon, though, King realized Kennedy had “the political skill” but not “the moral passion.” Nonviolent direct action, with its intention of creating conflict to expose tension, was precisely the tool to jump-start that moral passion. King saw an opening that the movement could prod, and this got him the legislation he desired: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The year 1963 was its own time, distinct from 1968 and certainly 2004. George W. Bush is no John F. Kennedy, and today’s Republican leadership in Congress is a far cry from the Congress of 1963–64. The chance that Bush and congressional Republicans would be prodded into some kind of action by such protests is zero (unless, indeed, protest moves them to act more forcefully in the other direction). The protesters at the Republican convention of 2004 might have imagined themselves as working in the tradition of King. But the context had shifted so drastically that their actions fell on -- quite literally -- deaf ears. It wasn’t even clear what they hoped to accomplish. And when the goals aren’t clear, protest means little more than expressing rage. That’s why it often takes the form of political theater, which too often encapsulates those who make it in their own hermetic world; it replaces explanation of political ideas and policies with in-jokes and references that confirm pre-existing opinions. If you know a pig stands for a white guy with power, you get it; if not, you don’t.
There’s a recent, evocative documentary, The Yes Men, that focuses on two activists inspired by the French Situationists (intellectual forerunners to 1968 France) and the Diggers (politically minded hippies before Hoffman). They pose as representatives of the World Trade Organization and attend business gatherings exhibiting a television monitor that polices workers and pops up like a phallus in a blow-up suit. They get applause in rooms of 30 people, although it’s not clear why. The movie winds up showing these “activists” as all-knowing lefties snickering at their opposition. The climactic scene involves their presentation to a college classroom, where students protest their idea of turning human feces into McDonald’s hamburgers sold to citizens of the Third World.
Unlike political humor that entertains, political theater has a pretense of changing public life. The Yes Men think of themselves as activists, but the tendency to laugh at their opposition rather than engage it betrays their project’s limitation. Asked about the “mind-set of the corporate man” who might resist their jokes, these activists call them “ready to goosestep.” Generally, people are “easy prey for the ideas of the corporate decision-makers.” The Yes Men characterize their opposition as “dumb asses” who wouldn’t “listen anyhow.” “Criticizing those in power with a smile and a middle finger” is what they intend. Expression trumps strategy.
Expressive Anti-Politics Indeed, guerilla theater and protest as outrage suggest another legacy of 1968: expressive anti-politics. This element of political style draws from pop existentialism and participatory democracy. Once again, it crystallized in Chicago, and specifically in Tom Hayden. By 1968, Hayden was disenchanted with electoral politics and supported urban riots and Third World guerilla fighters. Chicago ratified his break from electoral politics, especially when Eugene McCarthy’s supporters spilled out of the convention and into the streets. The left had literally split -- those inside the hotel symbolizing electoral politics (the fogies), and those outside practicing direct democracy in the streets (the youth). Here can be found the essence of expressive anti-politics and its long legacy of liberal powerlessness.
The impulsive nature of direct action -- its immediacy -- is precisely its major appeal for today’s activist left. L.A. Kauffman, an organizer involved with United for Peace and Justice (a leading anti-war organization that formed in the last few years), explains, “Direct actionists devote little if any energy to lobbying or passing legislation; if they interact with the government, it’s almost always by raising a ruckus.” Here’s a curious embrace of protest over power -- the bizarre idea that a presence in the streets can substitute for a presence in the halls of government, or that reacting to government action is morally superior to initiating it. The sentiment is echoed in the ideas of Dontjustvote.com, an organization that was created for protests at the Republican convention of 2004 and a clear inheritor of the spirit of ’68. As its Web site explains, the organization embraces “the power of direct action” and “direct democracy as a viable alternative to representation.” This is the political theory of street action or, put more positively, “participatory democracy.”
The idea’s salience arises from its respectable lineage in American political thought, which stretches back to Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey. Dewey believed democracy required a home in the local neighborhood where discussion and association took place. When members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gathered in Michigan in 1962 to write the famous “Port Huron Statement,” they outlined the demands of participatory democracy and invoked Dewey’s ideals. But they also invoked a jargon of authenticity taken from existentialist philosophy. While embracing “a democracy of individual participation,” they hoped to find “a meaning in life that is personally authentic.”
But there’s a problem with proclaiming both of those as goals: Authenticity of the self and actually living in a democratic community with other citizens who hold varying opinions are two very different -- if not, in fact, irreconcilable -- demands. In Chicago, the two ideals clashed, and authenticity won out. Protesters pitted themselves against the inauthentic masses -- the police, those who believed in the Vietnam War, the “pigs.” When this occurred, participatory democracy no longer supplemented representative democracy but replaced it; authenticity displaced the challenge of deliberating with other citizens who might disagree. To be authentic meant to give direct expression to desire rather than to work through a longer process of changing representative institutions. It focused on what George Cotkin, the historian of American existentialism, called “catharsis.”
Critics noticed the dangers at the time. As Christopher Lasch wrote soon after the Chicago convention, “The search for personal integrity could lead only to a politics in which ‘authenticity’ was equated with the degree of one’s alienation, the degree of one’s willingness to undertake existential acts of defiance.” Bayard Rustin agreed, arguing that the participatory ethic of protest threatened the importance of doing actual politics, which required coalition-building and compromise, and wound up pitting leftists against liberals in a dangerous internecine warfare and mutual alienation. But clear as this might have been to some back then, the idea’s appeal lives on in the activist left’s disposition to political action combined with a lack of realism -- a disposition apparent today when expression trumps effectiveness. Go back and read the statements of Naderites in 2000, or the shriller ones from 2004. You can hear moral fervor trumping political responsibility -- the idea that voting is about expressing conscience rather than influencing policy. When The Progressive interviewed the few remaining Naderites working in the swing state of Wisconsin in 2004, the publication confronted purist sentiment. Supporters explained that they were “principled” while those supporting the Democrats were “muted.” One went so far as to say, “It’s not important who’s sitting in the White House, it’s who’s sitting in.”
This is the ugly legacy of 1968: the authenticity of conscience pitted against the requirements of a pluralistic and conflicted society, the ethic of expression winning out against all other aims, including practicality. “Direct nonviolent action” no longer means what King believed it meant; it now means remaining pure by turning “Your Back on Bush,” as recent protesters did at the inauguration, even if the result wasn’t anything more than making them feel better. Expressive anti-politics is the last refuge of the powerless. Impulsive, it bursts like a flame and then burns out, to be felt only in the heart of the participant while the ruling class, unperturbed, goes on its merry way.
The Right(’s) Lessons from the ’60s Burnout is a constant theme of 1968. We’ve heard the refrain about “tired radicals,” and the one about Yippies turning into yuppies. Even while appreciating the social movements from this time, Paul Berman (who was a part of it all) admits, “The uprisings proved amazingly unproductive in regard to conventional political or economic change.” The historian Alan Brinkley comments, “The new radicals” of 1968 “never developed the organizational or institutional skills necessary for building an enduring movement.”
Meanwhile, of course, an enduring movement was being built during the ’60s -- but it was on the right. Historians of the decade used to focus on left-wing organizations, writing books about sds, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, typically culminating in the tumult of 1968 and thus telling a story of factionalism and decline. Today, however, historians are growing more interested in documenting the right and telling a tale not of decline but of ascendance. James Miller, who wrote a marvelous book about sds, explained to the magazine Lingua Franca a few years back that “in terms of the political history of this country, the New Left just isn’t an important story.” Focusing on the left, he explained with a certain irony about his own historical work, evades “the extraordinary success of the forces that first supported [Barry] Goldwater, then [Ronald] Reagan as governor of California, and then [George] Wallace. I can’t help but see that absence in the historiography as integral to the mythologization of the Sixties.” Miller echoes the argument of M. Stanton Evans, a leading conservative intellectual and popular writer, who wrote, “Historians may well record the decade of the 1960s as the era in which conservatism, as a viable political force, finally came into its own.”
When Evans wrote that line he was discussing an organization that still grabs the attention of young historians today: Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). YAF’s membership was always more stable and often larger than SDS’s, but more importantly, the group created a longer-lasting infrastructure. It engaged young people philosophically, through a ringing endorsement of liberty and individualism; but it also engaged them with well-organized chapters on campuses that cultivated long-lasting skills for activists (Richard Viguerie, for instance, pioneered his direct-mail tactics through YAF). YAF worked with the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists to coordinate lectures of right-wing thinkers and circulate conservative books to students. It linked up with Goldwater and Reagan, supplying an army of young volunteers for their campaigns. Did it engage in protest? Certainly not. During its “heyday in the early ’60s,” Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin point out, YAF members went to “the lectern and the party caucus more than into the streets.”
The networks of YAF were replicated for adults in places like Orange County, California. Here, there were chapters of the John Birch Society that supported local school-board candidates and institutions like the Orange County School of Anti-Communism, where conservatives could fraternize, learn about boycotts of corporations selling products to communist countries, and hear Reagan speak before he even considered a run for governor. There were also barbecues, coffee klatches, and discussion groups that congealed a conservative animosity toward the federal government and liberalism. Churches and right-wing bookstores helped provide “movement centers,” and the infrastructure was especially impressive considering the decentralized, suburban setting.
These networks explain the passion and long-lasting influence behind Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964. Traditionally, the campaign was seen as a right-wing disaster. Goldwater’s convention speech in favor of “extremism” still sounds scary. But now, more remarkable is the infrastructure that stood behind Goldwater. A strong network of activists worked hard to push the Republican Party toward the right, away from centrists like Nelson Rockefeller. It wasn’t enough to win the presidency in 1964, but that same infrastructure -- YAF, John Birch Society chapters, and general right-wing networks -- helped Reagan become governor of California in 1966. As Isserman and Kazin explain, conservatives “sustained morale and kept expanding their numbers for years after the young radicals had splintered in various directions.”
We can link this scholarship about conservative grass-roots activism to something already well-known: that throughout the 1960s, the right was developing ideas that would come to fruition much later. Leading this initiative was the well-known (now at least) American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Though founded in 1943, it changed form during the 1960s. Its leader, William Baroody, believed it should not just reflect the right’s primary “special interest” -- corporations -- but develop bigger ideas. Baroody “understood,” as Sidney Blumenthal explained in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, “that without conservative theory there could be no conservative movement.” Baroody forged alliances with the Goldwater campaign quietly, behind the scenes. He focused on long-term goals so that, when the excesses of the ’60s erupted, there was a place neoconservative intellectuals could go to develop their ideas during the ’70s. The AEI articulated both particular public policies and a broader philosophy of the free market -- something that undergirds conservative political action today. And, of course, it provided a model for other conservative think tanks during the ’70s.
