Abstract
This chapter rereads Mu Shiying through emphasizing the dimension of body and touch, which, unlike substantial determinations of social relations that derives from disciplines, social identities, and institutions, gives rise to a relation without substance, an individual whose individuality (or singularity) stems from its contiguity with other bodies. A contingent connection among different bodies, different individuals, and, in the last analysis, different words deprived of significations: this is Mu Shiying’s answer to the semi-colonial Shanghai where capitalism overdetermines cultural productions as well as political articulations. Where revolution is unexpectable, there is possibility of revolution. The political message that the New Perceptionism leaves may be as follows: try out different connections.
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- 1.
The very term “New Perceptionism” was coined by the Japanese literary group in the 1920s, which consisted of writers such as Riichi Yokomitsu, Yasunari Kawabata, and Teppei Kataoka. The establishment of the Japanese New Perceptionism as a literary group was signaled by the journal called “Bungei Jidai” (Age of Art), where these writers intentionally discussed and practiced the so-called “new perception” as a means of literary representation. By contrast, the representative writers of Chinese New Perceptionism—Shi Zhecun, Liu Na’ou, and Mu Shiying—hardly used this term to call their own works. In an essay written in 1933, Shi Zhecun argues that “Because of the exaggerated criticism published on News of Art, written by (Lou) Shiyi, until now I’ve been called by others as a ‘New Perceptionist.’ I think this naming does not hold true. Although I’m not quite sure what the Western or Japanese New Perceptionism is, I’m clear that my stories are just some psychological stories applying Freudism” (see Shi Zhecun, Shinian chuangzuo ji [On My Compositions over One Decade] [Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996], p. 804). Even though it is hardly plausible to argue that there was no common effort in terms of literary innovation in Shi Zhecun, Liu Na’ou, and Mu Shiying’s writings, the use of the term “New Perceptionism” was stressed and popularized in China after the 1980s, when literary critics and historians started to reexamine the cohort. To this extent, the term “New Perceptionism” is not so much a precise description of a self-conscious literary group (as the case in modern Japanese literature) as symptomatic of the way in which critics, from a historical hindsight, try to comprehend the position that these writers in Shanghai might occupy in the history of modern Chinese literature. There are many studies contributed to the comparison between Japanese New Perceptionism and Chinese New Perceptionism: for a comprehensive bibliography see Zhang Pingjin, Zhongguo xiandai wenxue zhong “xinganjue” de fasheng yu fazhan yanjiu (1928–1936) [A Study on the Genesis and Development of the “New Perception” in Modern Chinese Literature], Dissertation at East China Normal University (Shanghai, 2007).
In spite of the ambiguity of the term “New Perceptionism,” in this chapter I maintain it in its ambiguity, instead of limiting its connotation or throwing it away. It goes without saying that, although Shi Zhecun, Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying are regarded as representative of the school, their respective differences in terms of literary techniques, styles, themes, and understandings of literature, cannot be simply neglected. Nevertheless, that they did write under the same historico-political circumstance that was distinctively bizarre in comparison with the rest of China is also a crucial fact. Taking Mu Shiying’s stories as a case, what I want to explore is the extent to which the New Perceptionism, in terms of literature, may usher in a distinguished space of literature that is irreducible to the relationship (no matter how we define it) between literature and the politico-economic condition that overdetermines it in 1930s’ Shanghai.
- 2.
See Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 191.
- 3.
We must not neglect an important fact that a lot of writers who were categorized as Chinese “New Perceptionists” had close relationships with leftism. For example, Mu Shiying’s debut was a leftist writer in 1932. His first collection of short stories, South-North Poles (Nanbeiji) consists of narratives about the confrontation between the poor and the rich, the class suppression, and the spontaneous revolt of the proletariat. It harvested praises from leftist critics. For example, Wang Zhefu speaks highly of the literary genius of the author: “He can use everyday language to narrate the life of the proletariat…so that the reader will feel sympathetic for the protagonist and hate capitalism” (Wang Zhefu, Zhongguo xinwenxueyundong shi [History of the Movement of New Literature in China], [Beiping: Jiecheng shuju, 1933], p. 235). The stories in South-North Poles do not seem modernist. Only after 1932, in the stories that would be collected into Public Graveyard (Gongmu, 1933) and The Platinum Female Status (Baijin de nüti suxiang, 1934), can we recognize modernist styles. Nevertheless, as early as in 1931, Qian Xincun, a famous Chinese leftist critic, praised the writing style of Mu Shiying: “he explores new, popularized, clear, and powerful forms in his stories; he is familiar with the particular vocabularies of the proletariat, with which general intellectuals are not yet familiar” (see “1931 nian zhongguo wentan huigu” [Review on Chinese Literature in 1931], in Beidou [North-Pole], No. 1 (1931), p. 18). If we limit ourselves to the innovation of literary technique, then we can say that for Mu Shiying the depiction of the life of the proletariat class is no less “modernist” than his later, “properly” New Perceptionist works because literary leftism at the time was an Avant-guard practice.
