Theory: The Queen of America

"The Queen of America Goes to Washington City" -- detail of the cover, from Google books. Love that face!

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Professor Berlant looks carefully at an eclectic "archive" of materials from the 1980s and 1990s that helps her explain the rise of conservative and liberal politics in America that use sex and other normally 'private' parts of our identities to define what a 'citizen' is. She "repudiates" compulsory heterosexuality, of course, but what makes the book interesting, possibly, is the use of popular materials, including materials that demonstrate the re-strengthening of conservatism in the Reagan years, to "take the temperature of hegemony."

I have a few opening comments on what I'm reading:



I was planning to go out to the library to look at this book today, but it was checked out. I made do by inspecting the introduction, which I found very hard going. I really need to get through more of this sort of cultural studies prose so I can become familiar with all its vernaculars. A sentence like this:

Portraits and stories of citizen-victims -- pathological, poignant, heroic, and grotesque -- now permeate the political public sphere, putting on display a mass experience of economic insecurity, racial discord, class conflict, and sexual unease.

is not so bad on its own, but I do wonder at the rhetoric used here. There are too many different words, so its difficult to get what is important. The sentence is too complex to comprehend easily. Terms like "citizen-victims" have only implied meanings, which is an aggravation to me. For the reader not experienced with this rhetoric, it is necessary to make a translation:

There is a vast population of America that is frustrated, and shows it in a wide variety of ways, some heroic, some not.

Of course, this exercise reveals much of the motivation for the type of prose used -- Berlant wants to make multiple connections at once. Its not just that Americans are made because they are poor, or at risk of becoming poor, or feel racial and sexual tension. It's all of these things at the same time. So Berlant wants to see basically how this frustration has been working itself out. There's an interesting hint that if we don't make these kinds of explorations, the nation itself faces some kind of vague risk:"Mass national pain threatens to turn into banality, a crumbling archive of dead signs and tired plots."

I'm attempting to focus closely on the concept of an intimate public, which is elaborated on in this passage:

The fear of being saturated and scarred by the complexities of the present and thereby barred from living the "Dream" has recently produced a kind of vicious yet sentimental cultural politics, a politics brimming over with images and faces of normal and abnormal America. In the patriotically-permeated pseudopublic sphere of the present tense, national politics does not involve starting with a view of the nation as a space of struggle violently separated by racial, sexual and economic inequalities that cut across every imaginable kind of social location. Instead, the dominant idea marketed by patriotic traditionalists is of a core nation whose survival depends on personal acts and identities performed in the intimate domains of the quotidian.

It is in this sense that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. The intimate public of the U.S. present tense is radically different from the "intimate sphere" of modernity described by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas portrays the intimate sphere of the European eighteenth century as a domestic space where persons produced the sense of their own private uniqueness, a sense of self which became a sense of citizenship only when it was abstracted and alienated in the nondomestic public sphere of liberal capitalist culture. In contrast, theintimate public sphere of the US present tense renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere. No longer valuing personhood as something directed toward public life, contemporary nationalist ideology recognizes a public good only in a particularly constricted nation of simultaneously lived private worlds.

notes:

1. personal and political collapsed; mass experience of unease. the intimacy of national power. 2. the public rhetoric of citizen trauma; feeling vulnerable (3) 4. American Dream, intimate domains of the quotidian, Habermas, nostalgia-based fantasy notion, 5. explain conservative politics via intimacy. 6. fetus. national icon, 7. natoinality, trauma. intimacy, rhetoric and economic crisis. Institutions of intimacy <-> national questions. (8), 9 subjectivity. distract from structural conditions. hegemonic Reaganite. personal and structural: a false distinction. (10) 11. "national sentimentality." advertising. 12. reading and analysis. Foucault, Gramscie, Benjamin. Archive. quotidian citizenship. 13 naiton. (14) 15. counterfantasy, 16 sex and death. heteronormative culture (Michael Warner) (17) (18) identity. sex and crisis. "person" in American history. a heterosexuality to repudiate. 20 risky work. "takes the temperature of hegemony" nation, politics, culture, personhood. 21, 22. 1, 2, 3: Fetus. "Fat" by Raymond Carver. The Silent Scream. 4. Queer Nation. 5.