The power of YAF, grass-roots networks, and think tanks like the AEI show that the right focused its energy on infrastructure and ideas during a time when the left focused on protest. The right’s tactics weren’t loud or theatrical. Its activists operated under the radar to lay the groundwork. They worked almost entirely within the system, changing the Republican Party from moderate to conservative precinct by precinct. And their story challenges the left-wing narrative of idealism during the decade. That’s precisely why it should inform the way liberals think about the future. To win real power, liberals need to think about infrastructure, institutions, and ideas. And they’re not going to get these if they look to the late ’60s for inspiration.
The Spirit of 1948: New Ideas in the Old This is especially true for ideas. Who now reads left-wing books from 1968? Just try Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It or Woodstock Nation. Or try Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, a puff piece about the “non-intellective” exploration of “visionary splendor” and “human communion.” Or read the prognostication of “revolution” of “consciousness” in Charles Reich’s The Greening of America. Read even the otherwise smart Susan Sontag, who praises the worst elements of Third World revolutions in Styles of Radical Will (she later stood down from many of those positions). All of these books reflect a utopian hallucination not dissimilar from the style of protests on the streets of Chicago in 1968.
Younger thinkers today are going further back than the ’60s to rediscover good ideas. It’s been the Cold War liberalism of the ’40s and ’50s that has garnered the most interest. Books like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center or Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History or John Kenneth Galbraith’s American Capitalism seem much more interesting than The Making of a Counter Culture. There’s good reason for this, because though we might feel closer to the ’60s chronologically, our own age is much more parallel to the ’40s. Then, as now, liberals faced an international enemy -- Niebuhr’s “children of darkness” -- willing to murder for salvation. Then, as now, liberals confronted conservatives who entertained dangerous ideas of launching preemptive wars abroad while slashing social programs at home. And, if we take the ’48ers up to 1952 and the election of JFK in 1960, then, as now, liberals were often an opposition party.
The ’48ers knew they had to articulate a public philosophy, the way conservatives would later. They sketched out broad principles that transcended liberal interest groups. Those principles grew out of their faith in the American nation as a community of citizens sharing mutual obligations to one another -- the sort that they saw during World War II and that they hoped could live on afterward. The ideas of national greatness and patriotism grounded their political thought. They upheld a public purpose that highlighted the weaknesses of the libertarian right and led them to criticize the “social imbalance” of a society enamored of consumerism and markets, and not America’s civic fabric. Politically, they supported the idea of a “pluralist” government with many voices participating, not just those of business and privilege. They wanted influence on the inside, not protest from the outside. In The Vital Center, Schlesinger wrote, “Our democratic tradition has been at its best an activist tradition. It has found its fulfillment, not in complaint or in escapism, but in responsibility and decision.”
The ’48ers, so far as I know, never marched against American actions abroad. What they did do was construct a framework for a liberal foreign policy, a robust alternative to conservative emphasis on military action and “rolling back” the enemy. The idea of containment was not simply a doctrine of realism but a moral disposition toward the demands of national power. America certainly had a strong role to play abroad, the ’48ers argued, but it had to do so with a sense of “humility.” So, for instance, Niebuhr, drawing upon Christian ethics (not yet the sole property of the right), argued against “preventive war.” Those who articulated such an idea “assume a prescience about the future which no man or nation possesses.” He went on to explain, “We would, I think, have a better chance of success in our struggle against a fanatical foe if we were less sure of our purity and virtue.” Learning this lesson required America to work with others to “reconstruct” poorer economies as much as engage with military power. This was to be a war of ideas as well as guns.
These thinkers didn’t just think; they put ideas into action. They attended international conferences of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, where they argued that America stood for more than a prosperous consumer economy. (Richard Nixon had made this assertion to Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, displaying a gleaming American kitchen to the Soviet leader at an exhibition fair; Galbraith chided Nixon’s equation of democracy with consumer triumph as a “simple-minded and mechanical view of man and his liberties.”) The ’48ers also befriended politicians. Unlike our own age, when politicians hire overpaid consultants with few ideas, during the ’50s, politicians turned to intellectuals. In 1953, Galbraith formed the Finletter Group, which collected papers on topics by scholars and writers, crafted speeches, and found ways to have ideas inform public debate. Most famously, Americans for Democratic Action became an organizational forum where intellectuals and politicians could formulate foreign and domestic policy together. In this and other ways, they found outlets for ideas that could become a source of opposition as well as inspiration.
These strengths shouldn’t allow us to ignore their limitations. These thinkers took things for granted, including their privileged status as white, highly educated men. They sometimes had a hard time accepting the activism of the ’60s, and they were slow to see how their own anti-communism, legitimate though it was, could descend ineluctably into the disaster of Vietnam. Their experience of the staid 1950s, when bureaucratic corporations accustomed themselves to the welfare state, made them take Keynesian policies for granted. In going back to these thinkers, we need not romanticize them. Indeed, one of their central weaknesses, taking the welfare state for granted, should inspire our thinking today.
The Past’s Lessons for the Future This quick tour through postwar history gets us closer to what it means to be an opposition party today. First, we need to question the legacy of protest politics and political theater, which makes activists feel good but alienates and confuses others. We need to build a grass-roots infrastructure, like that developed by the right. We should also start reconstructing liberalism by going deeper into the past, while recognizing the limits any set of ideas from the past naturally have. These are some good first steps to take, but obviously they are just the beginning, and mostly about looking backward, not forward.
If we take these lessons seriously, our biggest challenge moving ahead is how to articulate our opposition to the right’s well-developed agenda while simultaneously developing a public philosophy like that of the ’48ers. The need for this became abundantly clear in the last presidential election. John Kerry lost because Americans didn’t understand what he stood for. They understood him as an opposition candidate but not as someone who had “values” that could be articulated and explained. This wasn’t just Kerry’s problem; it is the problem of liberalism generally. The public perceives liberalism negatively, due to the long war the right waged against it from the 1960s onward. Unlike the ’48ers, we cannot assume that our ideas resonate; we need to make them resonate.
To rearticulate liberal ideals while acting in opposition is not as hard as first appears. Take Social Security. Clearly, Bush is surprised by the backlash against privatization, as he scrambles around the country garnering support. This appears a dream come true for progressives, but it’s much more. It’s a challenge to articulate not just opposition but a public philosophy that can explain what liberals stand for. We shouldn’t defend a program inherited from the New Deal in a rearguard fashion but should reiterate the idea of a shared national purpose based on collective sacrifice.
Nor should we turn this into a demographic issue and bank on the elderly supporting Democrats; that’s interest-group politics, not a long-range public philosophy. We need to explain what Social Security teaches the nation about deeper principles. Why do Americans react against the term “privatize”? Because there is still a sense of shared obligation to one another, and it’s up to liberals to articulate that public philosophy while they oppose the president. We can show how the president’s proposal reflects the “social imbalance” the ’48ers perceived, the elevation of the self’s interest above the common good. None of this requires protest. It requires public argument. The time for protest may come, but it will undoubtedly rely on a change of leadership first and serious thinking about strategy later.
The same needs to be done on foreign policy. It’s not good enough to protest the Iraq War. Occasionally, Kerry articulated an alternative, albeit muted, to Bush’s foreign policy that embraced the ’48er idea of national humility and a critique of hubris. Today, we need to articulate this liberal foreign policy more forcefully. Its central message should be that American responsibility abroad shouldn’t rely on guns alone or a sense of superior moral virtue. Liberals should argue for nurturing civil society and democratic institutions throughout the world, envisioning an equivalent of the Marshall Plan for the Middle East and elsewhere. Liberals need to emphasize that the war against terrorism is a war of ideas as much as a war of military power and intelligence. Like the ’48ers, liberal intellectuals should define America abroad as more than just its well-known Hollywood films. We need not allow Bush to expropriate the rhetoric of democracy and freedom; we need to reshape these ideas in a more responsible and meaningful manner.
Liberals must also talk about shared sacrifice during wartime. This shouldn’t be about getting the military vote, even if that wouldn’t hurt. The tradition of national greatness expects shared sacrifice from all members of our society. As JFK quipped, “Ask what you can do for your country.” Only liberals will make it clear that the wealthiest elements of society should provide for the common good, so that we have enough to pay veterans’ benefits and provide other services. None of this will come from protest marches against the war, which to date have accomplished little more -- as unfair as this might seem -- than to permit the partisans of the right to raise questions about the left’s patriotism.
The problem with what I outline here is the lack of places to build articulate ideas and have them inform the thinking of Democratic politicians. Now is certainly the time for progressives to invest in building an infrastructure -- the only alternative to spasmodic protests in the streets. The term “progressive infrastructure” seems to spark interest among some funders today, especially considering how the quickie infrastructure built in 2004 -- notably America Coming Together -- didn’t quite do the trick. It’s time for institutions that can approximate what Americans for Democratic Action did during the Cold War -- provide a space where thinkers and politicians meet -- and build local networks. Of course, this requires that Democratic politicians stop relying so heavily on overpaid consultants, and that wealthier progressives pony up money for institutions without immediate impact.
This leaves open the question of how to relate to the “actually existing” protest left today. The ’48er spirit was recently invoked to call for a purge of the protest wing of the left today. Writing in The New Republic, Peter Beinart suggested that MoveOn should be pushed out of a more responsible left. While I think MoveOn deserves criticism for its pacifism and teaming up with hard-left dinosaurs like ANSWER, it doesn’t merit a purge (purge from what, exactly?). What MoveOn needs is an articulation of the principle of “responsibility” that Schlesinger set out against the spirit of alienated protest. There’s reason for hope on this front. After all, Mother Jones described MoveOn’s young leader, Eli Pariser, as a “scruffy indie-rock fan who not long ago was chanting anti-globalization slogans and confronting riot police at World Bank meetings.” At one anti–International Monetary Fund protest, though, he talked with police and, in his own words, “realized that the scripted confrontation of attacking and antagonizing them wasn’t going to get us anywhere. It changed the way I was thinking, tactically.” This idea of laying groundwork for an infrastructure also came out in MoveOn’s work during the last election; it didn’t succeed, but with a little help from a stronger intellectual infrastructure in the future, it might.
