Reflections on postmodernity: 'Streetlife China.'.

Dirlik, Arif

Michael Dutton, Streetlife China. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Michael Dutton is in the opinion of this reviewer the most gifted China analyst working today with poststructuralist methods and concepts. His first book, Policing and Punishment in China, used Foucauldian inspiration to offer a sophisticated historical analysis of community and surveillance in China, not the least important aspect of which was to demonstrate a coincidence of utopiamsm and social control. In the present, equally sophisticated reader, Streetlife China, he pursues similar themes to the analysis of contemporary postrevolutionary Chinese society.

The material compiled in Streetlife China, written and visual, ranges from official documents, scholarly discussions of social problems, and interviews (conducted by Dutton himself) to art work and posters. They have been selected and organized to juxtapose emergent regimes of surveillance and control with "subaltern" tactics of resistance and subversion. The condition in either case is the commodification of everyday life. The regime's pursuit of a market economy undermines earlier ideologies and organizations of social control, which are themselves commodified in the process of marketization, creating a need for new forms of surveillance that seek to contain the social consequences of commodification without suffocating it. The market economy also leads to "the emergence of class in China; not just the new mercantile class that has grown rich with reform, but also of the subaltern classes that have not" (p. 3). Part and parcel of the "syntactical structure" (p. 6) of commodification, these classes counter the regime's supervisory efforts at social control by nomadic, molecular tactics of resistance and subversion, which is paradigmatic of the new form of politics in China. The practitioners of this new politics are not the "heroic subjects" of an earlier day, but a "floating" (mangliu) population (mostly of migrant peasants released from land) that ekes out an existence in marginal occupations that range from the respectable (such as household work or construction) to the criminal (beggary, theft, and prostitution). Their practices, however, have a wider social significance. In the last lines of the collection, Dutton tells the reader that "the tactical language" of the subalterns takes "many forms: stealing, embezzling, and ripping things off. These are but a few of the 'dialects' of subalternity and, if Chinese police reports are anything to go by, these have become the 'mother tongue' of an ever increasing number of speakers who are talking with louder and louder voices" (p. 284).

The readings are organized in six sections, with each prefaced by introductory remarks by the editor. The first section, "Rights, Traditions, Daily Life, and Deviance," offers readings on human rights and Chinese tradition, as well as on the part played by the "work unit" in defining social status. Dutton's choice of human rights as the entry into the volume probably stems from his belief that "human rights abuses in China are...less about heroic dissident voices being suppressed than about the desultory practices of the hooligans, pimps, prostitutes, and unemployed being extinguished" (p. 8). The valuable discussions of the "work unit" as a form of social organization stress the part it has played in state control of society, as well as perpetuating "feudal" practices of the past. Not belonging in a work unit also meant almost certain condemnation to "vagabond" (liumang) status. The section concludes with readings on the meaning of this status and one on homosexual practices in Beijing by the noted expert Jin Ren.

The second section, "The 'Strategies' of Government and 'Tactics' of the Subaltern," offers readings on emerging methods of supervision, official perceptions of social problems, and subaltern aspirations. Most readings in this section pertain to official regulations and activities to control vagrancy- especially of the peasant populations floating into the cities. Of special interest is the "privatization" of supervision as household registers give way to "population registration cards" that code information on individuals, to facilitate "scientific arrangement of materials, which allows for both management and easy access to materials needed in any investigation or search" (p. 98). One result of the increasing fluidity of residency is what Dutton describes as "the commodification of residency" (p. 99), that is, the sale of residence permits for relocation in cities. The section also has interesting readings on the "special populations," as well as on the transformative effects of new urban occupations on peasant women.

The first two sections on the structures of control and vagrancy make up more than half the book. The remaining four sections address more specific issues. Section three ("Naming, Framing, Marking") includes interesting readings and visual material dealing with the uses of language and the body in the control and tactics of subversion. Section four ("The Architecture of Life"), in my opinion the weakest section of the book, turns to the organization of space in the expression and production of hierarchy and control. Section five ("Stories of the Fetish: Tales of Chairman Mao") contains readings on the simultaneous fetishization and commodification of Mao Zedong, as represented in Mao badges. A short section, "Market Trainings," concludes the collection, mostly with reflections by Dutton on the market, commodification, and subalternity.