When recollecting his writings in the 1930s, Shi Zhecun says, “The proletariat literature as a great tendency overwhelmed the Chinese literary arena; most writers, probably unwilling to lag behind, ‘conversed’” (see Shi Zhecun, Dengxia ji [Jottings under the Lamp] [Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1937], p. 80). Also, another representative writer of the New Perceptionism, Liu Na’ou, once translated into Chinese the Marxist theoretical work Sociology of Art, written by a Soviet literary theorist. After the closing down of the representative journal of the New Perceptionism, Trackless Train [Wugui lieche], a short-lived journal which lasted only a year, a journal coedited by the cohort, including Shi Zhecun, Xu Xiacun, Liu Na’ou (who was the main editor), and Dai Wangshu, in 1929 these people inaugurated a new journal called New Literature and Arts (Xin wenyi). With the encouragement of Feng Xuefeng, the new journal publically supported the establishment of “the Leftist Union (zuolian),” to the extent that in the editorial of the fifth volume we can find the following claim: “The literary arena in the 1930s finally gives voice to the proletariat literature. We, as well as our readers, no longer want to stay as self-enclosed intellectuals; this is why we decide to change the edit policy of the journal from the second volume onwards.” Quoted from Yan Jiayan, “Lun sanshi niandai de xinganjuepai” [On the New Perceptionism in the 1930s], in Zhongguo shehui kexue [Chinese Social Science], No. 1 (1985).
The complicated relationship between the New Perceptionism and Chinese Marxism has been addressed from different perspectives. For example, according to Qian Liqun and others, the New Perceptionism, and especially Mu Shiying’s works, “saturate the author’s intuitions and fantasies into all objects, fluidly narrate lives of male and female in a commercialized metropolis. In their representations of the pleasure and boredom, frivolity and burden that these characters experience through erotic desires, we find here and there a critique of the mechanism of the capitalist city (but not the class suppression), although this kind of critique is superficial and susceptible of being mixed with an admiration of capitalist materialistic civilization” (Qian Liqun et al., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue sanshinian, op. cit., p. 327). For mainland Chinese critics who take the New Perceptionism seriously, the difference between the New Perceptionism and Chinese Marxism lies in the depth of their respective critiques of capitalism: while Marxism correctly sees through the essence of modernity in the semi-capitalist, semi-colonialist city, focusing on the miserable life of the proletariat, the New Perceptionism’s critique seems to be dubious, insofar as the possibility of a revolutionary politics and the vista of collectivization are oftentimes mixed with a noncritical description of capitalism. By contrast, the famous literary historian Sima Changfeng argues that Mu Shiying’s short stories about the proletariat life do not accord to his “authentic intention,” because what he really desires is “the advanced city life and the ‘platinum female body,’ the ‘Saint-Virgil,’ the ‘smog autumn lane,’ the foxtrot and jazz, the beauty weaved by colors and melodies” (see Sima Changfeng, Zhongguo xinwenxueshi [History of the New Literature in China], Vol. II [Hong Kong: Zhaoming chubanshe, 1978], p. 85).
A different, more productive reading is provided, for example, by Shu-mei Shih. “From the very beginning,” she argues, New Perceptionism “claimed the two fronts of urbanism and socialism, their relationship appearing at times complementary and other times contradictory. On the pages of Trackless Train, these two fronts were negotiated as both representing the vanguard—the artistic vanguard and the ideological vanguard” (see Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 244). Shih’s argument finds its justification in Shi Zhecun’s late recollection, where he admits that his study of Soviet literature in the 1930s derives from his understanding of Marxism as the Left Wing of the whole movement of modernism (see Shi Zhecun, Shashang de jiaoji [Traces on the Sand] (Liaoning: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995), p. 180). Under the artistic slogan of “modernism,” then, the politico-ideological difference (or even confrontation) between, say, Paul Morand and Maxim Gorky easily goes underestimated.
If we agree with Shih, then it is arguable that “modernism,” no matter how the term is to be understood, functions for the New Perceptionism as a formalistic operator by means of which various cultural and political discourses could be artistically put together without necessary principles of integration as demanded by literary realism. The artistic coherence of the New Perceptionsim is guaranteed mainly, if not only, by its appeal to that which is artistically new, without taking into account the specific socio-political content. As we shall see, the radical division between content and form in itself is seen by critics as a product of the political situation in Shanghai during the 1930s.