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We just some country boys - country walk, country talk

...Don't bring it round here 'less ya know fa sho' it's jumpin off

Shen Congwen with Zhang Zhaohe (later his wife)

So the last paper I translated contained this passage:

It can be said that works of the Beijing School always manifest two types of clearly opposed worlds: one is the world of the rural villages, one is the more civilized cities and towns. But even though they clearly bring a critical eye to the representation of the urban world, actually this is mostly a foil for their beloved rural world. This is also extremely strange, because the Beijing School writers are mostly sophisticated intellectuals, yet they praise the pastoral, frequently taking on their own “pastoral” personae with great satisfaction. Shen Congwen put it well when he said, “I must ask you to compare two of my short works, “Baizi” and “Portrait of Eight Steeds” (Ba jun tu), so you can understand my moral sensibility, what is good, what bad, about rural villages, those great loves of intellectuals. You’ll see what makes a country person country, and how this is reflected concretely in my work.”

"Country person" doesn't sound as good as I'd like, but it does sort of remind me that there is a similar aesthetic at work between American and Chinese celebrations of unsophisticated rustics.


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One Book in One Day: Well, Maybe Next Time

Writing Cultural Heroes (not me, by a long shot)

I've already described the first essay in this collection, which helped me think about why I might call Yang Jiang a "cultural hero." But I never read the other eight essays included here, mostly because I still read Chinese much too slowly. To overcome this frustration, I've adapted Adler and Van Doren's techniques of "inspectional reading." My goal was to "inspect" all nine essays on Tuesday. For various reasons, I could not spend the entire day reading, nor did I do so on Wednesday, and on Thursday I took up most of the day with this task, but found myself easily distracted. (Scholarship with an internet-ready laptop presents distraction, temptation and ultimately dissipation, a folly that I hope to combat with Ben Franklin-like assiduousness. But that's more a topic for phramok than Wandermonkey). At last, though, on Thursday afternoon I completed my inspections. Here is the reduction of 20 or so pages of notes.

当代大众文化批评丛书

Writing Cultural Heroes is a volume in the Contemporary Popular Culture Criticism Series -- I'll make a list of other titles to look at in this series soon. The series editor is Li Tuo, who in his series preface gently chides scholars for not developing popular culture studies as a field. MTV may not seem important to scholars, he says by way of example, but they all need to recognize that young people reinforce their ideas of what is right, wrong, ugly and beautiful 美丑对错 with MTV. Hence popular culture, which is any and all books and media produced for a mass-market, is an important topic of study. The western world has already developed theories of popular culture, but these need to be analyzed carefully by the Chinese. Back when postmodernism became a fad, some scholars who lacked prudence 谨慎 thought that China in the 1990s was already in the postindustrial age!

1. Top-Tier Cultural Heroes

Yang Zao explains how Chen Yinke and Gu Zhun represent two major pathways by which an established scholar forgotten during the Communist years could rise again to gain iconic status in the 1980s and 1990s.

2. The Road to Self-Redemption 自我救赎之路

Jia Guimei describes the ways victims of the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaigns have written about their experiences in novels, memoirs, and mainstream historical works. For Jia, 1998 is a year of particular interest because so many books on these experiences appeared.

3. The Decline and Fall of Chinese Poetry 诗神的降落

Zhou Zan gives us an extensive outline of poetry movements since the Cultural Revolution, focusing on the bifurcation between more elevated forms and so-called "people's writers" 民间作家. The gloomy conclusion is that poetry as a form is probably dying in China.

