The possibility of Liu’s success was conditioned on his story being “stir-fried.” You can use this metaphor to suggest a rearrangement of the elements. The call for empathetic recognition of the plight of the bangbang in his earlier work is coopted into his becoming not only a model of success for others to emulate but the personification of a different kind of subject altogether: an entrepreneurial subject with no time to write!!!!
What we see here is the effacement of literature as having a value at all, once its surplus value has been extracted.
Take another look at Hairong’s essay about the baomu school. See how she does a close reading of the teacher’s words. You can do this with the documentary archive of texts by Liu and about him. You will need to carefully document the shift in his voice of his “true color.” What is this “true color”? This needs to be elaborated upon. Look carefully at the language of his writing: Is there a division between the literary style of himself as an observer and the words he quotes from other bangbangs? In other words, does Liu effect a distance between himself and his comrades from the very beginning in terms of the social dialect that is used in his writing or is this something that comes later?
The representational surplus value that is extracted from Liu is not only in his affirming the values of the dominant representational economy: hard work and pluck are the ingredients of success, but it is also extracted through the example of his own transformation: in his actually becoming a successful person “with no time to write.”
Liu is able to convert his social capital he acquired through his writing into money or entrepreneurial capital in a Bourdieu's notion of the convertability of capitals. I hesitate to call his social capital as cultural capital because of the complex transaction of his writing between the high and low: using the literary genres of high art to depict the low. There is an element of condescension here. It is okay for Liu to write about the low because he is low himself. Therefore his literary “art” is marked from the very beginning as something that is not quite art, but as a form of social documentation: an expression of “the real” (his true color) that reconfirms the truth of the hegemonic value system.. And once he loses this connection to the low through his transformation into an entrepreneur, his literary voice is effaced. His time is much too valuable to be spent on such silly stuff. He has moved to a new class position that now derogates his own writerly sign value. His being an entrepreneur is much sexier. There this is why you need to attend to the transactions of value in the representational economy that parallel this shift in Liu’s own practice of capitalizing on his fame.
Here is how I would understand the notion of representational economy. It is a “field” phenomenon in which you would include all the discursive apparatuses and forms of everyday practice that contribute to the hegemonic commonsenseness of what constitutes in this case human value in a human capital regime. This field is a tightly knotted matrix that would make it difficult to trace out the transactions in a linear and continuist way, if only because of the ways in which these transactions jump from one level to the other (economic/political/cultural). We can see this in the history of the suzhi concept. It starts out on the political level in the 1970s to explain why China is so belated in achieving its modernity (e.g., why China is in need of reform). From there it progresses in the 1980s to cheapen the labor of China’s rural migrants in the global expansion of capitalism in need of addressing its falling rate of profit, from there it progresses in the 1990s as a cultural politics of class distinction. However, despite our being able to trace out this historical succession, the three levels now are all braided together. The big question is how to find moments of critique that can break out of the stranglehold of this representation economy? Did Liu’s earlier work hold this potential? Could it be interpreted as a speaking back to a representational economy that derogates his value (here is where Kipnis’s work might be helpful)?
If economy is the word that is tripping people up, let’s go back again and think about the analogy between economic value and linguistic sign value. Stallybrass and White’s discussion of the “transcodings of the city” into high and low is an example of a binary code, in a figure of antithesis which is one of the most violent figures of all because you are either high or low but can never be in between. The high is the not-low and the low is the not-high. Here we have a sign system broken down into its most elementary terms. Now multiply that over the whole social field: the city, the body, the wage contract, cuisine, housing, &&.
1 comment:
Dear Ann,
Thank you so much for posting the poignant thoughts about the case of Liu!! After reading your comments, I went back to Liu's writing and read them again, and found that the shift in his tones is more complicated and nuanced than I thought. I would say that some of his early writing has the trace of distancing himself from his bangbang comrades; some do not. For example, in his very first published article, he described how his habit of studying -- buying and reading newspaper -- was joked around by his colleagues. He also complaint in this writing about the "bad habit" of his bangbang colleagues, such as negotiating the payment with the customers "shamelessly" and stealing other bangbang comrades' costumers in order to earn more money, etc. I found in this narration a strong sentiment of scorn and loathing toward the bangbang. After all, Liu was not willing to work as a bangbang; he was forced to.
But the other three early writings of his (from 1994-1996)express his deep sympathy to bangbang population. The first is the vivid description of a bangbang's very first day of work on which he was slapped on the face; and the other two tell the story of the urban violence and discrimination toward this population--a physically strong bangbang who was beaten by urban gangs and became mentally sick; another bangbang who was doubted by the landlord for stealing money and his bangbang colleagues defended his innocence. In these two writings, I think here he identified himself with the bangbang population as one of them.
But only his potential to become the observer of the bangbang population was developed under the guidance of the newspaper editor. This turn of tones can be seen very clearly by comparing some of the article that he wrote before and after he wrote the column. This raises the interesting question that you asked: what kind of literature (knowledge)is considered as having value and even produces surplus value waiting to be extracted by the hegemonic structure in the representational economy? What kind of literature (knowledge) that is deemed as having no value and should be snuffed out?
These are off the top of my head. I will post more later...
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