- 4.
See Yingjin Zhang, “The Texture of the Metropolis: Modernist Inscriptions of Shanghai in the 1930s,” in Modern Chinese Literature, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 11–30. According to Zhang’s introduction, “New Perceptionism in Japan might have borrowed from Futurism, which idolized the machine, celebrated material culture, and embraced the chaos, speed, conflict, disturbance, and fanaticism characteristic of the modern metropolis” (p. 14).
- 5.
See Shi Zhecun, Shashang de jiaoji, op. cit., p. 96. Shi Zhecun recollects that, if there were no battle against the Japanese, and if Shanghai could keep a stable development and gradual urbanization, “Mu Shiying and I would continue our literary practice. But as the situation changed, the entire environment of literature changed as well” (p. 166). Debates on “realism vs. modernism” lose their importance in face of the difference between the life in the semi-colonial Shanghai and the life in the rest of China, even though it is always disputable what counts as “really at stake” in semi-colonial everyday life. We should be careful, however, not to read Shi Zhecun’s as saying that the New Perceptionism is nothing more than a “representation” of Shanghai. In other words, what is to be addressed is not so much the veracity of Shi Zhecun’s claim as the extent to which the literary works exceed the representational logic that is indeed embraced by almost all interpreters, consciously or unconsciously.
This is why, when we discuss the New Perceptionism and its relationship with the semi-colonial historical background, it is always unproductive to insist on a socio-political perspective or a formalistic reading. While the former approach easily points out, for example, the cultural-ideological implications that underlie the New Perceptionists’ enumeration of various objects representative of urban life in a seemingly random, meaningless order, the latter approach readily responds that what is important is the new ways in which these writers represent a particular life by using new literary forms. On the other hand, slightly twisting the vector of argumentation, while the formalistic approach praises the New Perceptionism of its representation of new perceptions and feelings in literature, the socio-political approach reacts that the so-called novelty of expression is no more than a individualistic digression that is symptomatic of these writers’ lack of political consciousness at the historical conjuncture. It is not difficult to recognize that the debate in this context can be regarded as a particular variant of the famous debate concerning the relationship between literary realism and literary modernism (for more details see the collection of essays edited by Fredric Jameson, Aesthetics and Politics [London: Verso, 2007]). I do not think my rereading can resolve the debate between these two approaches, let alone giving an answer to the more profound debate on realism and modernism. Suffice it to say that, first, the semi-colonial historical condition overdetermines the literary practice of the New Perceptionism does not mean that we can reduce literature to the historical condition; and second, while I agree that the New Perceptionism opens up new possibilities, I do not think these are possibilities of expressing one’s feelings or representing one’s life—on the contrary, these new possibilities are concerned with some much more fundamental problems about literature.
- 6.
See Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, op. cit., p. 192.
- 7.
See Luo Tian, “Bingtai xinli de poushi, jixing shenghuo de zhuzhao,” in Mingzuo shangxi, No. 1 (1986); my insertion.
- 8.
See Zhou Yi, “Xi sanshi niandai zuojia Mu Shiying” [A Reading of a Writer in the 1930s: Mu Shiying], in Xiandai wenxue yanjiiu congkan, No. 3 (1989). Another critic also emphasizes the New Perceptionists’ representation of individuals in modern city, a representation that is absent in the revolutionary literature: “The proletariat writers in the 1930s were eager to represent the suppressed class, so that they had no leisure to touch on individual life. By contrast, the New Perceptionism paid attention to individual life, to the living condition of the people in the city… They depict the suppressed and distorted humanity and the alienation of emotion, as well as the ensued crisis of mind, during the process of industrialization, commercialization, and urbanization that is characteristic of the progress of modern civilization” (see Shen Yuanchuan, “Lun xinganjuepai xiaoshuo de xiandaixing” [Modernity in the Stories of the New Perceptionism], quoted from Zhang Pingjin, Shanghai xinganjue: zhongguo xiandai wenxue zhong “xinganjue” de fasheng yu fazhan yanjiu (1928–1936), op. cit., p. 17).
- 9.
For analyses of the relationship between the semi-colonial politico-economic structure and the mass culture in modern Shanghai, see for instance Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, op. cit., passim; Du Xinyuan, Chengshi zhong de “xiandai” xiangxiang [Imaginations of the Modern in the City] (Shanghai: Zhongguo fulihui chubanshe, 2007), p. 13ff.
- 10.
See Du Xinyuan, Chengshi zhong de “xiandai” xiangxiang, op. cit., p. 34.
- 11.
Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern, op. cit., p. 246; emphasis added.
- 12.