4. The Canonization of Jin Yong 金庸小说经典化

A fascinating account of Jin Yong's evolving status as the most-read author in the Chinese diaspora. The development of "Jin Yong studies" at Peking University gives author Wu Xiaoli a chance to reflect on how Jin Yong has helped elevate all popular literary forms in the eyes of China's teachers. Not everybody likes Jin Yong: Wang Shuo has a big problem with him.

Jin Yong 2009: Who da man?

5. Morte accidentale di cinese Avante garde 先锋的结束

Wang Chang examines the staging and reception of the 1998 Nobel Prize-winner in Literature's most representative work, the play Morte accidentale di un anarchico. That few Chinese scholars were even aware of the play or its author, Dario Fo, just goes to show the bankruptcy of the Chinese avant garde.

6. The Spirit of the Age has Symptoms: How Steel Was Tempered in 2000

How Steel Was Tempered (1934-ish) is apparently one of the most important Soviet Realist novels, though I'm just learning about it here. See, for example, a nice reading in a book on the female protagonist in Russian literature. A close reading of the main character Pavel and his romantic interest Gaia as the appear in the year-2000 feature-length TV version in China reflects the peculiar official (re)vision of a hero during a period of millenium fever.

7. Ain't Got Nuthin' 一無所有 : Cui Jian and Chinese Rock

Meng Wa gives a fun and enlightening examination of the spirit of resistance as exhibited in Cui Jian's biography and career. Meng's close reading of the song "Eggs Under/laid by the Red Flag" 紅旗下之蛋 gives me my first glimpse at how parody can work in China.

Cover of a Cui Jian Album

8. Say Hello to Mr. Fashion 時尚先生

This examination of the magazine "Fashion" 時尚 over the course of 1995-2000 is definitely my least favorite piece in the book. Concluding what is really no more than a report on the contents of the magazine, Ms. Mei hopes that readers get a sense that the figures in "Fashion" can become exemplary. But how so? She seems to recognize the weakness of her argument -- or more precisely, that she lacks any argument at all.

"Fashion" later merged with Cosmo

9. Privacy Fever 隱私熱

Teng Wei profiles a 1998 explosion of confessional and testimonial writing onto the Chinese market: "privacy fever." This is an excellent piece -- I remember that Wang Lingzhen covered the same topic from a different angle, and I intend to come back to this and to compare the two essays.

The original privacy bestseller became a TV movie in 2005

Dai Jinhua 戴锦华, editor. Shuxie wenhua yingxiong: shiji zhi jiao de wenhua yanjiu 书写文化英雄：世纪之交的文化研究 [Writing cultural heroes: cultural studies at the turn of the century]. Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2000.
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Yang Zao preface and lookback

Yang Zao 楊早 "Culture Heroes of the 1990s: the Cases of Chen Yinke and Gu Zhun." In Dai Jinhua, ed., Writing Culture Heroes 書寫文化英雄.

(NB, I mistook the author of this article for Dai Jinhua in my last post on it)

Prefatory remarks and "Looking Back at the 1980s"

Prefatory remarks

Yang Zao points to the vastly increasing number of references to the most famous intellectual figures in Chinese periodicals -- the "culture heroes." Examples of "first rank" heroes are Chen Yinke, Wang Guowei, Wu Mi, Qian Zhongshu, Qian Mu, and Zai Hongming. There's also a "second rank" that includes folks like Gu Zhun, Lao She, Lin Zhao, Yu Luoke and Li Jiufeng. Besides the relative fame and influence of the "ranks," Yang Zao alludes to a difference in their trajectory towards their current places as cultural icons (my term; doesn't it translate "culture hero" well? More to come on that.).

Chen Yinke, master of 10+ languages

Rank one icons represent famous scholars from before 1949 whose names were forgotten for 30-plus years. Only in the 1980s did they begin to receive recognition again, and only in the 1990s did scholars begin to appreciate their work again, and by the mid 90s they had become popular cultural icons (大眾歌頌的文化偶像; here 'icon' is the explicit term). Second rank fellows (no women are mentioned here!) like Gu Zhun follow a different track -- they are figures within the general scope of Chinese Marxist pioneers, but they were covered up for political reasons and so had to be re-discovered.

