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‘Joining tracks with the world’
The impossibility of politics in China
Rebecca E. Karl
Shortly before the October Revolution, Lenin challenged his comrades: ‘I
don’t know how radical you are or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical
enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.’1 A
large part of Lenin’s challenge was to defamiliarize reality so as to find the
possibility of transforming it. Indeed, in the 1920s, Lukács identified Lenin’s
particular genius as his explicit focus on revolution as ‘an everyday issue’,2
the recalling of radical philosophy to its ostensible vocation of finding a
possibility for politics. This possibility entailed, as Lukács put it, ‘that the
recognition of a fact or tendency as actually existing by no means implies that
it must be accepted as a reality constituting a norm for our own actions.’ For,
he added, ‘there is always a reality more real and therefore more important than
isolated facts and tendencies – namely, the reality of the total process, the
totality of social development.’3 In this light, today one could well ask how to
be as radical as reality, when contemporary analysis becomes ever more resistant
to radical totalization, as leftist radicalisms slip into endless particularisms
or into quotidian totalisms that appeal more to nominalism than to historicity,
while rightist radicalism roots itself ever more firmly in some version of
theocracy. Indeed, it seems that analyses of contemporary life increasingly can
only configure our current moment through that totalization identified by
Hegel’s eternal present, or that symptom of history that presented itself as a
defining moment of the historical itself and that was thence the occasion for an
immanent philosophy of a global unfolding and a return. As in Hegel’s moment,
today eternality has become enshrined as the end of politics.
This is quite clear from the vantage of contemporary China, where
the Hegelian eternal present that renarrated global contingency and
historical disjuncture in the early nineteenth century into historicist
inevitability has been adduced, perhaps paradoxically, to the endless standstill
of Hegel’s enabling Oriental nightmare. Recall here Hegel’s India: the dreaming
beauty of ‘enervation in which all that is rough, rigid and contradictory is
dissolved’, where what remains is ‘only the soul in a state of emotion’.4
Combine this dream state with the despotic servility figured by Hegel’s version
of the Chinese state, a ‘prosaic Empire, because the antithesis of form’, where
the political is impossible even to think due to the turpitude of generalized
slavery.5 Strangely, this negative Oriental standstill, where subjectivity is
either absent or is but a general subjection to an identity of all in a regime
of the same, appears to have been transformed in today’s China into a positive
dreamed-for culturalist anti-political supplement to the post-political eternal
present of a common global post-revolutionary moment. Despite this culturalist
reversal, it is, nevertheless, easy enough to recognize today’s eternality as
nothing other than that conceit long ago identified by Walter Benjamin as the
whore of history, antithetical to any logic other than that of accumulation.6
Thus it is, as Jacques Rancičre noted not long ago, that ‘the state today
legitimizes itself by declaring that politics is impossible.… To evacuate the
demos, post-democracy has to evacuate politics, using the pincers of economic
necessity and juridical rule.’7
That the state as such, in the economic and juridical terms indicated by
Rancičre, along with the cultural terms suggested by Hegel, is proclaimed the
transcendent subject of the revenant hauntings of an updated eternality is,
perhaps, no coincidence. Nevertheless, the conflation of eternalities is still
puzzling. On the one hand, in the world at large, there is a current fantasy of
a formless global Empire powered by a multitude working either servilely for, or
in shifting identities against, juridical and economic necessity in separate but
equal culture gardens. On the other hand, from the Chinese perspective, theirs
is a culturally defined historical Empire, now a powerful nation-state finally
converging with global capital. How, then, can history be both an immanent
eternal present and an eternal standstill simultaneously? Or, perhaps, a more
radically situated question might be: how is it possible to think these
eternalities simultaneously and what does it mean for the possibility of
politics in our present moment? In what follows, I want to suggest that however
we answer this question, or even howsoever we pose it, the analysis will have
integrally to include how the impossibility of politics has been culturally and
politically produced in China today, where the conflation of eternalities seems
all but completed as an ideological task.
To be sure, the pessimism evoked by ‘impossibility’ in the case of China
could be heard as a repetition of the lament, in that old McCarthyite accusatory
mode, about why China has been lost and who lost it, now to capitalism rather
than to socialism. Yet the false and misplaced nostalgia for a radical China as
an alternative to global capitalism does not capture the impossibility to which
I refer: that is, the apparent impossibility in China for the elemental
constitution at the level of intellectual or cultural practice of an
antagonistic politics of alienation, in the Leninist or, more immediately, in
the Brechtian sense of that term.8 This type of politics strives ‘to look at
things from an alien standpoint’,9 a standpoint that resides in ‘the strangeness
of the everyday, pointing up that contradiction with the familiar … that
protest[s] against … technocratic interpretation’.10 It is thus not a
sociological conceit, through which economic rationalization and freedom
from tradition produce an occasion for the rerouting of potential pathologies
into complicit social identities through the atomistic identification of social
problems. It points, rather, to a historical process that, in Fredric Jameson’s
words, ‘reveal[s] what has been taken to be eternal or natural’. In short, an
elemental component of politics is to look at and act on the conditions of life
so as to turn the purportedly eternal into the historical.11 It is precisely
this view that most intellectuals/technocrats and cultural producers in China
today resist with great vigour in their quest to become self-identically one
with what is often called normality.
Facilitating and shaping this view in the 1980s and 1990s, there emerged in
China the ascendance of an equation drawn by intellectuals/technocrats and
cultural producers between personal historical experience and political reality.
This equation posits an unmediated transparency to their particular historical
experience as the singular reality of politics, to which the past, the present
and the future must answer. While I am mindful that much China scholarship today
celebrates these last two decades as the moment when personal historical
experience was actually liberated from politics (with the death of the
revolutionary narrative), nonetheless the displacement of contemporary
social antagonism and conflict to the unmediated claims of
intellectuals/technocrats and cultural producers to their experiences of the
Maoist past has resulted in the denial of a claim on experience and politics to
any but themselves. This presents not an erasure of politics but rather a
powerful reinscription of the political, albeit now in the guise of technocratic
normality and culturalist assertion. Such a figuration of a singular historical
experience as the reality of politics not only displaces politics to the
repudiated past while disallowing and disavowing the possibility of politics in
the present, it also becomes a necessary support for the wild socio-economic
restructuring of Chinese society that helps produce and reinforce the profoundly
revanchist conflation of anti- and post-political eternalities.
In China today, the ideological naturalization of this conflation is most
often presented as the normalization of everyday life. This normalization is
underpinned by an endless pursuit of the commodification of labour-power and
primitive accumulation of capital in support of the economic and juridical
necessity of the state and its new class referents. Indeed, normality is most
often promoted as the urgent pursuit of the convergence between China and the
world summed up in the phrase ‘joining tracks with the world’. This is but the
articulation of a naturalized economism of the social and political history of
backwardness catching up with the capitalist West/Japan and China’s own
purported proto-capitalist past.12 ‘Joining tracks with the world’ has become
one of the most powerful desires to emerge from China’s 1980s and 1990s, and it
is no coincidence that it was during this very period that the Mao-era
experiences of many intellectuals and technocrats were ineluctably transformed
into the universalized negative definition of politics in
general.
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