My tempered hope about this comes from a sense of urgency about the Bush administration. Such a sense threatens to degenerate into protest theatrics and expressive anti-politics. Instead of embracing those styles from the past, liberals should take their lessons from the right during the 1960s. Liberals will never be as powerful as the right. That’s not just because the right is richer but because the liberal faith is, by definition, weaker. Unlike evangelical Christianity, liberalism can never provide absolute zeal or commitment. We can draw some inspiration from the “fighting faith” of the ’48ers’ liberalism, but we also face challenges that they never faced, especially the infrastructure the right has built over the last few decades. With this said, liberals don’t need to be as weak as they are now. We need not recycle protest and alienation from the past. Liberals have been in the opposition before, and they’ve managed to win back political power. But it took care and precision and some serious thinking about strategy. That’s our charge today.
Kevin Mattson teaches American history at Ohio University and is the author, most recently, of When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Kevin Mattson, "Goodbye to All That", The American Prospect Online, Mar 28, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
gender and sexuality issue
While comes up with the inquiry of Chinese modernity, focusing on the issue of gender and sexuality might be the last stage despite the emancipation of women or marriage was one of the most important appeal for the youth in May Fourth period and later. Rey Chow brought the issue of the narration and modernity and refereed to Eileen Chang’s descriptions of 'feminity-as-detial' as diminishing the society's dream of a collective humanity. Chow's approach and viewpoint of the conclusion is in the light of various theories of 'de-', such as deconstruction. In reading the story of A Xiao, Rey Chow regarded the servant girl was a contrast with upper-class and educated women characters and revealed a basic resistance in the trivialized and privatized affective structure. I am most willing to appreciate her effort from the peripheral or feminist viewpoint; however, I cannot be as optimistic as Chow as other theories of 'de-' and 'post-.' Concluding the triviality as feminity and as resistance is too easy a way to deconstruct the collective and the whole society.
Masculinity Besieged/ Femininity Beset
Masculinity Besieged/ Femininity Beset
In this week’s reading we are examining the cultural formation of gender as it was constructed in, through and beside the writing of fiction in Modern China, focusing particular on two broad time frames: May 4th and Post Mao. The majority of the works here are feminist in stance, but the variety of approaches, and conclusions is astounding, especially when we consider how these texts would affect our reading/interpretation of A Woman Like Me…are we seeing an internal world that can be categorized as engaging in the creation of a feminine subjectivity…are there traces of “feminine detail” or is the difficulty associated for our protagonist with finding a partner a product of the shadow of death across her when confronting the male of the post Mao era? These texts Lu Tonglin’s baldly titled Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism and Oppositional Politics, Sang Tzelan’s The Emerging Lesbian (which always makes me think of some kind of horror movie…the creature from the black lagoon maybe?} Zhong Xueping’s Maculinity Beseiged and Rey Chow’s Woman and Chinese Modernity. (the title of which I think sums up a lot of my problems with the work, I am reminded of the suffragist quote: “we speak of women and women’s suffrage. We do not speak of Woman with a capital W. That we leave to our enemies.”) in my opinion must all be considered to approach the way in which both (2? More?) genders and sexuality are being understood both through the text and in the wider social context of the time, as exemplified in characterization and importantly criticism. I found Lu Tonglin’s discussions of Can Xue particularly interesting. Lu writes uses a French feminist understanding of linguistic formation as imbued with the phallic, as a jumping off point for re addressing incoherence, logical dissonance and conflict in Can Xue’s work as a challenge to the phallic or phallogocentric order, and a subversive use of the master tool of language violence used with such deliberateness during and if we consider the implementation of bai hua as part of it, before the Maoist Era. I think this is indeed fair, however that is not to say that I believe that can Xue is creating a Chinese version of ecriture feminine in the process…this is also a conclusion which Lu herself seems wary of. Although I find the arguments of Irigaray for the creation of a “feminine order” one concerned with the chora,, the material and the fluid, (to me, nothing less than a great bowing to the construction of the feminine and females within the phallic order and providing no out for those not aligning themselves with either of these two polar choices) generally unconvincing as a means of subversion and reductive analytically, Lu Tonglin’s exploration of the subject matter, language and crucially, I think reception of Can Xue’s work allows her to gently probe the limitations of this theoretical oeuvre in the contemporary Chinese context and point out where Can Xue differs and is similar to her male counterparts contemporary and past. In this regard we may perhaps think of her images of frozen fire and recall the analysis of the dead fire motif of Lu Xun that Lu so successfully unpacks. In this respect, Lu’s writing on this subject suggests that in fact Can Xue’s work does have a precedent, and a lineage, despite her statements that it does not follow a school overtly in the sense that many contemporary male writers do, Can Xue, like everyone else, inherits the discursive history she grew up in, and her outsider status, whether constructed or perceived has benefits as well as problems attached to it…one may ask whether the same critics who accuse her of insanity, of schizophrenia or history would attach the same accusations to the works of say Andre Breton, or Charles Henri Ford? In the end we may think about question of the “hysterical” and the “pathological” in the representation of female identity…to what extent does Can Xue re-incribe and re-inhabit these, bringing out their pitfalls and their subversive potential?
Sang Tzelan’s book, Tthe Emerging Lesbian alongside books by Evans, and Barlow provides us with a loose chart to changes in representations of the self as a sexual and gendered being and the environment that fostered these. Importantly, this and other texts examining gender in modern China take on the issue of language and neologism, the approximation and ambiguities in translation…the variety of meaning of different categories of woman (funu, nuren, nuxing) and the changing meaning of xing, as markers of political and social change. Sang takes an approach inspired by the writings of Foucault and later interpretations by others in the field of Queer Theory to explore the usefulness of a term like “lesbian” (itself decidedly western and basically imbued with synecdoche) in not only a different historical context but a different cultural context to the one in which it is commonly used today. Using the literary she seeks to discover the parameters of same sex relationships in the 20’s, how they operated, how they were understood both by those in them and by the wider society and how they were represented. The revolutionary potential, the political power, and sense of community Sang finds manifested in certain interpretations of this community in writing of the May 4th period, in the context of the brief flowering of the “free love” movement, prior to what we may understand as the codifying of modern morality (the basis of modern literature, according to Chow) is something we may also consider when examining masculinity in this context, as is done by Zhong Xueping.
It seems to me that if Zhong took a little bit more Freud, or perhaps Lacan into her analysis and Chow lost a bit, both books would be more balanced. That Zhong is perpetually bewildered by the mixture of sexuality and death in Half of Man is Woman and Winter’s Gate mystifies me. She traces the trajectory by which the hyper masculine image used frequently as a cultural symbol in the Maoist era (and particularly in the cultural revolution) is in fact de-humanized through his lack of sexuality, but simultaneously portrayed as something of an ubermensch ( I would argue that this image and the ascetic aspect of it may have some traditional links in the idea of dissipation of qi and the Buddhist ascetic), and further shows that there is a strong death impulse associated with the sex imagery of particularly heterosexual intercourse in contemporary literature. Apart from the more obvious Freudian interpretation that would have us view intercourse as castration and the woman as grave, giving free rein to one’s libidinal impulses, in the historical context that arises from the prior disavowal of these same impulses for the creation of the healthy nation (both in cultural, literary and scientific formations of modern china) must be seen to be supremely human, and thus utterly imbued with the concept of mortality. The “masculine” that these male writers and protagonist strive for does not exist. The man’s man, the real man, does not exist in the same place as the human and in order to bring him about one’s humanity, the “he” of Half of Man is Woman, and the genital must be destroyed even as in a complex way potency must be manifested through them.
In other works that we have read in previous weeks it has been suggested that as a consequence of the iconoclastic bent of the May 4th movement, the Law of the Father was, if not entirely absent, much diminished in the cultural milieu of contemporary China. It seems to me that rather, the phallus continues to cast a long shadow. ☺
In this week’s reading we are examining the cultural formation of gender as it was constructed in, through and beside the writing of fiction in Modern China, focusing particular on two broad time frames: May 4th and Post Mao. The majority of the works here are feminist in stance, but the variety of approaches, and conclusions is astounding, especially when we consider how these texts would affect our reading/interpretation of A Woman Like Me…are we seeing an internal world that can be categorized as engaging in the creation of a feminine subjectivity…are there traces of “feminine detail” or is the difficulty associated for our protagonist with finding a partner a product of the shadow of death across her when confronting the male of the post Mao era? These texts Lu Tonglin’s baldly titled Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism and Oppositional Politics, Sang Tzelan’s The Emerging Lesbian (which always makes me think of some kind of horror movie…the creature from the black lagoon maybe?} Zhong Xueping’s Maculinity Beseiged and Rey Chow’s Woman and Chinese Modernity. (the title of which I think sums up a lot of my problems with the work, I am reminded of the suffragist quote: “we speak of women and women’s suffrage. We do not speak of Woman with a capital W. That we leave to our enemies.”) in my opinion must all be considered to approach the way in which both (2? More?) genders and sexuality are being understood both through the text and in the wider social context of the time, as exemplified in characterization and importantly criticism. I found Lu Tonglin’s discussions of Can Xue particularly interesting. Lu writes uses a French feminist understanding of linguistic formation as imbued with the phallic, as a jumping off point for re addressing incoherence, logical dissonance and conflict in Can Xue’s work as a challenge to the phallic or phallogocentric order, and a subversive use of the master tool of language violence used with such deliberateness during and if we consider the implementation of bai hua as part of it, before the Maoist Era. I think this is indeed fair, however that is not to say that I believe that can Xue is creating a Chinese version of ecriture feminine in the process…this is also a conclusion which Lu herself seems wary of. Although I find the arguments of Irigaray for the creation of a “feminine order” one concerned with the chora,, the material and the fluid, (to me, nothing less than a great bowing to the construction of the feminine and females within the phallic order and providing no out for those not aligning themselves with either of these two polar choices) generally unconvincing as a means of subversion and reductive analytically, Lu Tonglin’s exploration of the subject matter, language and crucially, I think reception of Can Xue’s work allows her to gently probe the limitations of this theoretical oeuvre in the contemporary Chinese context and point out where Can Xue differs and is similar to her male counterparts contemporary and past. In this regard we may perhaps think of her images of frozen fire and recall the analysis of the dead fire motif of Lu Xun that Lu so successfully unpacks. In this respect, Lu’s writing on this subject suggests that in fact Can Xue’s work does have a precedent, and a lineage, despite her statements that it does not follow a school overtly in the sense that many contemporary male writers do, Can Xue, like everyone else, inherits the discursive history she grew up in, and her outsider status, whether constructed or perceived has benefits as well as problems attached to it…one may ask whether the same critics who accuse her of insanity, of schizophrenia or history would attach the same accusations to the works of say Andre Breton, or Charles Henri Ford? In the end we may think about question of the “hysterical” and the “pathological” in the representation of female identity…to what extent does Can Xue re-incribe and re-inhabit these, bringing out their pitfalls and their subversive potential?