These themes are revealing of the poststructuralist inspiration that informs the collection and, in the China field at lest, offers highly unusual glimpses into contemporary Chinese life and society. (The collection should also be of interest to those in other fields.) Dutton himself comes across in his commentaries as a postmodernist not only in theory, but also in personal disposition. In the "Preface," he refers to Walter Benjamin, "who spent his many years 'loitering,' flaneur-like, in a study of the early commodity-form in the West" (p. xii). In the concluding lines to the collection, he returns to Benjamin when he states, "it is probably best to simply end with Benjamin's maxim: 'I have nothing to say, only show'" (p. 282). This volume, he tells us, is "in some respects...a tour book for the flaneur, a flaneur on a Chinese street" (p. 273). There is more than a hint throughout the book of his empathy for, if not self-identification with, the liumang, whose voices he seeks to render audible.

Dutton's work is no celebration of postmodernity or commodification, since he is critically aware of the power of consumer society to consume the consumers themselves (his prefatory chapter begins with a section entitled "an all-consuming China"). If he is a postmodernist, it is not out of a celebration of postmodernity, but rather a determination to live with it. Destructive as commodification is, it also plays a crucial part in revealing society to itself and opening up new spaces for social activity. The Communist revolution, for all its transformative consequences, also perpetuated for its own control requirements older forms of social organization and supervision that it sought to hide beneath revolutionary slogans. Changes that have accompanied the re-institution of the market economy have "ripped the social fabric of Chinese society to such a degree, that the land beneath the cloth is more visible than ever before" (p. 273). This land is inhabited simultaneously by the most contemporary forms of consumer society, living remnants of the revolution, and age-old social forms and attitudes. Its heroes are not the working class or peasant rebels of old, but those who manage to survive in its interstices.

Dutton compares the effects of the changes, especially on the peasants, to the Industrial Revolution in England - not least of all in producing a "reserve army of the proletariat," converting the congealed castes created by revolutionary social reorganization into a semblance of class. The comparison, which unfortunately he does not elaborate upon, is both revealing and misleading. It is revealing in pointing to the emptying out of rural into urban areas, the confusion of social orientations, and the requirements of survival in an unfamiliar environment. It is also misleading, however, because the environment into which the rural population flows is no longer the world of industrial modernity, with its brave hopes for the future. The production of a proletarian class issues not in class-consciousness and class politics, but in molecular tactics that evade the promise both of social consciousness and of politics informed by such consciousness. Dutton's choice of the term, "subaltern," as a paradigm for the floating population of contemporary China is revealing in this respect. "Subalternity," which has gained currency with postcolonial criticism, offers certain advantages over earlier terms such as class in pointing to the broader implications of social oppression and marginality, but it also carries with it a disadvantage of erasing differences between different kinds of oppression and marginality - including the difference between criminal behavior and socially reconstructive politics. There may be something Dickensian or Brechtian about the confounding of criminality and political opposition. Whereas earlier, as in the usage of Antonio Gramsci, subalternity appeared as a condition to be overcome, subalternity in contemporary usage appears as a perpetual condition without a future, replacing a politics of hope with one of survival. Unlike the lumpenproletariat of the Industrial Revolution, the liumang of contemporary China are post-revolutionary, without the modernist hopes to which revolutionary politics gave voice. In confounding the two, and in Dutton's urge to draw attention to the paradigmatic status of the liumang in contemporary China, the collection also remains blind in the end to alternative forms of politics that persist as a force in Chinese society. What do we make of the democracy movement activists who daily risk their lives in more conventionally political activities, or the peasants of Hunan who storm government offices against unfair taxes and for "national salvation"?

These are questions to which there are no longer any ready-made answers, and we must be grateful to Dutton for having compiled a volume that insistently pushes them into the foreground. I must note in concluding that aside from the theoretical intelligence and humane sympathies of the editor that empowers the volume, Cambridge University Press needs to be credited for the presentation of the material in a format that considerably enhances its effectiveness.

ARIF DIRLIK is Professor of History at Duke University (Department of History, Durham, NC 27708; e-mail: dirlik@nias.knaw.nl), where he specializes in Chinese history. His most recent publications include The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Postmodernism and China (edited with Zhang Xudong), and Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong's Thought (edited with Paul Healy and Nick Knight).