But for all these types of thinkers, we see a common general pattern: in a three stage process, these thinkers went from beleagured or totally suppressed, to being seen as bastions of independent thinking, and finally to become powerful symbols of resistance. Along the way, the very basic sense of who they were and what their lives mean evolved -- in some cases it was completely remolded. Yang Zao proposes that recognizing the rich layers of contemporary portraits of these 'cultural icons' helps us establish the topology 圖景 (not a word I'm terribly familiar or comfortable with yet) of 20th century "senses of the essence of knowledge" 知識精英 (that sounds like a boilerplate preface ending -- it's not clear if that means anything yet).

Looking Back at the 1980s.

Yang gives us a very interesting overview of some major Chinese journals and the 'cultural icons' who became major topics.

Going back to the December 1988 issue of Chinese Culture 中國文化 we can see quotes from Chen Yinke and Qian Zhongshu (Qian said: 東海西海，心理攸同;南學北學，道術未裂) that advance a conservative point against those pushing for westernization. The scholar making this point, Liu Mengxi went on to write a set of articles about Chen Yinke, which shows that Chen had become a major topic for the journal. Also Reading 讀書 magazine, from its renewal in 1992, took as major topics Chen Yinke and Qian Zhongshu. Yang's effort here is evidently to show a relationship between the recurrence and character of scholarship about these cultural icons -- the way writers focused on the icon's personalities, especially -- a relationship between this phenomena and the general malaise within humanities scholarship after the June 4 massacres at Tiananmen Square.

In a longer discussion, Yang considers the magazine Scholars 學人 which launched in 1991, which attempts to flesh out this relationship. The period between the mid 1920s and the mid 1930s was selected as a "golden age" in which more Chinese scholars had managed to achieve more than in any other period. The focus on the character of these scholars is bound to have been a huge influence on the general direction of 1990s thought. In all the articles on all the writers in Scholars magazine, there is a pervasive focus on what is said to be a "pure" 純 "history of the art of learning" 學術史. And yet, it was clear enough that this choice of topic and the attitude toward the topic was at least in part a reaction to 1989 that sought to find a new, less political role for intellectuals. A major figure here is Chen Pingyuan, who later in the magazine The East 東方 published an essay on "the fates and the choices" 命運以及選擇 of humanities intellectuals 文人. It wasn't just the massacre that made us lose our sense of self 自我, says Chen. We are looking for what Vaclav Havel 哈維爾 calls for in his essay "The power of the powerless" : to prefer the "art of study" over politics; to prefer the private over the public; and to prefer the elevated over the popular. The goal is to gain some self-confidence again in our field by standing independently in these areas. Xu Youyu, another scholars, had a similar list of priorities for humanists of the 1990s:

1. bring back Chinese studies 國學
2. return to Marxism's view of human nature 人性.
3. Science and Tech.
4. Modern social science methods.
5. Focus on the "spirit" of the humanities 人文精神的闡釋.

As the 1990s started, Xu advocated #1 even more to fill the "gaps" that had opened up. The end result was a large number of articles that searched for the key foundational features of great thinkers' personalities 人格. [A long editor's note at this point praises Yang, calling this attention to the personage of the scholar a modern version of the attitude Yan Hui, Confucius' favorite student. This must be the voice of Professor Dai!]

Countercurrent:

Yang end's with what Yang takes to be a totally dissimilar point of view, commencing with The East 東方 in 1993. An opening salvo in the magazine complains of the new "demoralization" 痞子化 of intellectuals. That Zhou Zuoren and other writers of what Scholars called "the golden age" were considered to at least have the appearance of 'immoral fellows' 痞子 suggests the blanket cynicism that has evolved in this particular journal. In this space, however, writers more often thought up alternative histories: what if the May Fourth movement had turned out differently? In this way, even the cynics seem productive agents in this debate about humanities in China.
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