Governmentality and the aesthetic state: A Chinese fantasia

Positions

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 2006, Pages

  Lee, Haiyan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950673765     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. See Barry Allen, "Foucault and Modern Political Philosophy," in The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, ed. Jeremy Moss (London: Sage, 1998), 164-98
2. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nicolas Rose, eds., Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
3. Colin Gordon, "Governmental Rationality: An Introduction," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1-51
4. Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (London: Routledge, 1995)
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 136
6. Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1 of Essential Works of Foucault: 1054-1084, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997)
7. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 25
8. Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 23-24
9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 86, 135
10. Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988)
11. Both works can be found in Zhang Jinsheng, Zhang Jingsheng wenji (Collected Works of Zhang Jingsheng), 2 vols. (Guangzhou: Guangzhou Chubanshe, 1998), hereafter cited in the text as ZJW
12. For biographical accounts of Zhang Jingsheng, see Zhou Yanwen, "Zhang Jingsheng: Zhongguo chubanshi shang de shizong zhe (xu yi)" ("Zhang Jingsheng: The Missing Person in China's Publishing History [Preface One]")
13. and Jiang Zhongxiao, "Zhang Jingsheng de shengping, sixiang he zhushu (xu er)" ("The Life, Thought, and Works of Zhang Jingsheng [Preface Two]"), in Zhang Jingsheng wenji, 1:1-22
14. see also Charles L. Leary, "Sexual Modernism in China: Zhang Jingsheng and 1920s Urban Culture" (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1994)
15. and Jing Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Mailing of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 129-31
16. Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 95
17. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1974), 190
18. For a discussion of Foucault's take on the Greek notion of askesis, see Jane Bennett, "'How Is It, Then, That We Still Remain Barbarians?' Foucault, Schiller, and the Aestheticization of Ethics," Political Theory 24 (1996): 653-72
19. Women's greater emotional capacity carries both a negative and positive valence. In Enlightenment rationalist discourse, women are said to be subject to the sways of irrational and unpredictable moods, passions, and impulses, and therefore cannot be trusted with political power. In the context of the romantic valorization of emotional spontaneity, however, women's perceived emotional "nature" is seen as "an index of their spiritual superiority and of the lesser degree of their alienation." Catherine Lutz, "Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Category," Cultural Anthropology 1 (1986): 405-36
20. For a discussion of the May Fourth construction of woman as the emotional gender, see Haiyan Lee, "Tears That Crumbled the Great Wall: The Archaeology of Feeling in the May Fourth Folklore Movement," Journal of Asian Studies 64 (2005), 35-65. In the late imperial cult of qing, love or passion was seldom exclusively gendered female. Indeed, the youqingren was as often "a man of feeling" as "a woman of feeling."
21. See Haiyan Lee, "Love or Lust? The Sentimental Self in Honglou meng," Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 19 (1997), 85-111
22. Haiyan Lee, "All the Feelings That Are Fit to Print: The Community of Sentiment and the Literary Public Sphere in China, 1900-1918," Modern China 27 (2001), 291-327. Zhang's theory of love is decidedly Enlightenment inspired and draws much less on traditional Chinese understandings of qing
23. Paul Veyne, "Foucault Revolutionizes History," in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 155
24. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 144
25. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 222-23
26. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), ix, 273
27. The idea of aesthetic education (meiyu) took hold in China in the reform movements of the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in the thoughts of Wang Guowei, who wrote about the connection among aesthetics, morality, and modernization. But it was Cai Yuanpei who, along with Wu Zhihui, Li Shizeng, and Wang Jingwei, "began implementation on an institutional and practical level of China's modernist aesthetic cultivation movement" (Leary, "Sexual Modernism in China," 96-97)
28. See Angela Zito, "Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries," in Body, Subject and Power in China, ed. Tani Barlow and Angela Zito (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 103-30
29. Max Weber, The Religion of China, trans. Hans H. Gerth (New York: Free Press, 1951)
30. Foucault, Discipline and Punish
31. See Barbara E. Ward, "Not Merely Players: Drama, Art and Ritual in Traditional China," Man 14 (1979): 18-39
32. Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993), 78
33. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 145
34. Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 140
