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AESTHETICS AND MARXISM
Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries
By Liu Kang Duke University Press
Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-2448-5
Chapter One
Aesthetics, Modernity, and Alternative Modernity: The Case of China
The fascination with the aesthetic is inexorably tied to modernity-understood now as a historical condition of existence and experience, cutting across temporal and geographical boundaries. As such, the question of the aesthetic pertains to modern European thought beginning with the Enlightenment, when philosophers assigned high priority to it in their reflections on modernity. The aesthetic question, however, hardly dominates discourses of modernity, which center instead on objective science and scientific reason. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it, the "rationality of the Enlightenment" promised "the disenchantment of the world, the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy." But as the course of history since the Enlightenment has shown, scientific rationality has failed to live up to the expectation that it would not only subsume, but also transcend natural and human existence. Instead, it increasingly betrayed its limitations in coping with the complex problems of humankind. Diverse cultures and histories have not, and cannot, be contained by a particular way of reasoning, be itscientific or otherwise. Serious challenges to scientific reason's applicability to and capacity to resolve all human dilemmas were only raised after the unbridled faith in ideas of science, progress, and freedom began to turn against itself, and transform Enlightenment rationality into an "instrumental rationality" that served the twentieth-century powers of domination and oppression. Then, cultural and anthropological dimensions, and indeed the aesthetic dimension so dear to many thinkers of the Enlightenment, were recovered once again, as in the Renaissance when the values of humanity dimmed that of God, in the critique of modernity and searches for an alternative modernity.
If science, technology, and scientific reason are the dominant themes of modernity, then "culture" becomes a key category for contemporary Western social thought in the analysis and understanding of the world, centering on the issues embedded in postmodernity. Hence, aesthetics has acquired or regained prominence among modern Western thinkers, ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud to Martin Heidegger, and from Sartre and Adorno to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It now serves as an immanent critique of modernity, and a way to measure the social, political, and economic movements of postmodernity. In modern Western Marxist thought, the ascendancy of the aesthetic from Lukács to Adorno is even more glaring, and aesthetic thinking has come to identify, to a great degree, the diverse projects of contemporary Western Marxism as a critique of modernity.
Yet the negative, critical function of the aesthetic in modern Marxist traditions is only part of the story. Aside from the largely repressive role it played in so-called "really existing socialism"-that is, the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries-aesthetic discourse has been constructive in the People's Republic of China, where Marxism was, and still is, a fundamental feature of modern tradition and social life. This positive function, however, has taken the dialectic form of critique and reconstruction. In other words, it has had both hegemonic and counterhegemonic formations, emerging from China's searches for an alternative modernity.
In the West, the aesthetic has been primarily a bourgeois discourse of modernity, a feature that it retains in the hands of Western Marxist intellectuals despite its challenge to the dominant ideological forms of capitalism. This contradiction also characterizes the diverse undertakings of modern Western Marxist cultural politics. When Marxists in the West critique capitalist modernity, they must assume a bourgeois civil society as a social space from which to mount their attack. In Chinese Marxism, in contrast, the aesthetic underwent a fundamental transformation, from a bourgeois discourse into a revolutionary tool in struggles for state power. After the seizure of state power, the aesthetic strengthened the revolutionary hegemony created by the Chinese Communist Party. This structural shift in aesthetic discourse involved serious contradictions, particularly in a postrevolutionary society.
The genealogy of the aesthetic in modern China, then, may reveal a possible alternative to the Marxist cultural formations of the West. It may also expose internal tensions and contradictions within modernity, understood as a global experience. An examination of the historical role of aesthetics raises the following questions: How have the relationships between culture, aesthetics, modernity (or an alternative modernity), and Marxism been generally perceived and described? What is the relationship between aesthetics and modernity in the West? What is the role of aesthetics in Chinese modernity, or an alternative modernity? What are the main functions of the aesthetic and culture in modern Marxist traditions, from Western to Chinese? And how shall we come to grips with these complex relationships, ones that lie at the heart of contemporary intellectual debates?
Indeed, these issues are pertinent to interrogating the historicity of the concepts and categories with which we engage the subjects of this study. Specifically, "critical theory" is explored as a rubric of contemporary intellectual discourse, and "China studies" as an institution of knowledge production and distribution. Since self-reflexive critiques are often central to today's critical theory, an investigation of the historical conditions of relevant intellectual discourses or institutions is a necessary point of departure.
