High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China.
Kinkley, Jeffrey C.
High Culture Fever is an expert intellectual history and critique of China's own "cultural studies," a long step toward a prosopography of the 1980s' vanguard intellectuals who appointed themselves China's spiritual and cultural saviors while the economy boomed and Marxist ideology and social relations dissolved without them. Their theories of sociocultural development, sometimes couched in recent Western "High Theory" vocabulary, and their contemporaries' literary works, popularly conceived as occurring in "waves" reflecting trends in cultural ideology, generated the headlines, slogans, and seminar topics for China's major debates in the humanities - in collaboration and competition with Communist Party precepts, Jing Wang points out.
It is with her own erudite discourse of liberation that Wang critiques hidden assumptions and oversights of the major contending debates and "schools," which were variously devoted to socialist alienation, Marxist humanism, existentialism; science, future modernity, modernism, subjectivity, and Chinese culture, including net-Confucianism and late-Ming sprouts of Enlightenment; the "Yellow River Elegy" TV series, Misty Poetry, root-seeking literature, and late-eighties avant-garde works; and late eighties problematics of pseudomodernism, postmodernism, and best-selling fiction. Jing Wang's exposition is more intelligible than the run of theoretical discourse from her own university's (Duke's) press and journals, but still difficult; perhaps Li Zehou and "roots" praxis cannot be made transparent. She does move among the many "schools" like a Fish (sorry, Stanley) in water, explicating Chinese intellectuals' "double bind": a Great Leap mentality that insisted on immediate modernity and overtaking the West, and a "sinification complex" that required trueness to "China" while meeting foreign norms.
High Culture Fever prepares us for the next stage of scholarship, which will require us to ignore predesignated "schools" and even the pronouncements of Li Tuo, who discovered so many important authors; face up to the tpposition between esthetic modernism and modernity; and analyze ideas like "cultural capital." Root-seeking works, for instance, were too diverse to be a school, and not all were modernist. An alternative view would see Dai Houying, Zhang Xinxin, and Can Xue as the modernists, competing with more commercial literature as early as 1984. Root-seekers, neorealists, avant-gardists, and Wang Shut were then inspired to give readers plot, colloquial lingoes, and other easy, "postmodern" pleasures. It depends on what postmodernism is and who represents the avantgarde. Ge Fei or Mo Yan? Fiction or film? Wang's readings of Ge Fei's and Wang Shuo's fiction are particularly illuminating, but she embraces not only the concept of schools but also that of zeitgeists - several in succession, within one decade and one tiny elite, no less. Literary works, not fully surveyed here, did not always reflect contemporary intellectual fads. Hence she does more justice to overt ideologists than to creative writers, ideological though they all were.
The debates go on, but High Culture Fever will surely emerge as a model of its kind; and Culture Critique of China is no small field, as the author clearly shows.
Jeffrey C. Kinkley St. John's University (N.Y.)