Ibid. The term “semi-colonialism” in Shih’s argument is redefined “to describe the crultural and political condition in modern China to foreground the multiple-layered, intensified, as well as incomplete and fragmentary nature of China’s colonial structure,” so that “semi-” denotes “the fractured, informal, and indirect character of colonialism, as well as its multilayeredness” (p. 41).
- 13.
For a now classic Chinese Marxist historical account of modern China, see Hu Sheng’s famous study, Cong yapian zhanzheng dao wusi yundong [From the Opium War to the May Fourth Movement] (Beijing: renmin chubanshe, 1981). The unresolvable disagreement between Hu Sheng and Shu-mei Shi, I think, consists in their respective judgments on the nature of semi-colonialism: while Shi wants to argue for the ambiguous space of flexibility and a certain freedom due to the multilayered governance characteristic of semi-colonialism, Hu Sheng argues that the state of semi-colonialism can be even worse than colonialism because it deepens the existing structure of exploitation and makes the multilayered exploitation and suppression unbearable.
- 14.
For a possible philosophical distinction between “subjectivity” and “individuality,” see Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity, trans. M. B. DeBevoise and Franklin Philip (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997).
- 15.
Shu-mei Shih, op. cit., p. 275.
- 16.
See Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, op. cit., p. 210; emphasis added. Lee concludes that Mu Shiying is “blatantly and brilliantly body-oriented.” On another occasion Lee calls the femme fatale “surrealist,” a mental fantasy for the metropolitan male. See Li Oufan (Leo Ou-fan Lee), Xiandaixing de zhuiqiu [Pursuit of Modernity] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2000).
- 17.
Quoted from ibid., p. 217.
- 18.
See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 48.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 50; emphasis added. The task in wake of the capitalist technologization of the body, then, is to “appropriate the historic transformations of human nature that capitalism wants to limit to the spectacle, to link together image and body in a space where they can no longer be separated, and thus to forge the whatever body, whose physis is resemblance” (p. 50). And we should add that the task cannot be carried out by returning the human body to its traditional determinations (be it religious or political), where the body lacks communicability. What is at issue, on the contrary, is that the capitalist limitation of the body to “the spectacle” must be reversed, so that the image of the body no longer functions as a representation of the body, but its pure appearance. The image of the body should not be derived from an illusionary elevation of the body, as the body in advertisement would have it; rather, the image of the body is nothing other than an inscription (or ex-scription) of its being. “This appearance of the object,” Maurice Blanchot says, “is that of resemblance and reflection: one might say that it is its double. The category of art is linked to this possibility objects have of ‘appearing,’ that is, of abandoning themselves to pure and simple resemblance behind which there is nothing—except being.” See Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” in Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, ed. P. Adams Sitney, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill Press, 1981), p. 84.
- 20.
Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern, op. cit., pp. 302–303.
- 21.
Shih’s following argument is characteristic of a historical narrative of the political situation of Shanghai in the 1930s that is often implicitly shared by others: “A helpful way of conceiving semicolonialism is to see its structure in terms of the separation of dominance and hegemony. On the one hand, when semicolonialism exercised dominance through political and military means, its cultural hegemony was by no means complete, seamless, or thorough. Due to the fragmentary nature of its dominance, there was always room for the Chinese to exercise options in the production and critique of culture. On the other hand, when semicolonialism operated in conjunction with effective policies of cultural imperialism emanating from metropolitan centers, it was able to construct a symbolic hegemony of Euro-American culture over native culture, and this hegemony was supported by the culturally colonized native elites” (Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern, op. cit., p. 275). When Lee in his Shanghai Modern, for example, attempts to excavate “modernity” from the semi-colonial Shanghai through a close reading of commercial newspaper, popular calendars, and the literary works of the New Perceptionism, the underlying presupposition concerning the politico-economic condition of Shanghai may be regarded as close to Shih’s.
- 22.
See Xun Si, “Mu Shiying,” in Wentan shiliao, ed. Yang Zhihua (Zhonghua ribao she, 1944), p. 232.
- 23.
To anticipate our discussion of Lu Xun’s late writings in the next chapter, we should note that Lu Xun and the cohort of the New Perceptionism are often discussed together because all of them lived in Shanghai in the 1930s. Given Lu Xun’s frequent critique of the foreign governance and the so-called modern way of life in Shanghai, it is conceivable that Lu Xun’s works would be cited in a criticism of the New Perceptionism, not to mention that Lu Xun once critically mentioned the practice of the New Perceptionism even though he did not write specifically on it. See Peng Xiaoyan, Langdaizi meixue yu kuawenhua xiandaixing (Taipei: Lianjing chubanshe, 2012), where the author points out that even though Lu Xun might be critical of the works of the New Perceptionism, his own style of writing—which is termed “trans-cultural practice”—is similar to that of the New Perceptionism (see esp. pp. 277–79).