Sang Tzelan’s book, Tthe Emerging Lesbian alongside books by Evans, and Barlow provides us with a loose chart to changes in representations of the self as a sexual and gendered being and the environment that fostered these. Importantly, this and other texts examining gender in modern China take on the issue of language and neologism, the approximation and ambiguities in translation…the variety of meaning of different categories of woman (funu, nuren, nuxing) and the changing meaning of xing, as markers of political and social change. Sang takes an approach inspired by the writings of Foucault and later interpretations by others in the field of Queer Theory to explore the usefulness of a term like “lesbian” (itself decidedly western and basically imbued with synecdoche) in not only a different historical context but a different cultural context to the one in which it is commonly used today. Using the literary she seeks to discover the parameters of same sex relationships in the 20’s, how they operated, how they were understood both by those in them and by the wider society and how they were represented. The revolutionary potential, the political power, and sense of community Sang finds manifested in certain interpretations of this community in writing of the May 4th period, in the context of the brief flowering of the “free love” movement, prior to what we may understand as the codifying of modern morality (the basis of modern literature, according to Chow) is something we may also consider when examining masculinity in this context, as is done by Zhong Xueping.
It seems to me that if Zhong took a little bit more Freud, or perhaps Lacan into her analysis and Chow lost a bit, both books would be more balanced. That Zhong is perpetually bewildered by the mixture of sexuality and death in Half of Man is Woman and Winter’s Gate mystifies me. She traces the trajectory by which the hyper masculine image used frequently as a cultural symbol in the Maoist era (and particularly in the cultural revolution) is in fact de-humanized through his lack of sexuality, but simultaneously portrayed as something of an ubermensch ( I would argue that this image and the ascetic aspect of it may have some traditional links in the idea of dissipation of qi and the Buddhist ascetic), and further shows that there is a strong death impulse associated with the sex imagery of particularly heterosexual intercourse in contemporary literature. Apart from the more obvious Freudian interpretation that would have us view intercourse as castration and the woman as grave, giving free rein to one’s libidinal impulses, in the historical context that arises from the prior disavowal of these same impulses for the creation of the healthy nation (both in cultural, literary and scientific formations of modern china) must be seen to be supremely human, and thus utterly imbued with the concept of mortality. The “masculine” that these male writers and protagonist strive for does not exist. The man’s man, the real man, does not exist in the same place as the human and in order to bring him about one’s humanity, the “he” of Half of Man is Woman, and the genital must be destroyed even as in a complex way potency must be manifested through them.
In other works that we have read in previous weeks it has been suggested that as a consequence of the iconoclastic bent of the May 4th movement, the Law of the Father was, if not entirely absent, much diminished in the cultural milieu of contemporary China. It seems to me that rather, the phallus continues to cast a long shadow. ☺
Monday, March 21, 2005
CAST YOUR VOTE
I am just reminding anybody who happens to look at the blog today or tomorrow to cast your vote of confidence on Summers. Regardless of the direction of your convictions I really feel this is a significant moment, and I am providing the information that was in the email sent out by the GSC and the link to the anonymous voting site on my blog, so that if you have misplaced the email sent out you can find that info there.
For that purpose, please feel free to go to: http://sirensmirror.blogspot.com
see you all wednesday!
Danielle
For that purpose, please feel free to go to: http://sirensmirror.blogspot.com
see you all wednesday!
Danielle
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
response part 1: hu feng, the nation and the subject
CONSTITUTING THE NATION: WHAT IS THE SOUL OF THE MODERN MAN?
In our reading of the last 2 weeks I believe that a complex web of linkages between the constitution of the nation state, the notion of the modern and the creation of the subject has become apparent. In my response below I seek to begin to explore these linkages through the politics of the PRC literary field as they relate to the subject and to the work of authors Can Xue and Lu Ling whose writings though related explore subjectivity and society in quite different ways and in different contexts.
1. THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE EMBRACE:
After many years in prison and off the record books of literature, Hu Feng and Lu Ling have re-emerged into the literary consciousness of the PRC. Previously identified as comprising an unsavory and un-revolutionary “clique” jituan 集团 imperiling the revolutionary project we must ask what it is about Hu Feng’s conception, and Lu Ling’s representation of the subject, of individualism and subjectivity, variously described, and inscribed within a leftist discourse that constituted such a threat to the wellbeing of the body literary/politic that they had to be expunged with such zealous virulence. Further to this and looking at the works of Kirk Denton and Lydia Liu, we should consider the state of subjectivity and individualism in Chinese literature relative to the thought of Hu and what it is about his works and those of Lu Ling that enabled them to have resonance with the post-Mao populace of China sufficiently that their authors and the school they represented were re-embraced, rehabilitated from a jituan to a pai 派 as Denton argues.
I spoke above of the literary consciousness of China and perhaps that is precisely the heart of the matter…is the issue of sovereignty truly separate from that of consciousness? Sovereignty being the making and definition of a national identity separate from the auspices and pressures of other invading forces, contrasted against these aggressors and against those nations lacking in agency, or sovereignty and indeed modernity can indeed be seen to be on the same continuum as the constitution of the individual subject, the individual consciousness and the individual interior life. We may think of the May 4th arguments for China’s rightful and sovereign position to lie somewhere between the modern poles (as they saw them) of Japan and Europe (or the US). We may like to make a link between this kind of national self-constitution and Bourdieu’s idea of the triangular literary field, seeing a parallel here with between the nation striving for sovereignty and the avant-garde that creates itself through “double-disavowal” (also cf. “the Third man group” and Hu Feng’s own vision of the group that grew up around Hope and July). This also perhaps again points to the relationship between the national and the individual that occurs along link of desire as in the case of the geming jia aiqing tradition and It is interesting to note on this score that the content of Hu Feng’s Journal Qiyue (July) was largely a mixture of war reportage and poetry, the overtly national/political and the romantic/lyrical.
“In the mid-1940s, in the wake of the Yan’an Rectification campaign, Hu Feng was attacked by party critics for promoting “subjectivism” (zhuguan zhuyi), which to them was idealist and sought a dynamic role for the subject in social transformation that conflicted with official materialist ideology and the primacy of the Party in historical transformation.”
Kirk Denton “The Hu Feng Group: The Genealogy of a Literary School” obtained through MCLC
The subjectivity of Hu Feng as described by Denton in both the above quoted essay and the section of his book that we have examined places his ideas within a context of Confucian concepts of self improvement as well as at the 3rd position within the nexus of ideological foment occurring between the 20’s and the talks at Yan’an; what is described is a vision of the self as produced both by social interaction and individual creativity, an agent that may at times grate against the
“mechanical determinism” (jixie juedinglun 机械决定论) of Maoist Marxist thought . In this way Hu Feng’s self is more akin to the fractured soul of the modern than to the proscribed positions advocated by Mao Zedong even as he places it in the service of a leftist agenda, and it can be seen that this is a significant step to departing from the wholeness of the enlightenment polemic of self knowledge that in many senses was reproduced in politically inflected literature of China at the time. That writing that opens up the possibility for an individual will to both move in concert with, to lead and to inform as well as be constituted by the “masses” should be rejected in the process of rectification of literature of the CCP following the talks at Yan’an should come as no surprise, since just as fragmentation and doubt of the self must be suppressed in order to create a solid national subject that can operate efficiently to the greater endeavors of the state, so polyphony in the literary constitution of the leftist body politic must be suppressed in order to create a sovereignty that is similarly self knowing, similarly delineated and superficially unperturbed by hybridity within itself. Thus the “other” is cast.
Hu Feng identified himself with the project and person of Lu Xun, and re-emerging into the literary landscape we can certainly see both the link and the tension between the writing projects and visions of these two authors. As Kuangren Riji implies, a radical outsider cannot truly exist, a person is always implicated in the society that in part creates him, and just as the madman suspects himself of having eaten human flesh, the third position of Hu Feng cannot be thought of as a radical outside, but rather a further product of the political and literary milieu, even as his subject may be one that disturbs the Manichean dualism so conducive to the aims of political struggle of the maoist type. This in-between-ness, this liminal and ambivalent position is one present too in the writings of Hu Feng;s protégé Lu Ling. Lu Ling seeks to explore the project of writing "for" the subaltern with a critical, one might say an “objective” eye, and as a consequence his writings and the vision of the self that is present in his writing is complicated, and imbued with the uncanny…the self that sees society around it as at once horrific and familiar.
In our reading of the last 2 weeks I believe that a complex web of linkages between the constitution of the nation state, the notion of the modern and the creation of the subject has become apparent. In my response below I seek to begin to explore these linkages through the politics of the PRC literary field as they relate to the subject and to the work of authors Can Xue and Lu Ling whose writings though related explore subjectivity and society in quite different ways and in different contexts.
1. THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE EMBRACE:
After many years in prison and off the record books of literature, Hu Feng and Lu Ling have re-emerged into the literary consciousness of the PRC. Previously identified as comprising an unsavory and un-revolutionary “clique” jituan 集团 imperiling the revolutionary project we must ask what it is about Hu Feng’s conception, and Lu Ling’s representation of the subject, of individualism and subjectivity, variously described, and inscribed within a leftist discourse that constituted such a threat to the wellbeing of the body literary/politic that they had to be expunged with such zealous virulence. Further to this and looking at the works of Kirk Denton and Lydia Liu, we should consider the state of subjectivity and individualism in Chinese literature relative to the thought of Hu and what it is about his works and those of Lu Ling that enabled them to have resonance with the post-Mao populace of China sufficiently that their authors and the school they represented were re-embraced, rehabilitated from a jituan to a pai 派 as Denton argues.
I spoke above of the literary consciousness of China and perhaps that is precisely the heart of the matter…is the issue of sovereignty truly separate from that of consciousness? Sovereignty being the making and definition of a national identity separate from the auspices and pressures of other invading forces, contrasted against these aggressors and against those nations lacking in agency, or sovereignty and indeed modernity can indeed be seen to be on the same continuum as the constitution of the individual subject, the individual consciousness and the individual interior life. We may think of the May 4th arguments for China’s rightful and sovereign position to lie somewhere between the modern poles (as they saw them) of Japan and Europe (or the US). We may like to make a link between this kind of national self-constitution and Bourdieu’s idea of the triangular literary field, seeing a parallel here with between the nation striving for sovereignty and the avant-garde that creates itself through “double-disavowal” (also cf. “the Third man group” and Hu Feng’s own vision of the group that grew up around Hope and July). This also perhaps again points to the relationship between the national and the individual that occurs along link of desire as in the case of the geming jia aiqing tradition and It is interesting to note on this score that the content of Hu Feng’s Journal Qiyue (July) was largely a mixture of war reportage and poetry, the overtly national/political and the romantic/lyrical.
