MCLC: Festival of Liumang review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Festival of Liumang review
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Source: Harvard-Yenching Institute (n.d.):
http://www.harvard-yenching.org/features/festival-liumang-liumang-narrative
-contemporary-china

The Festival of Liumang: The Liumang Narrative in Contemporary China
Reviewed by Pan Lu
(Lecturer, The University of Hong Kong Community College; HYI Visiting
Fellow)

================================================
The Festival of Liumang: The Liumang Narrative in Contemporary China  (流氓的
盛
宴), by Dake Zhu (朱大可) (New Star Press, Beijing, 2006)
================================================

Literally, the two characters “liu-mang” (流氓) in Chinese refer to a
floating population. In the contemporary Chinese linguistic,
socio-political and cultural context, however, the word is usually
understood to refer to a marginal and dangerous social group. The given
English title of the book, which resists translating the Chinese word
“liumang” into English approximations such as “gangster”, “hooligan” or
“scoundrel”, reveals the author Zhu Dake’s intention. Zhu’s groundbreaking
book endeavors to establish a competing discourse on this significant but
largely overlooked concept in contemporary China.

Zhu Dake, born in 1957 in Shanghai, is one of the most active and renowned
cultural critics in China today. In this book, which is probably his most
famous, Zhu rejects the definition of liumang in its narrow and negative
sense and extends it to a broader semantic configuration. Liumang in Zhu’s
book challenges its current position in the dichotomy between inhabitants
and vagrants, the state and the underground, the elite and the grassroots.
Here, liumang regains its noble origin from Yu the Great (dayu), the
legendary ruler of the Xia Dynasty, and finally comes down to a new image
of a nomad who has lost his or her identity, still wandering around with
haunting anxiety and anti-social impulses. The idea of liumang is
understood as a constructive rather than destructive force in the cultural
discourse of contemporary China. The book boldly asks questions such as
“why has today’s China, an allegedly Confucian society, lost its
courtesies and etiquettes that supposedly constitute our social norms? Why
do rascal spirits and discourse (pizijingshen and pizihuayu) dominate our
daily life? Why do the aesthetics of violence prevail in our cultural
life? (P 8) For Zhu, liumang plays a vital role in understanding the
inconsistencies and traumatic experiences in the course of constructing
modern Chinese identity. Since the early twentieth century, the question
has not only been central to intellectual and the mass debates, but also
to lived political and cultural realities that have literally changed the
historical path of the country.

Almost a textbook of liumang discourse, the book contains thirteen
chapters, each preceded by an abstract. It ends with an appendix of the
author’s earlier short essay: “The Psychoanalysis of Liumang”(1994). The
introductory chapter offers a brief overview of Zhu’s definition of
liumang and a literature review of previous research on the topic.
Chapters One and Two examine the relationship among liumang discourse,
statism and identity. Highlighted by Zhu as the “soul of the book”,
Chapter Three theorizes three major forms of liumang language: the cool
(kuyu), the erotic (seyu) and the filthy (huiyu). Secondly, the chapter
summarizes the main rules of the liumang narrative, including the
characteristics of the liumang narrator, the differences between liumang
writing and liumang speech, and the establishment of liumang idols.
Finally, five models of liumang discourse are formulated: the street
rascal, the cynic, the thick black theory (houhei), the lower body
(xiabanshen) and the avant-garde. Temporally situated in Chinese cultural
history from the 1920s to the 2000s, the subsequent chapters are dedicated
to detailed analyses of the five categories of discourse that circulate
and nourish everyday language, music, poetry, novel, film, visual arts,
fashion, architecture and mass media (mainly TV and the internet). With
the assistance of numerous visual images inserted in the text, the book
unfolds a panorama of Chinese liumang discourse that proves stunningly
rich.

One of the most controversial but enticing elements of the book is Zhu’s
original and imaginative use of Chinese language and rhetoric. He barrages
readers with new words and semantic clusters built upon imageries of
diverse colors, sounds and smells: “aesthetic earthquake”, “feast of
signs”, “ethical explosion”, “ethical scent”, “index of vulgarity”,
“hermeneutic disaster”, etc. As if engaged in a semiotic revolution, Zhu’s
language challenges the predominance of a comfortably soothing writing
style represented by, e.g., another famous Shanghai writer and cultural
critic, Yu Qiuyu. More than a language game, Zhu’s embrace of sharp and
conflict-ridden language speaks to a deeper purpose, that is, to demystify
the established hegemonic discourse of “official speak”. The most
stimulating part the book offers is the demonstration of a mass misreading
and misinterpretation of texts of popular culture in modern China as a
part of the aesthetics of liumang. In other words, Zhu not only shows how
hegemonic discourses are constructed, but also how they are constructed
through misunderstandings. Such discrepancies between the encoding and the
decoding of the prevalent myths of Chinese society can be found in various
popular memories, from the May Fourth Movement to the 1990s’ TV drama “Ke
Wang”. These misunderstandings, according to Zhu, are fashioned in a
masquerade between liumang and statist discourses. Such unveilings reveal
the condition of (post)modernity in China. Whereas modernity in the West
is marked by the death of God and consequent disenchantment and
rationalization, the modernity discourse in China is still riddled with
tensions concerning what the disenchantment, if there was one, is all
about.   

Interestingly, some of the chief merits of the book are also the most
controversial. Zhu’s effort to depict liumang discourse as “a subversion
of statist discourse, a discursive campaign which emancipates subjectivity
from the prison of the identity of the other” (p 15) has made the
conceptualization of “liumang” a semiotic metaphor rather than a de facto
social group. Liumang, therefore, becomes difficult to identify due to its
symbolic nature, which seems to be all-inclusive. The Baroque style of
Zhu’s language sometimes eludes the reader. The wide spectrum of the
liumang discourse in various texts hampers an in-depth investigation with
a clearer main thread. Although Zhu claims that “Liumangdiscourse in a
broad sense tries to conquer the entrenched discourse of statism while
reestablishing a vast horizon of individual liberalism” (p 15), the
question remains whether this highly fluid and fragmented discourse is
able to subvert hegemony, or whether it actually consolidates the hegemony
while eroding its own resistant capacity. In a Bahktinian carnival, can
the normalized liumang discourse in contemporary China be also seen as,
according to Paul Virilio, a collective silence and disappearance? Where,
after all, does the power of liumang as a constructive force ultimately
lie?

Yet the book can still be regarded as a leading if idiosyncratic work in
the field of cultural studies in China, which brings me to one final
remark about its theoretical genealogy. It seems that Zhu tries to
construct his own independent kingdom of liumang discourse, based mostly
on his original observations. Considering the fact that Zhu earned his PhD
in Australia, an absence of any conspicuous reference to Western critical
theories is noticeable. When recently the famous and infamous “leftist”
professor Kong Qingdong publicized on his weibomicro-blog (the Chinese
version of Twitter) that he had just refused, with a three-parallel
structured name-calling, an interview request of a journalist from a
“rightist” newspaper in southern China, the use of vulgar language by a
supposedly social elite attested to the prevalence ofliumang discourse. As
this incident stirred vehement debates on the continuing confusion of the
thinking public, we know that the festival ofliumang in China is still
being celebrated.