- 24.
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), pp. 4–5. By the same token, in the legal sense a person is not an individual, it is not what one is, but what one has, and “that is why, unlike what is commonly assumed, the paradigm of person produced not a union but a separation. It separated not only some from others on the basis of particular social roles, but also the individual from its own biological entity” (p. 30). To disengage the body from the person, then, becomes the first step toward a new configuration of individuality with regard to its bodily dimension, an “impolitical” dimension.
- 25.
Ibid., pp. 17, 18.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 71.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 105.
- 28.
See Plato’s Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Martha Nussbaum famously points out that, when Alcibiades intrudes into the symposium and starts his speech on Socrates rather than Eros, his part represents a concrete dimension of love that is neglected or overcome by Socrates’ speech. The incompatible choices between the materiality and concreteness of love, on one hand, and the pursuit of philosophy where concrete beauties have to be dismissed, on the other hand, constitute the core conflict in Symposium. While the Socratic teaching on love emphasizes the “interchangeability” of concrete beautiful bodies when the lover ascends to a certain ladder, Nussbaum stresses that the case of Alcibiades shows precisely the important sense in which the beloved cannot be “overcome.” The individuality of the beloved, in this sense, gets configured at the moment when (s)he is loved in his or her bodily dimension. See Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Chapter 6. What is implied in Nussbaum’s argument without being explicitly developed, though, is the emphasis on vision and seeing in Plato’s Symposium. The lack of sensibility, or, more precisely, the lack of touch, is what distinguishes Plato’s (or Socrates’ Diotima’s) teaching on eros from the specificity of body, of a specific body.
- 29.
Robert Esposito, Persons and Things, op. cit., pp. 80–81. Literature, continues Esposito, “is the form of supreme attention to what remains of things, the ashes left behind by the fire” (p. 81).
- 30.
Mu Shiying, “Baijin de nüti suxiang,” in Xinganjuepai xiaoshuo xuan [Selected Stories of the New Perceptionism], ed. Yan Jiayan (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1985), p. 253. Translations are mine. Quotations from this text will be given paginations in parentheses hereafter.
- 31.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), p. 87.
- 32.
Just take a look at the several lines in the fourth section and we cannot fail to notice that it is a repetition of the first section with only several details altered: “The next month. 8 a.m. Doctor Xie wakes up. 8: 00 a.m. – 8: 30 a.m. Doctor Xie lies in the bed with his eyes open. He listens to the sound of water in the bathroom, where Mrs. Xie is taking a shower. 8: 30 a.m. A middle-aged gentleman, with a smooth chin and a red tie, walks downstairs with his wife. His face is fleshy, his eyes are jubilant. A body that is five feet and nine inch in length and one hundred and forty-nine pounds in weight” (p. 261).
- 33.
Mu Shiying, “Hei mudan,” in Gongmu [Cemetery] (1933), quoted from Xinganjuepai Xiaoshuo xuan, op. cit., p. 179. To mention in passing, the ballroom is not only one place among others where Mu Shiying stages his stories; according to one of his critics, he “does not regard the ballroom as a place where he takes pleasure; on the contrary, it is rather his study room. Therefore, although Mu Shiying often goes to ballrooms, instead of dancing, he often hides himself at a corner, holding a pencil and several pieces of fragmented paper or a slim notebook, scribbling something bizarre.” See Xun Si, “Mu Shiying,” op. cit., p. 232. Thus, it might be argued that the ballroom for Mu Shiying is a place where his literary experiments are carried out.
- 34.
See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 101; italics are original.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 102.
- 36.
It goes without saying that Mu Shiying had strong interests in film and wrote a lot of essays discussing modern film; in this regard, some of his discussions on film do seem to be applicable to an analysis of his literary works. For example, in “On Montage” he argues that “When observing an object, the more one approaches it, the more limited his horizon becomes and the sharper his observation becomes; similarly, the more one’s observation is detailed, the more his horizon is limited. The wholeness of the object no longer appears to him, for all that maintains in the observer’s horizon are the details of the object, but by so doing the observer has an impression of the object much deeper, much stronger than the impression he gets when glimpsing the object vaguely from a distance” (Mu Shiying, “Montage lun” [On Montage], in Mu Shiying quanji [Complete Works of Mu Shiying], vol. 3 [Beijing: Beijing shiyue wenyi chubanshe, 2008], p. 263). It goes without saying that Mu Shiying’s attachment to modern film has a lot to do with his literary writing. But I want to stress that a discussion of the relationship of the two artistic genres should not simply stop at pointing out the similarities between the literary language and the cinematic language. Indeed, quite a few interpreters have compared Mu Shiying’s application of cinematic techniques to literary writing, emphasizing that in such a technical innovation Mu Shiying manages to “press subjective impressions and perceptions into the object in order to create new ways of making sense of things and the so-called ‘new reality’ constituted by intelligence” (see, for example, Yan Jiayan, “Lun sanshi niandai de xinganjuepai” [On the New Perceptionism in the 1930s], op. cit., p. 2). For a recent study in this regard, see also Jin Lang, “Lun Mu Shiying ‘xinganjue’ xiaoshuo de shijue xingshi” [On the Visual Form of Mu Shiying’s “New Perceptionist” Stories], in Hebei keji daxue xuebao [Journal of Hebei University of Science and Technology], Vol. 11, No. 2 (2011), pp. 70–75.