“In the mid-1940s, in the wake of the Yan’an Rectification campaign, Hu Feng was attacked by party critics for promoting “subjectivism” (zhuguan zhuyi), which to them was idealist and sought a dynamic role for the subject in social transformation that conflicted with official materialist ideology and the primacy of the Party in historical transformation.”
Kirk Denton “The Hu Feng Group: The Genealogy of a Literary School” obtained through MCLC
The subjectivity of Hu Feng as described by Denton in both the above quoted essay and the section of his book that we have examined places his ideas within a context of Confucian concepts of self improvement as well as at the 3rd position within the nexus of ideological foment occurring between the 20’s and the talks at Yan’an; what is described is a vision of the self as produced both by social interaction and individual creativity, an agent that may at times grate against the
“mechanical determinism” (jixie juedinglun 机械决定论) of Maoist Marxist thought . In this way Hu Feng’s self is more akin to the fractured soul of the modern than to the proscribed positions advocated by Mao Zedong even as he places it in the service of a leftist agenda, and it can be seen that this is a significant step to departing from the wholeness of the enlightenment polemic of self knowledge that in many senses was reproduced in politically inflected literature of China at the time. That writing that opens up the possibility for an individual will to both move in concert with, to lead and to inform as well as be constituted by the “masses” should be rejected in the process of rectification of literature of the CCP following the talks at Yan’an should come as no surprise, since just as fragmentation and doubt of the self must be suppressed in order to create a solid national subject that can operate efficiently to the greater endeavors of the state, so polyphony in the literary constitution of the leftist body politic must be suppressed in order to create a sovereignty that is similarly self knowing, similarly delineated and superficially unperturbed by hybridity within itself. Thus the “other” is cast.
Hu Feng identified himself with the project and person of Lu Xun, and re-emerging into the literary landscape we can certainly see both the link and the tension between the writing projects and visions of these two authors. As Kuangren Riji implies, a radical outsider cannot truly exist, a person is always implicated in the society that in part creates him, and just as the madman suspects himself of having eaten human flesh, the third position of Hu Feng cannot be thought of as a radical outside, but rather a further product of the political and literary milieu, even as his subject may be one that disturbs the Manichean dualism so conducive to the aims of political struggle of the maoist type. This in-between-ness, this liminal and ambivalent position is one present too in the writings of Hu Feng;s protégé Lu Ling. Lu Ling seeks to explore the project of writing "for" the subaltern with a critical, one might say an “objective” eye, and as a consequence his writings and the vision of the self that is present in his writing is complicated, and imbued with the uncanny…the self that sees society around it as at once horrific and familiar.
Chinese subjectivity
This week's reading suggests that the self/ subjectivity engendered in the chaos of modernity to a practical purpose: to save China. It seems that the subjectivity emerged due to, in C.T. Hsia's terminology, the obsession with China. Indeed from the late Qing thinkers to post-May Fourth intellectuals, the motive or stimulus of revolution in every field was the tremendous fear of the clash of China and strong desire to revive it. In this context, the subjectivity in modern China was to be distinguished from the self-consciousness in Western culture(s), to which Denton and Lydia Liu claim to be one of the sources of modern Chinese subjectivity. Furthermore, the obsession with China would lead to distinguish the subjectivity in modern China from the self-consciousness in pre-modern China such as Wei Jin period. Here comes the question. Why Chinese intellectuals in the late 19th century and early 20th century were obsessed to 'China' to such a great extent, compared to intellectuals in other epochs or other parts of the world? Lydia Liu's discussion regarding the issue of foreign and 'central state' might be helpful.
My personal question is why Lydia Liu adopted the terminology of 'translingual practice' in her books? Because that multiple languages involved in the shaping of Chinese self? Is that trans-cultural practice?
My personal question is why Lydia Liu adopted the terminology of 'translingual practice' in her books? Because that multiple languages involved in the shaping of Chinese self? Is that trans-cultural practice?
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Imported Modernism
In her book, Shu-mei Shih regards modernism in China, from May Fourth period to 1930s, as an imported product from Western civilization and (Westernized) Japanese culture due to the metropolitan lure and colonial power. Sometimes I feel it is too easy to conclude that modernism is only an imported ideology. I would rather know more about the process and details of how the indigenous intellectual adopt and adapt the imported ism and on which ground they implanted foreign ism. Even if modernism could be mostly regarded as foreign species, it would be meaningful to know why this particular group of intellectuals rather than other group of elites are more likely inclined to modernism. While Shih considered the Republican Chinese writers were not critical to modernity in their practice of modernism, I cannot help but doubt that the Republican Chinese modernists were practicing a superficial version of modernism? That is, did they only grasp something "looks modern," such as racecourse, ice-cream or skyscrapers, (read: imported materiality) in their modernism works? Moreover, I would regard the concerns of the May Fourth intellectuals as modernization and modernity rather than modernism.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Come one Come all: OPEN MIC FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY
Sorry I am having a tendency to advertise here, but this is an event I am running happening on tuesday and I am hoping that some of you may be interested and come!
best,
SR65
--------------------------------------------------
Attn: MUSiCIAnS! POETS! WRITERS! ARTISTS!
Refreshments provided!
F***NISM
Is
Not
A Dirty
Word
Join us and share your words or words that inspire you at: “Woman’s Word”: a poetic open mic’ lounge on women, gender & feminism
MARCH 8th, International Women’s Day, @7.30pm, Dudley House, Café Gato rojo. Email: dfeo@fas.harvard.edu for details & early sign up
A project of Dudley Literary and the Harvard Anti-Sexist coalition
Sign the petition at: http://www.petitiononline.com/ashncls/petition.html
Can’t make it so late? Go to the Harvard anti-sexist coalition open mic on inequality & Gender at the Ticknor Lounge, Boyleston Hall, 5-6.30pm for a more political flavor, or just COME TO BOTH!!
best,
SR65
--------------------------------------------------
Attn: MUSiCIAnS! POETS! WRITERS! ARTISTS!
Refreshments provided!
F***NISM
Is
Not
A Dirty
Word
Join us and share your words or words that inspire you at: “Woman’s Word”: a poetic open mic’ lounge on women, gender & feminism
MARCH 8th, International Women’s Day, @7.30pm, Dudley House, Café Gato rojo. Email: dfeo@fas.harvard.edu for details & early sign up
A project of Dudley Literary and the Harvard Anti-Sexist coalition
Sign the petition at: http://www.petitiononline.com/ashncls/petition.html
Can’t make it so late? Go to the Harvard anti-sexist coalition open mic on inequality & Gender at the Ticknor Lounge, Boyleston Hall, 5-6.30pm for a more political flavor, or just COME TO BOTH!!
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Realism(s) In China
Realism(s) in Modern China
Through Anderson��s and Prof. Wang��s books, we are able to outline both the theory and the practice of Realism in modern China. In Anderson��s book, it is easy to consider that the debates between realistic groups of different standpoints were much eagerer and more violent than the debates between realists and romanticists. The diversity of modern Chinese Realism sometimes is not related to the poetic viewpoints of the participators but their politic positions. By reading Prof. Wang��s discussion on the lyric realism in Sheng Congwen��s fiction, the diversity of realism is manifested in the poetic aspect. First of all, I admit that I was confused by the distinction (or the ambiguity) of lyricism and romanticism. If Sheng Congwen��s fiction could be considered as ��lyricism,�� or in my understanding, lyric realism, how could he be a Realism writer? That is, if Sheng expressed his personal feeling, conveyed strong emotion or enthusiasm in his fiction, according to the definition of ��lyric,�� what is the difference between his realistic writing and Romantic writers such as Bai Wei, who shouted herself hoarse in Fight out the Ghost Tower? In my reading, Sheng Congwen��s fictions, just like the title ��Quiet,�� is quite quiet and calm in narrating tones. He never expressed his emotion excessively and most of the time we cannot recognize the implied author��s emotion in his fictions. Prof. Wang gave us the explanation my first question immediately in the begging of chapter seven in his book. Extending from Prof. Wang��s answer, in my understanding, Sheng��s fiction could be regarded as lyricism is because he expressed the emotion and collective subconsiousness of human rather his personal emotion that make his fictions lyric.
Through Anderson��s and Prof. Wang��s books, we are able to outline both the theory and the practice of Realism in modern China. In Anderson��s book, it is easy to consider that the debates between realistic groups of different standpoints were much eagerer and more violent than the debates between realists and romanticists. The diversity of modern Chinese Realism sometimes is not related to the poetic viewpoints of the participators but their politic positions. By reading Prof. Wang��s discussion on the lyric realism in Sheng Congwen��s fiction, the diversity of realism is manifested in the poetic aspect. First of all, I admit that I was confused by the distinction (or the ambiguity) of lyricism and romanticism. If Sheng Congwen��s fiction could be considered as ��lyricism,�� or in my understanding, lyric realism, how could he be a Realism writer? That is, if Sheng expressed his personal feeling, conveyed strong emotion or enthusiasm in his fiction, according to the definition of ��lyric,�� what is the difference between his realistic writing and Romantic writers such as Bai Wei, who shouted herself hoarse in Fight out the Ghost Tower? In my reading, Sheng Congwen��s fictions, just like the title ��Quiet,�� is quite quiet and calm in narrating tones. He never expressed his emotion excessively and most of the time we cannot recognize the implied author��s emotion in his fictions. Prof. Wang gave us the explanation my first question immediately in the begging of chapter seven in his book. Extending from Prof. Wang��s answer, in my understanding, Sheng��s fiction could be regarded as lyricism is because he expressed the emotion and collective subconsiousness of human rather his personal emotion that make his fictions lyric.
Realism
Anderson’s book is very inspiring in that he delineates in details the development of the so-called “realism” in the first part of last century– from the very beginning when the concept of “realism” was introduced to Chinese modern literature and increasingly became a hot issue either to the literary creations or to their critiques, along with numerous debates about the interpretation of the concept and the practice of the genre according to different political situations, finally to Mao’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum” where he addressed the issue of national forms and established a orthodoxy of opinion about the political function of literature. But we cannot help but notice that the concept of “realism”, which Anderson took for granted from western literature and employed as a genre to compare with its Chinese counterpart, is too simplified in his usage. “Realism,” as he defined, “is a fundamentally epistemological exercise, which involves testing the capacity of language to capture and communicate the Real.” But to what extent “the Real” could be captured and communicated in the literary works? What is “the Real”?
