Not sure how all this is directly relevant, nor how I even found it, but there are reverberations, and it sure gets the blood up, if nothing else.
Its also VERY LONG.
"Meanwhile, back in the PRC, things were different. Once the chairman
shuffled off this mortal coil, the curtains lifted on a new party performance
called economic reform. In sharp contrast to previous party
efforts, economic reform unleashed market forces, opened China to the
outside world, and introduced the benefits and vices of globalization to
the Chinese people. For this, the reform program received widespread
applause. But as the clapping dies away, one begins to wonder whether
reform has bought off or merely postponed the same kind of crisis that
turned "big brother" Russia into a very poor cousin. Indeed, as Rupert
Murdoch's Star TV beams in 1960s reruns to an ever eager Chinese
audience who are ordered not to watch, one is left wondering whether
other types of 1960s reruns are also about to be aired. Maybe the 1960s
show that sent shivers down the spine of the mayor of Philadelphia is
about to be relayed to China.
The streets of China aren't burning . . . yet. But the endless caravans
of rural migrants heading for the cities in search of work and wealth may
well have their own plotlines to add.
In conditions reminiscent of those outlined by Marx in his description
of the formation of the European working class, tens of millions of
would-be proletarians are now streaming into the cities of China in
search of employment. As they reach their destination, some find jobs
but most find their lives increasingly circumscribed by ever tightening
laws against vagrancy, prostitution, and hooliganism. Under these circumstances,
the odor of the backstreet begins to reek of social unrest.
For the Marxist, this is the smell of the backyard furnaces of revolution.
For me, I guess, there is the whiff of a different form of sedition.
While Marxists look to the macrolevel story, sifting through the tea
leaves of change to discern the beginnings o f a revolutionary class, more
localized street-level divination suggests something else. That "something
else" tells of more intimate and private rebellions. It is a story line
straight from Brecht, for it is not about revolutionary heroes but antiheroes.
It is in the lives of these often "resourceful, humorous nobodies"
that one begins to recognize a form of backstreet biopower that leads to a
kind of resistance very different to that imagined in Marxist dreams." 63-64
"Biopower is an interesting expression. It forces us away from grand
homologies and makes us attend to the seemingly insignificant. It introduces
a new concern for the interstices of government that turns, in so
many ways, on microlevel "ways of doing things" that produce calculable
outcomes for government. From social security to public security, government,
it seems, is about the disciplining of the everyday. Moreover,
under the Maoist-inspired mass-line local security systems, such disciplinary
forms appeared to operate everywhere. Indeed, the picture being
presented would be a perfect image of totalitarianism but for the fact that
it is less than "total." As we shall see, ordinary people have their own
forms of "disciplinary technologies" that can, and do, run counter to
those of government. In other words, just as there can be no display of
power without resistance, so can there be no deployment of biotechnology
without a struggle." 64-65
"An entirely different picture of the art of struggle in this era of global
maneuver emerges in these diminutive and modest forms of resistance,
which belie the Marxist message of revolution. Indeed, the artful subversions
of the sly dominate and work to ensure that government is not the
only thing generating "calculable outcomes." Here, one discovers a form
of "sly civility,"to steal a line from Homi K. Bhabha, that reveals
through its shadowy forms Michel de Certeau's "art of the weak."'