When arguing that through an application of cinematic techniques Mu Shiying amongst other New Perceptionist writers produces “new perceptions” and “new realities,” interpreters do not often notice that the so-called “new realities” they tend to emphasize are comprehensible only insofar as the “old reality” is presupposed, whilst what should be explored is precisely the way in which the given presupposition is challenged and suspended. For instance, Jin Lang argues that through the technique of montage, Mu Shiying’s stories “show the way in which people living in the metropolitan are not passive recipients of outside stimuli; rather, equipped with modern visual technology they are able to reconstitute their world” (p. 74); in so doing, he implicitly reintroduces a representational reading of Mu Shiying’s stories from the backdoor.
- 37.
See Du Xinyuan, Chengshi zhong de “xiandai” xiangxiang, op. cit., p. 113.
- 38.
Lee, Shanghai Modern, op. cit., p. 213.
- 39.
That the bodies touching each other do not constitute a representational subjectivity provides a clue to understanding Shi Zhecun’s absurd story, “Jiangjun di tou” [The General’s Head], in which the General, when his head was chopped down, carried the head of the enemy and went to see the girl on whom he had a crush. Beheaded, the body was nevertheless able to move and feel, as if the head could be easily detached from the body. “The General,” writes Shi Zhecun, “did not feel that his head had been chopped down.” After meeting with the girl and ridiculed by her, however, the General came to realize that he was—or should be—dead. What then happened was as absurd as illuminating: “Suddenly, the General recalled the prophecy concerning the head, and felt bored as he contrasted it with the indifferent attitude of ridicule of the girl. The General’s hands moved toward the sky, grasping nothing, and then he dropped down. At that moment, the head of the enemy in the General’s hands smiled. At the same time, the General’s head, in the enemy’s hands, started to shed tears” (Xinganjuepai xiaoshuo xuan, op. cit., p. 62). What is striking, among other things, is the way in which the human body is opened to different combinations and compositions, dispersed as if it could be dismembered and disseminated without compromising any part. Bodily parts, then, become autonomous from the organicity of the body. The enemy could “smile” even though he had died, whereas the head of the General could shed tears even on the condition that it was quite remote from the spot where the General reencountered the girl. Questions such as “by what organ could the General (fail to) see his reflection in water, and by what organ could he hear the girl without ears,” no longer matter, because what is put into suspension and opened up for twists and turns is nothing other than the organic principle that determines the body. The reminder of the girl, which eventually claims the death of the dead body, should be read as a revelation that, to borrow Spinoza’s famous claim, what our body can do is beyond our cognition.
- 40.
While Lee holds that Doctor Xie’s thoughts in the brackets are “chaotic musings,” I tend to argue that, on the contrary, these thoughts strictly follow a representational logic that is not at all “chaotic.” But Lee correctly points out that “Mu Shiying is not interested in plumbing the depths of male psychology. Instead, he focuses on the doctor’s increased sexual arousal through languages” (Lee, Shanghai Modern, op. cit., p. 213).
- 41.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 136.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 163. Foucault calls the structure of gaze as “plurisensorial” (p. 164). But he immediately adds that “this multi-sensorial perception is merely a way of anticipating the triumph of the gaze that is represented by the autopsy; and ear and hand are merely temporary, substitute organs until such time as death brings to truth the luminous presence of the visible; it is a question of a mapping in life, that is, in night, in order to indicate how things would be in the white brightness of death” (p. 165). That is to say, while at first glance the doctor must employ different methods and senses when “traversing” within the body of the patient, these are eventually absorbed into a sovereign gaze aiming at discovering that which is inexpressible and avoids linguistic articulation. Hence Foucault’s important distinction between two layers of the gaze:
[F]rom the discovery of pathological anatomy, the medical gaze is duplicated: there is a local, circumscribed gaze, the borderline gaze of touch and hearing, which covers only one of the sensorial fields, and which operates on little more than the visible surfaces. But there is also an absolute, absolutely integrating gaze that dominates and founds all perceptual experiences. It is this gaze that structures into a sovereign unity that which belongs to a lower level of the eye, the ear, and the sense of touch. (p. 165)
While the clinic experience in the eighteenth century is bases on a presupposed correspondence between what is seeable and what is sayable, a strict correspondence permitting no remainder for the gaze, the anatomic-clinic, via opening the body and redeploying geometric terms, claims a discrepancy between “to see” and “to say,” whose result is, according to Foucault, no other than an individuation of the disease: “To discover, therefore, will no longer be to read an essential coherence beneath a state of disorder, but to push a little farther back the foamy line of language, to make it encroach upon that sandy region that is still open to the clarity of perception but is already no longer so to everyday speech—to introduce language into that penumbra where the gaze is bereft of words” (p. 169).