The Preeminence of Aesthetics in Modern Chinese Thinking
This genealogical inquiry starts from the historical resources of modern aesthetic thought and their social conditions in the West. The aesthetic is a discourse of modernity par excellence, for it articulates the intrinsic contradictions of modernity in the most concrete and "sensuous" of terms. (The term aesthetic in its original meaning refers precisely to "sensuousness," or human senses.) Its inception in eighteenth-century Germany is indicative of the contrary character of Western capitalist modernity. From Alexander Baumgarten to Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Schiller, aesthetic cognition served as mediation, reconciliation, and negotiation on two fronts: Politically, it moved between the generalities of reason and the particularities of sense; socially, it tried to negotiate between an aspiring modern European bourgeoisie yearning for freedom and autonomy, and the German feudalist absolutism. It should be noted, though, that aesthetic mediation and negotiation are immanently imaginary and utopian. The aesthetic's projection of a free, equal, autonomous, and universal subjectivity speaks at once for all humanity, and for the bourgeoisie in particular. Terry Eagleton's study aptly uncovers the correlation between the contradictory, mediatory, and utopian nature of aesthetic discourse, and the concrete political conjuncture of eighteenth-century Germany. It is in the sense of rigorous historicizing scrutiny that the versatility and ambiguity of the concept of the aesthetic should be understood, both in the Western and Chinese contexts. The aesthetic, as Eagleton argues, has "a certain indeterminacy of definition which allows it to figure in a varied span of preoccupation: freedom and legality, spontaneity and necessity, self-determination, autonomy, particularity and universality, along with several others." This indeterminacy of definition, however, is actually historically determinate:
The category of the aesthetic assumes the importance it does in modern Europe because in speaking of art it speaks of these other matters too, which are at the heart of the middle class's struggle for political hegemony. The construction of the modern notion of the aesthetic artifact is thus inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class society, and indeed from a whole new form of human subjectivity appropriate to that social order.... But my argument is also that the aesthetic, understood in a certain sense, provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to these dominant ideological forms, and in this sense an eminently contradictory phenomenon.
It is crucial that Eagleton insists on the specific class character of universal humanist concepts of the aesthetic and subjectivity. Many current cultural and social theories either refuse to recognize, or attempt to obfuscate, the still-dominant class character of contemporary societies. But it must be added that "class" as a social formation is susceptible to structural overdeterminations from a multitude of factors. It is now widely acknowledged that class formation is subject to the influences of race, gender, and ethnicity. Impacts of cultural values and geopolitical differences on social classes must be considered, too. In the Chinese context, for instance, the mediatory and reconciliatory functions of the aesthetic have to be grasped not only with respect to different class formations, but also different cultural and geopolitical formations, which have decisively affected class and discursive formations.
The aesthetic discourse mediates and negotiates the contradictions within Western modernity on several levels: first, the abstract philosophical realm; second and perhaps the least abstract, the realm of social life; and finally, the ambiguous domain of psychology, which itself also mediates between abstract ideas and concrete social practices. On the first level, the aesthetic discourse mediates the fundamental dichotomies of Western metaphysics, between rationality and sensuousness, and between epistemology and ethics. In a political as well as sociological sense, it promises to reconcile the mounting tensions between free, autonomous individuals in a civil society and public sphere, and the regulatory, coercive, and authoritative powers of the state. On the third level, the aesthetic is probably at its most effective: its imaginary, sensuous, and utopian projection of subjectivity promises to unify logic-reason with sense-experience, ontology and ethics with epistemology, and particular individuality with general sociality. During the process of its migration from eighteenth-century Germany to twentieth-century China, however, radical structural changes took place. On the metaphysical or philosophical level, the tension between scientific rationality and ethical, ontological reflection is now compounded by the presence of an alien system of values-an Oriental culture as old as those in the West. Philosophical differences are ultimately connected to practical social issues. From the standpoint of an imperialist power in the West, the Nietzschean "will to power," seen in the Western context as a disruptive and subversive force to scientific reason, served to disseminate and reinforce the Eurocentric rationality of modernity to the rest of the "alien and barbaric" world. Such a reinforcement was largely carried out in reality by the barbarous, brutal means of violence and force. To this aggressive assertion of power, the Chinese responded by intensifying the intrinsic tensions of Western modernity, asserting the ti-yong dualism or "Chinese essence or substance versus Western practical use." In other words, the internal contradictions of Western modernity were externalized or fragmented by the various Chinese/Western dichotomies. Formulated after the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, in which China was defeated by its rapidly modernized and aggressive neighbor, the ti-yong dualism was a culturally reassuring position that affirmed basic ethical and cosmological values that gave continuity and meaning to Chinese civilization, and that would enable adaptation and absorption of Western modernity.