35. While the use of images, sights, and sounds cannot be automatically equated with fascism, Zhang's articulation of these elements does remind one of the "concentrated spectacle" of bureaucratic capitalism that Guy Debord believes to be a primary technique of state power: "It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence." Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), para. 24
36. For a distinction between "articulation" and "elements," see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985)
37. see also Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2002), 243
38. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 46
39. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 160
40. Zhang Jingsheng, Mei de shehui zuzhi fa (How to Organize a Beautiful Society), 2nd ed. (Shanghai: Mei De Shudian, 1927), 210-14. The compilers of Zhang Jingsheng wenji edited out the section under the heading "Common Needs and Separate Production" (gong xu yu ge chan), deeming Zhang's critique of Marxism unsuitable for the readers' eyes. Hence this and subsequent references are from a 1927 edition of the book, published by Zhang's own bookstore
41. This phrase is taken from Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 50
42. Wendy Brown, "Genealogical Politics," in Moss, Later Foucault, 37
43. For reasons I outline below, I am inclined to take these apparently facetious remarks at face value even though Zhang's texts are undeniably utopian in many registers. Utopia as a genre has a long pedigree in Chinese literary history, ranging from Tao Qian's Peach Blossom Spring to Kang Youwei's The Book of Great Unity and Wu Jianren's The New Story of the Stone. Interestingly, Zhang's scenario of world amalgamation through racial miscegenation bears a strong resemblance to Kang Youwei's plans for world racial unity. And the "civilized realm" (wenming jingjie) in The New Story of the Stone (Xin shitouji, 1908) shares a number of features with Zhang Jingsheng's republic of beauty, such as the emphasis on rule by moral suasion and the absence of police, courthouses, and prisons. But Wu's utopia also places far greater faith in technology and militarism while dispensing with the spiritual, the theatrical, and the sensuous. Without venturing into an extended comparison, we might note that while Zhang might have derived inspirations from native utopian discourses, his theory of the aesthetic state exemplifies a political rationality that is quite distant from that of Wu's Confucian technological wonderland
44. Tani Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 3
45. Brown, "Genealogical Politics," 42
46. One can draw many parallels between Zhang's programs and the governmental practices of the People's Republic of China. The most striking of these is probably the draconian family planning policy that has been put in place since the late 1970s. In outlining the responsibilities of the Ministry of National Strength, Zhang states that it has an obligation to maintain the population size at an optimal level through such measures as internal migration (transferring excess populations to remote regions), international emigration (dispatching people to less populated countries), and state-administered birth control programs (e.g., injecting people in regions with population overgrowth with a to-be-invented short-term "contraceptive solution"). The idea that populations are a state resource that may be manipulated and expended according to the reason of state is surely one of the key premises of China's one-child family policy, which at one point found its starkest expression in the "joke" that China needed simply to kill off half its population for its modernization project to take off. See Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 121
47. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, para. 64
48. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 162
49. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3
50. Jay, Force Fields, chap. 6
51. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 220-23
52. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 123-24
53. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 221
54. Michael Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 113
55. Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 97
56. Common sense in this context should be distinguished from Antonio Gramsci's notion of "hegemony," which emphasizes the consent of the ruled even when the ruling classes pursue agendas that run counter to the economic interests of the ruled. The aesthetic model of common sense is closer to the poststructuralist revamping of hegemony by Laclau and Mouffe. In their definition, (socialist) hegemony does not retotalize the social field around the universal category of class (which Gramsci's notion does), but recognizes the plurality, contingency, and overdetermination of identities, interests, alliances, and antagonisms. It proceeds from the "common sense" of liberal-democratic ideology - particularly the egalitarian imaginary - and expands the democratic revolution begun by the bourgeoisie in new directions. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, chap. 4
57. Leary, "Sexual Modernism in China," 128
58. Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature, 131
59. Zhang Jingsheng's call for stories was met with enthusiastic responses. He had certainly been planning for more volumes, and the second volume was already in press when the hoopla over the first volume forced him to call off the entire project (Zhang Jingsheng wenji, 1:365)
60. Tani Barlow, "Zhishifenzi (Chinese Intellectuals) and Power," Dialectical Anthropology 16 (1991): 209-32