"Sly as a fox and twice as quick, there are countless ways of making
do," proclaims de Certeau as he lists innumerable examples of the heterogeneous
tactical plays on life by the antiheroes of this more modest
form of rebellion. From a stolen word to a stolen wallet, these are the
petty thieves of the everyday whose actions are crouched just below the
threshold of the label "rebellion." My concern, then, is not with the
political dissident whose words we all too readily know and whose voice
we hear so clearly. Rather, it is with those whose words are whispered or
whose contempt is articulated just out of earshot. Their words are mere
murmurs, for should they be otherwise, it would be an open declaration
of war on a "strategic field" that could only result in failure. A guerrilla
war of the everyday is going on just below the surface, requiring, it
seems, far more subtle forms of maneuver and resistance." 65
"A society," writes de Certeau, "is composed of certain foregrounded
practices organising its normative institutions and of innumerable
other practices that remain minor. The former practices he labels strategies
while the latter he names the tactic. While a strategic field of government
emerges out of "monotheistic" panoptic power, de Certeau quickly
adds that "a polytheism of scattered practices survives, dominated but not
erased by the triumphal success of one of their number." The "tactics of
the weak" come into play through these latter "subjugated" forms of
power or even through the "exchanges" opened up between them and
triumphant power. If power trades time for space, then resistant tactics
will always attempt to "turn the tables" and trade it back again. Thus the
prisoner in the cell has "all the time in the world" to map the cracks in
the wall that offer the opportunity to escape, for, as Catherine Ingraham
notes, even panoptic power must blink." 65
Wang's promise grew into a museum project that transformed his
tiny house into a shrine. Much to the chagrin of the local party officials,
the "very small museum" (xiuo xiuo bomuguun) he established was a success;
it led to the founding of a magazine (aptly named Contenlporary
Cultural Relic) and to the formation of an international communist
alliance. (See figure 1.) Like the rhetoric of Polus that Socrates so sarcastically
labeled his "museum of ornaments," Wang's museum was a "turning
of the tables" on the official Mao. It resurrected a Mao obsessed with
cultural revolution, a Mao as excessive as the badges that are pinned to
the chest and tell the Mao story. Wang's efforts spike the drinks of the
teetotaling homogeneous party accounts of Mao by mixing a more
potent radical otherness into the cocktail. This is champagne Mao, and
one we readily recognize, for it is on the surface of every badge ever
made in his image. It is a Mao who trades on the sacred, the erotic, and
the excessive. It is this other Mao who, quite by accident really, reveals
the scandal of both the chairman and the party's selective history of him.
The party, it seems, may set the strategic field, but the procedures within
that field always leave room for tactical maneuvers that can undermine it.
Yet de Certeau's account of tactics is remiss in at least one respect. It
fails to adequately recognize that the government of the strong plays its
own tactical games. In other words, tactics are not "of the weak," but
are "anybodies." Indeed, it is their very promiscuity that gives them protean
life." 66
"This is pure tactics. Nowhere is this subtle rewrite
more graphically demonstrated than in the theme park of revolution constructed
in Mao's home village of Shaoshan." 68
"the party has its share of problems with pirated copies
that would not only steal their thunder but will also steal their logo." 69
"In this way, language is transformed into a
variable code for the marking of different bodies, times, and positions.
The dexterity and speed of re-marking the body illustrates the nature of
the tactical lives these people live. But flexibility of meaning isn't always
to be found in the quick turn of phrase. It is also about remarking the
landscape to highlight one's own values and aspirations. While thieves
marked the body, it was always the party that marked the ground on
which these bodies walked." 70
"...one could not think of going home or going out without "going red," for virtually every
street name demanded it...some 475 streets were renamed to include the
word revolution. Between the "Red Sun" Roads and Study Chairman
Mao Alleys, one could not help but think revolution when thinking about
where to go." 72
"At the height of the cultural revolution, the street
on which the Soviet embassy stood was renamed and the embassy was
given a new number. Their new address: 1 Oppose Revisionism Road,
Beijing." 72
"They are the migrants who populate the cities but for whom the city
will always be a foreign place. They are despised as uncultivated or uneducated
tramps, or as morally unworthy streetwalkers. They are marked
out not only by overt signs of difference, such as the tattoo, but by a
series of less visible birthmarks. The way they dress, their speech patterns,
their dialects and customs all mark them out from city people.
With one designation, one Chinese character, they are marked as the
eternal undesirable. That character is liu and it means "to float." In combination
with other characters, liu marks out the social lepers of Chinese
society." 74
- This is almost reading like a textbook of ways to articulate social change (dubious types of change, to be sure) within legal petri dishes
or fabricated realities. Quite a bit sounds spatial, even quasi architectural. Scary. It also sounds weirdly like MODERNISM (I mean the arch kind).