- 43.
Ibid., p. 169.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 84.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 93.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 96.
- 47.
See Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr (London: The Favil Press, 1930), p. xxxvii.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 3. It should be noted that the five senses and the possibility of their lack are frequently discussed in the context of skepticism. As early as in the work of Sextus Empiricus (160–210 CE), a similar thought experiment is laid out as follows: “Let us conceive of someone who from birth has touch, smell and taste, but who hears and sees nothing. He will suppose that there is absolutely nothing visible or audible, and that there exist only those three kinds of quality which he is able to grasp. So it is possible that we too, having only the five senses, grasp from among the qualities of the apple only those we are capable of grasping, although other qualities can exist, impressing other sense-organs in which we have no share, so that we do not grasp the objects perceptible by them” (Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, trans. and ed. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], pp. 26–27). See also Michel de Montaigne, An Apology for Raymon Sebond, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 171–72. What is distinct about Condillac’s experiment, then, consists in its deprivation of the principle of organicity of living beings through the introduction of a statue.
- 49.
Ibid., p. 61.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 71. What Condillac is proposing here, indeed, can be regarded as a “modal ontology”: “Having only a confused and indefinite idea of extension, deprived of all idea of shape, of size, of place, of situation and of movement, the statue feels only that it exists in many modes” (p. 70); “the combination of sight, smell and taste increases the number of our statue’s modifications” (p. 71). See also his digressive discussion of love in a note: “whatever the qualities for which you love me it is always me you love, for the qualities are only me modified differently” (p. 44).
- 51.
Ibid., p. 81, p. 82.
- 52.
Ibid., p. 75.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 87.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 75.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 85; emphasis added. Although Condillac also writes that “nature must produce the first movements in the statue’s members” (p. 84), we can hardly see any reason why the statue, which is never a human child, has the “nature” to actualize the “first movements.” Let us not forget the important claim: “But how did it learn to touch? Through movements nature has forced on it” (p. 90). This is possible only on the condition that the statue is replaced by the child.
- 56.
According to Husserl’s phenomenological investigation, the experience of one’s body constitutes the most proper and originary experience. Yet if this is so, how we could experience others’ bodies becomes a problem. How not to experience others’ bodies as a corpse (Körper) instead of a living body (Leib)? What comes out as a resolution is the concept of “non-originary originarity,” in which, argues Agamben, “the originarity of the body proper is maintained so to speak in bad faith, only on condition of dividing empathetic experience into two contradictory moments” (Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016], p. 84). What the theory of empathy and “originarity” indicates is exactly the dilemma of the insistence on one’s “originary” experience of one’s own body. Agamben points towards a structural correspondence between body and language: “Indeed, language also—in particular in the figure of the mother tongue—appears for each speaker as what is the most intimate and proper; and yet, speaking of an “ownership” and of an “intimacy” of language is certainly misleading, since language happens to the human being from the outside, through a process of transmission and learning that can be arduous and painful and is imposed on the infant rather than being willed by it” (p. 86).
- 57.
Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. E. Barnes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 506; italics in the original. We must not forget that Sartre uses a theological term “grace” to describe the body in situation: “In grace, the body appears as a psychic being in situation. It reveals above all its transcendence, as a transcendence-transcended; it is in act and is understood in terms of the situation and of the end that it pursues. Each movement is apprehended in a perceptive process that goes from the present to the future. […] It is this image of necessity and freedom in movement…that, strictly speaking, constitutes grace” (p. 519). It is in situation, in movements, that the body, argues Sartre, “is the instrument that manifests freedom,” since the “graceful act, insofar as it reveals the body as a precision instrument, furnishes this body at each instant with its justification for existing” (p. 519; emphasis added). Besides the theological term, “instrument,” “justification for existing,” “freedom,” and other problematic words in question deserve a meticulous rereading. Suffice it here to say that for Sartre, notwithstanding his distinction between “body” and “flesh,” the body is similar to an inferior matter that awaits its form, which can only be given by the situation, as if the body, or rather, bodies, could be put into a situation, as if bodies and movements could be detached. But what if the appearance of the body does not need to be “furnished,” what if the appearance of the body, what Sartre calls “the flesh,” is a manifestation of freedom, of the fundamental freedom: i.e. the bodily freedom?
