Ta's Paper

Feedback for Ta
Page 1: I would insert a footnote that documents some of the controversy about organ procurement from convicted criminals and also the sensationalization of this issue in Falungong networks worldwide.

There is a thread undeveloped in your essay about the propriety of the body (in the sense of who owns it?). Does the young man own the right to dispose of his organs as he sees fit? Is this one of those murky areas between a socialist ideological system and the new legal system (the one that the people need to be instructed about)? Do the parents have rights over the body of their children in the sense of an obligated return to them for the sacrifices they made on behalf of the children (the tradition of filiality)? Does the state have rights over the bodies of its citizens? Are these competing rights clarified through this case or do they remain unresolved? You raise the question of possession a bit in page 7, but I think it needs to be elaborated as a legal point. A case of habeas corpus in the more literal sense of “who has the legal right to the body.”

You might mention that von Hagen does not just claim his exhibit as science as a new art form, moreover one in which his subjects willingly donate their bodies to be immortalized in plastic. Of course there are crossovers between science and art—both involve processes of close observation. But it bears thinking about the relative roles of art and science in legitimating this public display of dead human remains.

Page 2: the body brokers—you might mention how unreclaimed bodies or the bodies of convicts have long had a market value—going back to the Victorian era. Catherine Gallagher has quite a wonderful essay on Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, which is all about the sale of bodies fished up in the Thames and also bodies for dissection and taxidermy!!! She begins with the question: Is it possible for a dead man to be the possessor of wealth? This relates directly to the propriety of the money reward in your story. I am also thinking of Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged, which discusses in great detail the way that executions were used to wage class warfare in 19th-century Britain. People were hanged for quite inconsequential crimes, especially those that were deemed “crimes of property” in a new private property regime.

Page 2, first full para: I think you move a little too quickly here. You need to insert some discussion of the difficulty of obtaining voluntary organ donations in China. Are there cultural issues that complicate such a campaign (as there were in blood donation for example)?

Page 4, first full para: This last paragraph in the section needs to invoke the fetish of consent here. Can you pose it in a way that it returns with gathering force as you move through your argument (i.e., with each return)?

Page 6: Are you told whether this letter left to his mother is the same letter that is regarded as his last will and testament? Does he leave the money explicitly to his parents? Or is this left unclear? Is the text offered verbatim?

Organ donation as social sacrifice: as we discussed in class this part of the story does not quite hold together. Why would there be a money reward given to someone who has already donated his organs in ignorance of such a prospect? Your job as analyst is to note the gaps and fissures in the story itself and try to understand how these areas of murkiness work ideologically in producing a public message (i.e., those things that had to remain unclear in order for the state to extract a representational surplus value from this story).

Page 7, second full para: Whether a body has more value alive or dead connects this story with the biopolitical and the necropolitics that emerge from a neoliberal political logic. I see that you do not reference Agamben’s Homo Sacer here (i.e., he who can be sacrificed without loss) and yet the story fairly screams out for some discussion of how some bodies have value only in their application to other bodies (visions of the Frankenstein Monster).

Xia's Paper

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, &&.

Writing Workshop Schedule/Room Assignment Update

Thursday (note change in day of the week), November 13, 12:30-2:20, 109 Smith (papers by Ta and Xia)

Tuesday, November 18, 12:30-2:20, 224 Suzzallo (papers by Evi and Chingchai)

Tuesday, November 25, 12:30-2:30, 224 Suzzallo (papers by Bonnie and Charles)

Tuesday, December 2, 12:30-2:30, 316 Suzzallo (note room change) (papers by Cheryll and Hsun-Hui)

Thursday (note we are meeting twice in the same week), December 4, 6:00-8:00, my house over pizza (papers by Chris and Allan)

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will be November 12 at 5:00 in Denny 401.

I have set up a discussion board here

I promised Hsun-hui to post a link to an online discussion by Murray Smith of Rubin's notion of "socially equalized labor." You can find it here

Changes to the Time and Place Schedule

Please note: I am retaining the original time and place on Thursday for meetings of the value group and also for when the Writing Workshop meets on a Thursday, November 13.

T 12:30-2:20 MGH 289

Th 11:30-1:20 MGH 297

Value Group

We will have our first meeting on Thursday, October 9, 12:00-1:30 in MGH 297. We will be discussing the readings listed under "Marx's Theory of Value."

Class Schedule for Writing Seminar

10/7:

The time has been changed to Tuesdays, 12:30-2:20. The room will be announced soon.

11/13 (Please Note: This is a Thursday):
1. Ta
2. Xia

11/18 (the week of AAA):
1. Evi
2. Chingchai

11/25:
1. Bonnie
2. Charles

12/2:
1. Hsun-hui
2. Cheryll

12/4 (Please Note: This is a Thursday. Seminar at my house over pizza):
1. Chris
2. Allan