As Anderson traces back and compared the Chinese and western tradition, he suggests that Chinese literature has no “realism” to the west definition. The reason, firstly, as we all know, is the different ways of the representation or reflection of the outside world (Chinese people used to integrate the outside into their inner world and comprehend the world from the inside-- “Tian ren he yi,” while in the western tradition early from Aristotle the outside world is alienated and understood as a object awaiting for comprehension); secondly, as Anderson develops, is that the value of Chinese history and literature is not for their own sake. In other words, he stresses the intent of the author during his literary creation and takes it as a standard to investigate the “real” representations in the literary works. The “Real,” as we would discern from Anderson’s account,
As Anderson traces back and compared the Chinese and western tradition, he suggests that Chinese literature has no “realism” to the west definition. The reason, firstly, as we all know, is the different ways of the representation or reflection of the outside world (Chinese people used to integrate the outside into their inner world and comprehend the world from the inside-- “Tian ren he yi,” while in the western tradition early from Aristotle the outside world is alienated and understood as a object awaiting for comprehension); secondly, as Anderson develops, is that the value of Chinese history and literature is not for their own sake. In other words, he stresses the intent of the author during his literary creation and takes it as a standard to investigate the “real” representations in the literary works. The “Real,” as we would discern from Anderson’s account,
the eye and the I: the mirror focuses
Ok, I have the flu, so this is going to be shorter than usual, and possibly influenced by cold medicine, and I am sorry I always seem to be posting so late.
One of the interesting explorations of realism that Anderson goesthrough is a discussion of the mirror as a metaphor for the realist fictional work. I had often thought of the same logical point that he goes on to raise...that the mirror is NOT in fact a faithful representation of reality (great news to me at the moment: I look like death). THe mirror, like the camera, and the train of movement in the realist story, is dependent upon viewpoint, upon focus. THis makes the discussion of focus on kinds of detail ostensibly superfluous to plot development especially interesting, particularly with regard to the writing of Shen Congwen. If we follow the logic that it is only in those inexplicable moments of blank lull, of fixated attention on a sheet or a landscape that reality can be viewed we must ask why. It is suggested by Anderson that because these things are not FUNCTIONAL to a plot because they disrupt and disjoint, they behave in their confounding, in a :lifelike" manner. THat realism should be a method by which we seek a knowing mimesis of the world that is real because of its pretensions of being BEYOND THE AUTHOR"S IMAGINATION is also telling. The reality sought therefore must be unknown...cannot be known. In this sense the moments of stillness and detail that pop up in works by shen congwen, a sort of managed compulsion to look, even as they are indeed subject to the control, behest and artifice of the author may well manifest a reality as well as it can possibly be described, in that it is in those places that meanings are sought and sought and sought by critics because there is no one solid meaning, because in fact those moments represent a state of not understanding that IS the only element close to a truly objective eye. In other words that which is unknowable is the only thing that approaches a true Reality, and it is not a reality that is inside our epistemological bounds, it is one that MUST lie just outside of it, and therefore be beyond the quotidienne, the experience of reality that is perhaps more like what we would expect of realism.
One of the interesting explorations of realism that Anderson goesthrough is a discussion of the mirror as a metaphor for the realist fictional work. I had often thought of the same logical point that he goes on to raise...that the mirror is NOT in fact a faithful representation of reality (great news to me at the moment: I look like death). THe mirror, like the camera, and the train of movement in the realist story, is dependent upon viewpoint, upon focus. THis makes the discussion of focus on kinds of detail ostensibly superfluous to plot development especially interesting, particularly with regard to the writing of Shen Congwen. If we follow the logic that it is only in those inexplicable moments of blank lull, of fixated attention on a sheet or a landscape that reality can be viewed we must ask why. It is suggested by Anderson that because these things are not FUNCTIONAL to a plot because they disrupt and disjoint, they behave in their confounding, in a :lifelike" manner. THat realism should be a method by which we seek a knowing mimesis of the world that is real because of its pretensions of being BEYOND THE AUTHOR"S IMAGINATION is also telling. The reality sought therefore must be unknown...cannot be known. In this sense the moments of stillness and detail that pop up in works by shen congwen, a sort of managed compulsion to look, even as they are indeed subject to the control, behest and artifice of the author may well manifest a reality as well as it can possibly be described, in that it is in those places that meanings are sought and sought and sought by critics because there is no one solid meaning, because in fact those moments represent a state of not understanding that IS the only element close to a truly objective eye. In other words that which is unknowable is the only thing that approaches a true Reality, and it is not a reality that is inside our epistemological bounds, it is one that MUST lie just outside of it, and therefore be beyond the quotidienne, the experience of reality that is perhaps more like what we would expect of realism.
Monday, February 28, 2005
"I have revolutionary feelings for you.": PArt 1: Yu Dafu, romancing the self/romancing the collective
I apologize for this response being so delayed, but I have had flu oddly off and on...I had it with mostly just muscle aches and headache last week, it went away, and now it's back with cough and stuff, probably made worse by standing out in the cold rather a lot. SO forgive my response not being as long and detailed as usual. I felt it was kind of important to write something about this topic though since lat week was a particularly Revolutionary one. This topic of Revolution + Love came up more than once in class and with the demos and all, the whole week was steeped in the theatre of revolution.
"I have Revolutionary Feelings for You"
So this is a bit of phraseology from the Cultural Revolution, but it is interesting to see the use of Revolution in Maoist discourse as a euphemism for love, romance or attraction. Maybe by this point it is less a case of revolution PLUS love than a case of revolution AS love, and love, (very) occasionally as revolution. Obviously this is much later than the writings we have been looking at but it in some ways represents an extreme end of the discourse inside the Geming jia Aiqing genre. “Free Love” was one of the underpinning concepts at work in the doctrines of New Culture, often tied up together with the "Woman Question" as posed by an overwhelming male group of intellectuals. Love, marriage and sex, loosened from their moorings of "traditional" morality became free and radical and consequently immediately subject to a new set of moralities often times conjunct to political philosophy imported from the West (usually through Japan). In my opinion sex, romance and especially their relationship to the family and to matrimony are always politically inflected if not overtly political, and so the heightened relationship and tension between these at times of political upheaval should come as no surprise. Examples in abound in the West also, (consider the persecution of homosexuals as a consequence of relations drawn between homosexuality and communism in the McCarthy era, for example). Sexual morality and the mores surrounding love are usually pivotal to cultural streams and consequently often come under fire even in the course of political change that seems unrelated to them. Furthermore in this week’s readings we are investigating ROMANTICISM… the idealistic, aesthetic, lyrical and overestimated. That poltical change that requires investment of passions (sic) should speak in the language of romance especially as constructed to be diametrically opposed to a system equally constructed as disdaining the will of the individual makes sense…we are to fall in love with the movement and with the idea of ourselves as agents in it. It might even be worth considering the romanticism of the protests of 1989 along this continuum.
Libidinal energy is a powerful thing, one to be channeled and used for the aims of the revolution, and sexual frustration or excess in this context take on meaning far greater that the desires of a particular body, just as romance extends its influence to the creation of the self, as hero or as villain, a caizi or a blackguard, in any event thus in Freudian terms overestimated, as in the case of the object of many libidinal engagements. Yu Dafu's struggle with himself on and off the page of fiction illustrates precisely the crux of the contradiction inherent in the mixing of romance, or sexuality and revolution, or nation saving. Essentially we are speaking of two related types of romance here, as presented by Leo Lee...the sexuality of the individual as directed onto others, that is the politics of correct and incorrect sexual practice, and secondly the romancing of one's image in the public eye, or as related to the masses. Obviously one arises from the other and they are very closely related, being essentially tied up with defining the self against some other, and the importance of one’s sexual practices…whether one masturbates every morning or not, are only significant if one perceives of oneself as somehow essential to the future of a nation that would be adversely affected by such things, even as it desires (sic) freedom. Leo Lee’s understanding of Yu Dafu pulls him in the end from his status as tragically flawed “superfluous man” or accidental romantic hero after years of struggle between his various selves into a comprehension of him playing a role, perhaps romanced by the public eye, perhaps knowingly playing to it. It is difficult to read works like Sinking and not detect moments where protagonist and narrator pull apart in ironic distance, and it is perhaps this complex distance which may be present in Yu Dafu’s view of himself that is often ignored in interpretation of his works and life (I am not altogether comfortable with the tendency of the analysis of Yu Dafu and Lu Xun’s works that rely heavily on diary…).
In essence, Yu Dafu in life and often in the portrayal of his protagonists pits sex against progress, and sexual politics as crucial to the moral health and character making of the nation, as it would be of the adolescent boy. Revolution is romantic, and the choice of sexual partner could mean the population of the landscape of the new Chinese Eden with revolutionary souls or the spreading of pestilence. In this he perpetuates traditional ideals, as did the discourse that would prevail in citing the moral health of the nation in relations with women.
"I have Revolutionary Feelings for You"
So this is a bit of phraseology from the Cultural Revolution, but it is interesting to see the use of Revolution in Maoist discourse as a euphemism for love, romance or attraction. Maybe by this point it is less a case of revolution PLUS love than a case of revolution AS love, and love, (very) occasionally as revolution. Obviously this is much later than the writings we have been looking at but it in some ways represents an extreme end of the discourse inside the Geming jia Aiqing genre. “Free Love” was one of the underpinning concepts at work in the doctrines of New Culture, often tied up together with the "Woman Question" as posed by an overwhelming male group of intellectuals. Love, marriage and sex, loosened from their moorings of "traditional" morality became free and radical and consequently immediately subject to a new set of moralities often times conjunct to political philosophy imported from the West (usually through Japan). In my opinion sex, romance and especially their relationship to the family and to matrimony are always politically inflected if not overtly political, and so the heightened relationship and tension between these at times of political upheaval should come as no surprise. Examples in abound in the West also, (consider the persecution of homosexuals as a consequence of relations drawn between homosexuality and communism in the McCarthy era, for example). Sexual morality and the mores surrounding love are usually pivotal to cultural streams and consequently often come under fire even in the course of political change that seems unrelated to them. Furthermore in this week’s readings we are investigating ROMANTICISM… the idealistic, aesthetic, lyrical and overestimated. That poltical change that requires investment of passions (sic) should speak in the language of romance especially as constructed to be diametrically opposed to a system equally constructed as disdaining the will of the individual makes sense…we are to fall in love with the movement and with the idea of ourselves as agents in it. It might even be worth considering the romanticism of the protests of 1989 along this continuum.