- 58.
Ibid., p. 520.
- 59.
See Lee, Shanghai Modern, op. cit., p. 213.
- 60.
See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 38.
- 61.
See Lee, Shanghai Modern, op. cit., p. 214.
- 62.
A more natural formulation could be “zhu a jiuwo baijin de suxiang” [Lord save my platinum statue], where the interjection would then function to enable us to read the rest of the sentence as a structure of belongingness. To mention in passing, if we delete the phrase “the platinum statue,” the rest of the sentence would be “Lord save me,” which sounds quite natural in Chinese.
- 63.
Erik Peterson, “Theology of Clothes,” in Selection, vol. 2, ed. C. Hastings and D. Nicholl (London: Sheed and Ward, 1954), pp. 55–56. See also Giorgio Agamben’s analysis in Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
- 64.
I am borrowing a distinction between the individual and the singular from Jean Luc-Nancy, who writes: “Behind the theme of the individual, but beyond it, lurks the question of singularity. What is a body, a face, a voice, a death, a writing—not indivisible, but singular? What is their singular necessity in the sharing that divides and that puts in communication bodies, voices, and writings in general and in totality? […] Singularity never takes place at the level of atoms, those identifiable if not identical identities; rather it takes place at the level of the clinamen, which is unidentifiable” (see Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Conner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota University, 1991, p. 6). The distinction between the individual and the singular is nothing new. But Nancy’s approach introduces a new dimension. For Nancy, whereas the indivisible individual is modeled on the self-enclosed, absolute atom that leads to an immanentist community, the singular resists atomization and absolutization, giving itself to contingency and excess, to the nothing of exteriority that constitutes community in communication (or rather, communicability, since community and its “members” have nothing to communicate, have nothing in common). The singular individual, thus, is concerned with Nancy’s claim for “literary communism,” a claim thematized in The Inoperative Community yet put aside in Nancy’s later works.
- 65.
Jacques Rancière, “Literary Communities,” in The Common Growl: Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community, ed. Thomas Claviez (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 98.
- 66.
Yomi Braester, “Shanghai’s Economy of the Spectacle: The Shanghai Race Club in Liu Na’ou’s and Mu Shiying’s Stories,” in Modern Chinese Literature, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 40.
- 67.
For a Lacanian critical investigation of desire and commodity, see for example Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2009).
- 68.
Yomi Braester, “Shanghai’s Economy of the Spectacle,” op. cit, p. 49.
- 69.
Jacques Rancière, “Literary Communities,” op. cit., p. 98.
- 70.
Ibid., p. 99.
- 71.
Ibid.; emphasis added.
- 72.
Mu Shiying, “The The Shanghai Foxtrot (a Fragment),” trans. Sean Macdonald, in Modernism/modernity, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2004), p. 804. Quotations from this text will be given paginations in parentheses hereafter.
- 73.
See Mu Shiying, “Wenxue shichang manbu (2)” [Wanderings in the Literary Market (2)] (1935), in Mu Shiying quanji, Vol. 3, op. cit., p. 90.
- 74.
It should be noted that we are not talking about the absolute sameness of simulacra which is characteristic of the cultural logic of late capitalism, according to Jean Baudrillard. The sameness entailed in simulacrum has to do with the sameness of the reference (if the term “reference” is still meaningful for simulacra), and it is a sameness derived from the capitalist commercialization which transforms everything into a measurable value. We might say that simulacra cannot be distinguished from each other, for the sameness of simulacra flattens everything into its image—a separation between image and being, a separation which delimits, limits, and overshadows the body.
We should also note that some interpretations of Mu Shiying tend to emphasize his deployment of commodities. It seems that by juxtaposing various items with each other Mu Shiying and other New Perceptionists strikingly show the medley of the everyday life in Shanghai and the process in which an organic, meaningful life is giving way to a mechanic, inorganic, and orderless life in modernity. Without delving into a reading of this approach, we suffice to say that this conclusion can hardly avoid falling into a phantasmatic nostalgia for a nonexistent, and was never existent, “organic community” that is to be revived in the wake of capitalism.
- 75.
Jacques Rancière, “Literary Communities,” op. cit., p. 105.
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Wang, Q. (2020). Touch, Body, and the New Perceptionism: Mu Shiying’s Case. In: Configurations of the Individual in Modern Chinese Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9640-4_4
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