The Chinese solution to the external social and political tensions of modernity, embodied by the ti-yong dichotomy, was grounded on the assumption that only internal cultural and psychological (or spiritual) values-perceived as inherently superior to the materialist, instrumentalist, and scientific reason of the West-could empower a materialistically and technologically backward China in its own search for modernity. As the intrinsic tensions of Western modernity were transfigured into the preeminently cultural and geopolitical dichotomy of the "materialist" West against the "spiritual" East, structural transformations in both the cultural and psychological domains took on complex dimensions. Culture must now bear the burden of not only solving the paradoxes of Western modernity, but also reaffirming and empowering China's own national identity. Hence, a crisscrossing and collapsing of the "interior" and "exterior" boundaries become inevitable. "Interior," or psychological and spiritual transformation would provide vital subsistence to "exterior," or social and political transformation.
The aesthetic, then, became a favorable topic for those Chinese intellectuals who wanted to mediate and reconcile the intricate tensions and contradictions arising from China's passage into modernity. In the course of its structural transformation, the inherent contradictions contained within the aesthetic concept became exacerbated. To begin with, the aesthetic discourse that tried to bridge the traditional Chinese value of harmony with Western dualism was unavoidably at odds with modernist ideas of autonomy, independence, and subjectivity. Second, when Marxism was introduced into China, a transference of the class character of subjectivity occurred: it was no longer the bourgeois subject, but a newly emergent, revolutionary subjectivity, that the aesthetic discourse should identify. Such a transference entailed a demystification of the universalism that the aesthetic discourse embodied. Third, the utopian aspect of the aesthetic discourse, in the process of conceptual transgression and transference, became increasingly politicized. The politicization of aesthetics and aestheticization of politics thus became salient features of modern Chinese history.
In other words, aesthetic discourse in modern China is loaded with a mélange of ideological presuppositions: as a historical concept derived from Western bourgeois thought since the Enlightenment, it carries an ideological baggage advocating at once for the political hegemony of the bourgeoisie and a utopian notion of true humanity in opposition to bourgeois utility. Aesthetics is primarily a concept of modernity, in the sense that it bespeaks the autonomy and separation of social spheres, and presupposes a self-determining and self-sufficient subjectivity. Contradictions inherent in aesthetics become most apparent when transplanted into China.
The aesthetic is first hailed by modern Chinese intellectuals around the turn of the century as an indispensable constituent of modernity. Liang Qichao, eminent reformist scholar and ardent advocate of cultural enlightenment, extolled "beauty" or aesthetics as "the most important element of human life." He insisted that "meishu [literally, the art of beauty, or fine art] generates science." Wang Guowei, another prominent intellectual regarded as a founder of modern scholarship in China because of his efforts to integrate German philosophy and aesthetics into traditional Chinese thought, devoted his whole life to the promotion of the aesthetic ideal as the paramount model of modern life. Founding President of Peking University and renowned social reformist Cai Yuanpei proposed to replace religion with "aesthetic education." Chinese Marxists, too-from early intellectual leaders such as Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, to revolutionary commanders such as Qu Qiubai and Mao Zedong-invariably stress the importance of aesthetics and culture. Lu Xun, modern China's "cultural giant," can be credited with creating an "aesthetics of negativity," responding to the formidable tensions between political revolution and cultural enlightenment. As we shall see, Lu Xun's aesthetic thought, together with Qu Qiubai's idea of fostering a proletarian class consciousness through cultural revolution and popularization, represent Chinese Marxist aesthetics in incipient, yet significant forms. But Lu Xun's urban, cosmopolitan vision of cultural revolution differs greatly from Qu Qiubai's rural-centered, nativist view. The incommensurability between Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai signals the bifurcation of Chinese Marxist cultural and aesthetic theories in the decades that followed, thereby intensifying the tensions within Chinese modernity.
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Excerpted from AESTHETICS AND MARXISM by Liu Kang Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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