"Two separate and unrelated acts of
government ensured this stilling of city populations. The first act symbolized
the type of mobile city life that was to be left behind, while the
second flagged the stable, static, socialist life to come. Both acts were
designed to halt the movement of people and things and to set in place a
regime of perfect calculation.
Act one of this two-part performance began at ten o'clock on the
morning of 10 June 1949 when the head of the newly formed Shanghai
Public Security Bureau led a team of 400 police and garrison troops
down to the Shanghai stock exchange. After surrounding the building
and calling on the occupants to come out, the police immediately arrested
238 of the occupants as speculators and registered the rest as suspects
before sending them home. The chaotic and fluid world of shares and
speculation came crashing down. A registered, stable life, not the floating
world of the share, would, in the future, determine one's fortune and
fate. A new equity came to displace old (in)equities! This alternative
vision of the future was unveiled a few months later.
This second act began in September when the Social Section of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party passed an edict instructing
all workplaces to establish personnel security sections to monitor, survey,
and register all staff and workers. This was the final brick in a wall that
surrounded a social arrangement known as the work-unit system. The
panoptic quest of the work-unit security forces could only succeed, however,
if these units supplied what Mauss, in a very different context and
with a slightly different meaning, referred to as a system of "total services."
Local work-unit-level party committees, therefore, developed a
system to provide for virtually all of life's material needs. As a consequence,
the concept of the main street, of shopping precincts, and of city
life as we know it began to fade into memory, and as these things waned
the work unit spread into most areas of life.
So it was that hidden behind compound walls that designated their
jurisdiction, work units set about establishing a labyrinth of small institutions
to provide for life's needs if not its pleasures." 76
"That dream imagined an "algebraic society" of registers (of
workers) and (work) units that would make everything visible and measurable.
The dream of a mathematically calculable socialism seemed but
a few sums away." 77
And this sounds like algorithmic architecture. I'm just sayin' sounds like.
"By trading in obligations, connections, and reciprocity,
work units not only began to cohere as tiny societies but were
able to live up to the production demands of party planners." 77
"The architectonics of the traditional compound house reinforced
patriarchy by ensuring an internal economy based on the hierarchical
ordering of family members. The ordering of rooms in the house hierarchizes
bodies, privileging the central gaze and guidance of the patriarch.
At the same time, its closed nature reinforces the powerful bonds of
interdependence between family members. A floor plan of the compound
house is, in this way, a map of the ethical and moral order of the
Confucian world. Space, symbolically coded and hierarchized in this
manner, makes every home a temple to the family and a "machine" to
train bodies in the art of Confucian comportment." 78
"Those who are not tied into such networks of social relations
are always on the outside, and limits are placed on their action. They are
the people to fear and the ones who remain huddled under the character
liu." 79
"...says Yi Zhongtian, "the day when every single person has a place that will
secure their fate and enable them to have a roof over their head is the
day when there will truly be great harmony under heaven." The opposite
of this, he continues, "is a state of great confusion. "If work units represented
stability, the people of liu are its opposite. Outside of any compound
wall, they signal danger to a society unused to movement. After
all, as Yi goes on to note, "floating or drifting is a form of movement
and movement leads to chaos."" 79
"Above ground, the neon lights and bright window displays
dazzle us. Beneath the surface, however, live the people of liu.
Street Scenes of Subalternity
The "people of liu" are the Chinese subaltern. They are the floating
outcasts of a society that is organized to ensure that everyone has a
place. They signal a challenge to this stability in a way that fundamentally
threatens the Chinese sense of community and self. If chai is the mark
of destruction of the old, then liu flags a fear of what the future might
bring. If chai signals a physical reorganization of the city-space to promote
a consumer-based future, liu signals the underside to this new
more mobile and more class-based society. Economic reform has left the
people of liu-the internal migrants, the poor, the destitute, the criminal,
and the undesirable-more vulnerable than at anytime since the 1949
revolution. Without connections, money, or position these people are
vulnerable both to police harassment and arrest and to popular local
resentment. Theirs is the human rights story all too often ignored in the
West, for it is a tale that seriously challenges the Western approach to the
question of rights." 81-82
No comments:
Post a Comment