Libidinal energy is a powerful thing, one to be channeled and used for the aims of the revolution, and sexual frustration or excess in this context take on meaning far greater that the desires of a particular body, just as romance extends its influence to the creation of the self, as hero or as villain, a caizi or a blackguard, in any event thus in Freudian terms overestimated, as in the case of the object of many libidinal engagements. Yu Dafu's struggle with himself on and off the page of fiction illustrates precisely the crux of the contradiction inherent in the mixing of romance, or sexuality and revolution, or nation saving. Essentially we are speaking of two related types of romance here, as presented by Leo Lee...the sexuality of the individual as directed onto others, that is the politics of correct and incorrect sexual practice, and secondly the romancing of one's image in the public eye, or as related to the masses. Obviously one arises from the other and they are very closely related, being essentially tied up with defining the self against some other, and the importance of one’s sexual practices…whether one masturbates every morning or not, are only significant if one perceives of oneself as somehow essential to the future of a nation that would be adversely affected by such things, even as it desires (sic) freedom. Leo Lee’s understanding of Yu Dafu pulls him in the end from his status as tragically flawed “superfluous man” or accidental romantic hero after years of struggle between his various selves into a comprehension of him playing a role, perhaps romanced by the public eye, perhaps knowingly playing to it. It is difficult to read works like Sinking and not detect moments where protagonist and narrator pull apart in ironic distance, and it is perhaps this complex distance which may be present in Yu Dafu’s view of himself that is often ignored in interpretation of his works and life (I am not altogether comfortable with the tendency of the analysis of Yu Dafu and Lu Xun’s works that rely heavily on diary…).
In essence, Yu Dafu in life and often in the portrayal of his protagonists pits sex against progress, and sexual politics as crucial to the moral health and character making of the nation, as it would be of the adolescent boy. Revolution is romantic, and the choice of sexual partner could mean the population of the landscape of the new Chinese Eden with revolutionary souls or the spreading of pestilence. In this he perpetuates traditional ideals, as did the discourse that would prevail in citing the moral health of the nation in relations with women.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Reading response
Regarding literature between the May Fourth and the outbreak of Second Sino-Japanese war, there are several features referred to Romanticism in literature—both in literary works and the author’s personalities and personal life. The symptoms of romanticism seem to be embodied in the writing of (autobiographical) romance in early twentieth century China, according to Prof. Leo Lee’s and Prof. Wang’s comments. The depression of sex and the depression of the nation are always among the most important issues in the literary text and the biographical context. Sexual depression and national depression intertwine in the literary writings and convey the confusion of the generation whom Leo Lee generalized as the generation of Romanticism. While Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” related his sinking in the sexual indulgence to the decadent of his homeland, Bai Wei’s “Fight out the ghost tower” displays a ghost tower dominated by the landlord Rongsheng’s longing for women’s body, and fight out the ghost tower is will liberate both the bodies of the women and the nation. The sexual desire and depression, sometimes deprivation dominated the pursuit of the social and national renovation in the literary works of the generation of the Romanticism. While the sexual depression becomes the national depression, or the disasters of the nation are analogized as the sexual depression, the emancipation of the nation will be lead to the extreme pole of the emancipation of the sex.
Some notes
I agree with Ting on her suspect on Professor Leo Lee’s statement of the relationship between the “Romanic heritage” and “modernity.” I feel that his “modernity” doesn’t focus on its technological meaning as well as the “rationalization and disenchantment” from Weber’s theory. He draws more attention to the development of self/ the individual in Chinese culture and society, which coincides with European Romanism to some point. As for Chinese modernity, as Professor Leo Lee said somewhere else, the most important aspects are the change of the concept of time, the formation of public space (according to the rise of print capital) and the emergence of nation (imagined community). But Chinese modernity does not merely derive from the western pattern; instead, it connotes a series of collisions between Chinese culture and western concepts at the turn of last century. Professor Lee tracing Chinese modernity back to the Six Dynasty in terms of subjective sentiment of Chinese literati therefore suggests his effort of seeking its Chinese origin.
I see many of you focus on Professor Lee’s book, so I try to do some reading of BAi Wei’s play in the following paragraphs.
It is noted that Bai Wei’s Fight Out of the Ghost Tower (1928) has to be rewritten because Xiang Peiliang grabbed the first edition of the play and refused to return it to her. To rewrite a literary work from nothing for the writer, as we can imagine, may be more difficult than the first time that it’s written. The reason is not only because the writer’s passions and inspirations for the literary creation may have been exhausted at the first time, but also because that it may take more energy to recollect the original plots and rearrange them according to the writer’s (fragmentary) memories, though the first version can never be retrieved just as we cannot step twice into the same river. During the rewriting process, other elements such as some unexpected incident, the traumatic experience of the author and so on may also be added to the difficulty.
Insofar as Bai Wei is concerned, under her worst health condition as well as the continuous strikes in personal life in 1927, she was still willing to take the difficulty and rewrite the play. The reason therefore may not only consist in her preference of the play and its plots. Her experiences in the real life during one year from 1926 to 1927 may constitute another drive for her second writing. In other words, Bai may have contextualized herself, in some way, between the lines of Fight. In reading the images of women in this play, some facts about the writer herself need to be kept in mind: firstly, Bai met Yang Sao again in Hangzhou in 1927 after Yang left Japan two years ago; secondly, to Bai the rejoicing of the reunion quickly turned into nightmares because of Yang’s continuous betrayals, and finally ended up at the ceremony of their marriage because Yang didn’t even show up; thirdly, she couldn’t resist the appeal of staying with Yang though they broke up in words. Those facts in all can be traced somewhat in the characteristics of the women protagonists in Fight: fainthearted, envious of other woman, fear of commitment (the woman revolutionary Xiao Sen hesitates to tell Yue Lin her real identity, and reveals their relationship only at the cost of her daughter’s life) as well as anxiety of independence (After Yue Ling is raped by her foster father, she “chooses” to live with him under his strong will, which indicates at once her mania and potential/ subconscious dependence as a woman). At the end of the play, after Yuelin shot Hu Rongsheng to death, the dying girl exulted at the overthrow of the ghost tower and the regaining of her life. Very ironically, the final symbolic rebirth of Yue Lin appears only at the cost the death of her physical body. If we take a close look at Yue Lin’s final words, Bai actually put a quotation mark on the word “birth” which, though cannot be told from the performance of the play, may imply her own suspects about the possibility of rebirth (emancipation) of woman in such a cannibal/ patriarchal society.
Other than her own romance, the April 12th incident in 1927 and its sequent impact may serve as footage to Bai’s depression of the revolution.
Many critics has indicated the striking resemblance between Bai Wei’s Fright Out of the Ghost Tower and Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm (1934) in terms of their similar setting, character and even dramatic conflicts. Most of them laud Thunderstorm more for its comparatively complicated description of character and reflection of the social conflicts. But here I would like to point out two features of Bai’s Fright compared with Thunderstorm. One is the image of man in the play from the perspective of a woman writer (p.s. Bai is obviously more relentless in her descriptions of the male characters), and the other is the unbalance between its main dramatic conflicts—the social conflicts indeed yield to the ethical conflicts, which may serve as a reason for the eclipse of the play.
I have to run now, because I have been 15 minutes late for another class. :)
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
RALLY TODAY!!
There will be an anti sexism protest today at 3pm in front of the science centre/loker where the second round of meetings betweent he faculty and Larry Summers will take place. I will be speaking at some point, so come out and support the cause and be my cheerleaders please!!
SR65
SR65
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Commnet-week 3
When interpreting the “Chinese pathologist” Lu Xun, both T.A. Hsia and Leo Lee indicated Lu Xun’s personal pathos, rather than the social pathos in Chinese society in Wild Grass. It seems that both of the researchers’ discontents with the literary canon established or made up by the literary historians in Communist China, which follow the opinion of Chairman Mao and assert the revolutionary aspect of his works. Both of them link up his gloomy psyche to the modernity. However, I would pay more attention to the literary tradition in Weijin period which are mentioned in Leo Lee’s book but only a few reference. Just like Xi kang or other Weijin writers whom Lu Xun worked with for a long period, Lu Xun himself probably felt the turmoil of the Republican period was a “ran shi” in which people cannot find an exit.
Lu Xun: Conscience Bites
Response Paper Week 3: Conscience Bites
In Wild Grass (or Weeds) Lu Xun explores the colorings and valences of the prose-poem genre, creating Kafka-esque snippets ranging from visceral symbolic nightmares, or visions (as in the case of “Si Hou/After Death” or “Fuchou/Revenge” and its more religious sequel) contemplations that bring us back to the very heart of the writer’s art, poems and polemics. These pieces are pithy, at times delicious, painful and ragged. The use of the prose poem allows the writing to sit precariously on the edge between Lu Xun’s bitter and deadly essay writing and his satirical but craft-conscious short stories and novellas. The format also formally bridges the gap between the traditional elements and motifs in Lu Xun’s writings and his own condemnation of the past, a tension that has proved to be rich in creative power for this writer. Ye Cao portrays a man alienated from society by a complex mesh of choice and necessity…a traveler, a writer in the dark of night. These are pieces packed with passion and meaning, both political and emotional, outlining the ragged shape of the wounds that Lu Xun must lick and tend in private.
Lu Xun’s “modernity”, or lack of same is often debated. The fact is that a neat dividing line between modern and classical simply doesn’t exist in the creative milieu in which he wrote even as it was expounded. In “Xin Qingnian” or “Yu Si” among others we see articles that are “wenyanwen-ish” (M.Hockx and B.Fuehrer’s phrase, god love ‘em), with Hu Shi’s article on the merits of baihua being a good example. Lu Xun is a product of his time and his education and he will no better completely escape his place in the on-looking crowd than his protagonist in Kuangren Riji actually succeeded in crushing an ancient account book.
In Lu Xun’s letters, as quoted in The Gate of Darkness we see his repeated struggle to balance his political conscience and consciousness, one that could not readily be fit into the mold of the Communist exercises of the day with some kind of self preservation, and thus to balance his often conflicting urges to speak and remain silent. He writes of not wanting to write anymore, not being able to write anymore, and advises others that it is better to act than write, better not to write at all, perhaps. Whether we view this as a symptom of his bitterness and personal disgust or a moment of the feelings of philosophical futility that engulfed the man who saw himself as awake in an iron house of sleeping bodies, or perhaps a combination of the two, it must be acknowledged that this tensions between knowing, writing, and saying is ever present in Lu Xun’s work; he advises us all to embrace the beauty of nothingness in our lives even as we hoist our javelin in the contradiction of peaceful combat and to reply to it all with an echoing “HAhaha Heee hee”.
Within the pages of YeCao he exploits and describes this self same tension: the form as I have described above is pithy, short, even for Lu Xun, a master of brevity. They are vision-like, they are not in the business of playing extensively with language or sound, in short they are often about silent moments: death, writing in the middle of the night, contemplating the changing seasons, reading a stone tablet, and their form and length are built for maximum impact. The inability to speak or move, muteness, unknowing, and nothingness especially are all major themes in these works. Perhaps this is reflective of the political quandary in which Lu Xun found himself at the time. I is treated in a variety of different ways, as empowering and beautiful, as simply blank and hollow, as bitter, or impotent, or futile. Since nothingness, choosing of speech, acknowledgement of knowledge or forgetfulness are all aspects of the discursive process in Lu Xun’s work it can easily be said that these are also the basic parameters of his politics of writing as well as his politics of silence. Such a complex, nuanced and changeable view stands in sharp contrast with the edicts of Mao’s talks at Yan’an that take literature as a tool to be used, formed and directed in certain ways and not others, even as Lu Xun’s political fervor overlaps with that of the CCP. While I think it is interesting and important to examine the personal correspondance of Lu Xun on this score, the question of how Lu Xun “really” felt about the CCP is liable to be consistently fraught with difficulties while he remains canonized in the red heavens. There is always going to be someone who want to reveal that he was secretly a democrat or an anarchist, or even a capitalist, a traditionalist or a fake. I think the answer to these questions in the terms that it is important that we know them as scholars of literature rather than biographers or historians in large part lies in his writing, and its creative context. Whether we believe that Lu Xun should be the smiling father of modern Chinese literature, or whether he, this strange tubercular king should be toppled from his throne it must be admitted that no one quite writes like Lu Xun, because no one quite thinks like Lu Xun, Which is perhaps one of the reasons that his brilliance is tamed, reified and officially gloried in, and also one of the reasons he still remains an unlikely communist hero, despite his love of the masses…an oddly placed jigsaw piece whose muse is tension.
In Wild Grass (or Weeds) Lu Xun explores the colorings and valences of the prose-poem genre, creating Kafka-esque snippets ranging from visceral symbolic nightmares, or visions (as in the case of “Si Hou/After Death” or “Fuchou/Revenge” and its more religious sequel) contemplations that bring us back to the very heart of the writer’s art, poems and polemics. These pieces are pithy, at times delicious, painful and ragged. The use of the prose poem allows the writing to sit precariously on the edge between Lu Xun’s bitter and deadly essay writing and his satirical but craft-conscious short stories and novellas. The format also formally bridges the gap between the traditional elements and motifs in Lu Xun’s writings and his own condemnation of the past, a tension that has proved to be rich in creative power for this writer. Ye Cao portrays a man alienated from society by a complex mesh of choice and necessity…a traveler, a writer in the dark of night. These are pieces packed with passion and meaning, both political and emotional, outlining the ragged shape of the wounds that Lu Xun must lick and tend in private.
Lu Xun’s “modernity”, or lack of same is often debated. The fact is that a neat dividing line between modern and classical simply doesn’t exist in the creative milieu in which he wrote even as it was expounded. In “Xin Qingnian” or “Yu Si” among others we see articles that are “wenyanwen-ish” (M.Hockx and B.Fuehrer’s phrase, god love ‘em), with Hu Shi’s article on the merits of baihua being a good example. Lu Xun is a product of his time and his education and he will no better completely escape his place in the on-looking crowd than his protagonist in Kuangren Riji actually succeeded in crushing an ancient account book.
In Lu Xun’s letters, as quoted in The Gate of Darkness we see his repeated struggle to balance his political conscience and consciousness, one that could not readily be fit into the mold of the Communist exercises of the day with some kind of self preservation, and thus to balance his often conflicting urges to speak and remain silent. He writes of not wanting to write anymore, not being able to write anymore, and advises others that it is better to act than write, better not to write at all, perhaps. Whether we view this as a symptom of his bitterness and personal disgust or a moment of the feelings of philosophical futility that engulfed the man who saw himself as awake in an iron house of sleeping bodies, or perhaps a combination of the two, it must be acknowledged that this tensions between knowing, writing, and saying is ever present in Lu Xun’s work; he advises us all to embrace the beauty of nothingness in our lives even as we hoist our javelin in the contradiction of peaceful combat and to reply to it all with an echoing “HAhaha Heee hee”.
Within the pages of YeCao he exploits and describes this self same tension: the form as I have described above is pithy, short, even for Lu Xun, a master of brevity. They are vision-like, they are not in the business of playing extensively with language or sound, in short they are often about silent moments: death, writing in the middle of the night, contemplating the changing seasons, reading a stone tablet, and their form and length are built for maximum impact. The inability to speak or move, muteness, unknowing, and nothingness especially are all major themes in these works. Perhaps this is reflective of the political quandary in which Lu Xun found himself at the time. I is treated in a variety of different ways, as empowering and beautiful, as simply blank and hollow, as bitter, or impotent, or futile. Since nothingness, choosing of speech, acknowledgement of knowledge or forgetfulness are all aspects of the discursive process in Lu Xun’s work it can easily be said that these are also the basic parameters of his politics of writing as well as his politics of silence. Such a complex, nuanced and changeable view stands in sharp contrast with the edicts of Mao’s talks at Yan’an that take literature as a tool to be used, formed and directed in certain ways and not others, even as Lu Xun’s political fervor overlaps with that of the CCP. While I think it is interesting and important to examine the personal correspondance of Lu Xun on this score, the question of how Lu Xun “really” felt about the CCP is liable to be consistently fraught with difficulties while he remains canonized in the red heavens. There is always going to be someone who want to reveal that he was secretly a democrat or an anarchist, or even a capitalist, a traditionalist or a fake. I think the answer to these questions in the terms that it is important that we know them as scholars of literature rather than biographers or historians in large part lies in his writing, and its creative context. Whether we believe that Lu Xun should be the smiling father of modern Chinese literature, or whether he, this strange tubercular king should be toppled from his throne it must be admitted that no one quite writes like Lu Xun, because no one quite thinks like Lu Xun, Which is perhaps one of the reasons that his brilliance is tamed, reified and officially gloried in, and also one of the reasons he still remains an unlikely communist hero, despite his love of the masses…an oddly placed jigsaw piece whose muse is tension.
response
In Professor Leo Lee’s article, he tries to seek the Lu Xun’s “modernity” from both traditional Chinese literature and some western works. But “modernity” in Lee’s usage, as in his other works, its connotation is not very clear. Insofar as Lu Xun’s works are concerned, Lee lauds their “modernity” in terms of the new techniques of expressions and the intention of iconoclastic thrust, which are named “creative writing” and “sense of originality” in Lee’s own words. But I argue that the “modernity” in general not only can be interpreted from the novelty of the form, but also needs an investigation of its content (such as its technological elements) and philosophical meanings. In other words, the “modernity” doesn’t equal to novelty (or creativity) and counter-tradition in the form. Instead, it has other standards, which urge our interpretations of the literary works to a more complicated extent. Also, the difference between the “western modernity” and “Chinese modernity”, and the characteristic of Lu Xun’s “modernity” need to be noticed.
Haosheng's response, for easy viewing and appreciation
Here is my two cents: I do feel Leo Lee’s approach to his study of Lu Xun, to a certain degree, reveals the impact of both Prusek and T.A. Hsia/C.T. Hsia. For example, when dealing with Lu Xun as a truly Chinese modern writer, Lee examined Lu Xun’s “modern” signification by contextualizing Lu Xun’s case in the whole Chinese literary tradition, from classical to modern period, just as Prusek did. By emphasizing how Lu Xun indulged himself in ancient time and classical works during his silent period from 1909 to 1918, Lu Xun’s research on history of classical fiction and on Ji Kang’s selection, and Lu Xun’s practice of classical-style poetry, Lee convincingly argued that people cannot fully and profoundly understand the modern characteristic of Lu Xun without examining his relation to classical literary tradition. Using Prusek’s key word “lyrical”, Lee pointed out that Lu Xun is a truly modern writer not because he appeared as one of the most radical iconoclasts among the May Fourth generation, but because he effectively obtained nutrition from classical tradition as important source of culture re-construction for modern China, sophistically transformed traditional factors into new artistic form in serving the author’s modern emotion, anxiety, and desire, and eventually, successfully created a modern “lyrical poetics” through his writing. Not like T.A. Hsia, who emphasized the complete separation of traditional and modern, and treated traditional culture’s attraction towards Lu Xun as a gate of darkness that Lu Xun had to fight against (p152), Lee found elements in tradition more positive to Lu Xun's intellectual development and literary creation.
T.A. Hsia’s influence can be clearly figured out when Lee probed the dark side of Lu Xun’s “inner self”. Both Hsia and Lee were seeking Lu Xun’s tragic complexity. As Hsia described Lu Xun as an egotist opposed to Partyist, Lee also paid attention to the stereotype of the contrast between particular individual and the mediocrity in Lu Xun’s fictions. Here Lee did not appreciate Prusek’s concept of collective subjectivity as the highest criteria, for him it is nothing else but the intense internal contradiction and anxiety, even the unconquered decadent feeling in Lu Xun’s troubled psyche should take credit for making Lu Xun a distinguished “modernist".
As for T.A. Hsia’s book, I was not surprised to find the author’s anti-communist political stand, but I was surprised to find that Hsia gave Rou Shi’s work a quite bad evaluation, which does not seem fair to me. It seems to me that in Rou Shi’s case, Hsia’s political prejudice misguided his judgment.
T.A. Hsia’s influence can be clearly figured out when Lee probed the dark side of Lu Xun’s “inner self”. Both Hsia and Lee were seeking Lu Xun’s tragic complexity. As Hsia described Lu Xun as an egotist opposed to Partyist, Lee also paid attention to the stereotype of the contrast between particular individual and the mediocrity in Lu Xun’s fictions. Here Lee did not appreciate Prusek’s concept of collective subjectivity as the highest criteria, for him it is nothing else but the intense internal contradiction and anxiety, even the unconquered decadent feeling in Lu Xun’s troubled psyche should take credit for making Lu Xun a distinguished “modernist".
As for T.A. Hsia’s book, I was not surprised to find the author’s anti-communist political stand, but I was surprised to find that Hsia gave Rou Shi’s work a quite bad evaluation, which does not seem fair to me. It seems to me that in Rou Shi’s case, Hsia’s political prejudice misguided his judgment.
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