Language Fever: The Search For Aesthetic Rationality

No aesthetic or sociocultural trend is completely correct or corrupt. The debate over aesthetic modernism in 1982, no matter how crippled it was by the partial vision of formalism, served as a catalyst for a conceptual revolution in the field of literary criticism, specifically, the emergence of yuyan (language) as a new problematic for critical inquiries.

Several factors converged to give rise to the fad of studying language as a system of signs. As social modernity unfolded during the process of progressive rationalization in economic, administrative, and cultural sec-

tors, there emerged a parallel movement in Chinese aesthetic modernity toward a quest for rationality. The magnetism of the concept of rationality for Chinese literary critics grew increasingly stronger as the methodology fever swept over China in the mid-1980s. The Cultural Discussion of 1984-1986 spread a model-conscious mode of thinking. Whether the cultural elite defined modernity in terms of scientific rationality (Jin Guantao), enlightenment of thought (the qimeng school), reinvention of tradition (neo-Confucianists), or hermeneutic understanding (Gan Yang), all the participants in the Discussion were anxious to locate paradigms of rationality that would impose a coherent and systematic order upon the chaotic manifold of different experiences of modernity. The new ethos of objectivity in the cultural sector sent waves of stimuli to the literary field. But even long before the mid-1980s, the literati themselves had anticipated the critical turn to the paradigmatic mode of thinking as the depoliticization of literature opened up new interpretive possibilities. The formal revolution of "Chinese modernism" in 1982 was particularly significant in that it reversed the old formula of socialist realism—content determines form—by privileging the latter and thus initiating a new mode of inquiry that highlighted language as the central problematic of literary criticism.

To fully appreciate the revolutionary significance underlying this new agenda of criticism, we only have to recall the prevailing translinguistic myth that traditional Daoist and Zen poetics propagated, namely, "once meaning is grasped, the linguistic sign can be forgotten" (deyi wangyan ).^[38] This cultural myth was reappraised in the new age of methodology as "one without logic and without grammar" by those cultural critics who now considered the traditional elite's efforts of "enervating" the "logic function of language" as one of the major obstacles to China's quest for modernity.^[39] What has always been absent from traditional Chinese aesthetics is, in short, "a place for the language-using and language-making agent."^[40] This tendency to deny the linguistic signifier its own integrity was further exacerbated in modern China as dogmatic Marxist aesthetics lavished its attention on questions of content at the expense of form. Throughout the 1980s, for Chinese literati at least, the repression of the linguistic sign was a subject as explosive as that of humanity. A Copernican Revolution had taken place around the mid-1980s to trigger the circulation of concepts such as "the ontology of literature" (wenxue benti lun ) and "literary linguistics" (wenxue yuyanxue ).^[41]

As I suggested, the emergence of this "language fever" (yuyan re ) in the mid-1980s was on one level the critics' response to the experimen-

tation of creative writers with the formal aesthetics of modernism, and yet on a deeper level, it was undoubtedly an outgrowth of social modernity's obsession with the paradigmatic mode of thinking. Nowhere was this deep structural correspondence to the Culture Fever better manifested than in the rise of a dominant trend of literary criticism oriented toward system theory and structuralist studies, a trend designated as the "panoramic, totalistic, and regulated."^[42]

Reason's coming of age in the field of literary criticism in 1985 resulted in a relationship of colonization between cognitive-instrumental and aesthetic rationality. Although critics eagerly announced the liberation of literature from the tyrannical hold of politics and ideology, they were unaware that their interpretive activities produced a different kind of repression: the co-option of aesthetic by instrumental modernity. Instead of multiplying the linguistic sign as creatively as writers, many critics responded to the language fever by committing themselves to a categorical framework that bound their imagination to the interpretation of literature as a differentiated network of system maintenance. The proliferation of journals of literary criticism in the mid-1980s (according to statistics, thirty unofficial journals and thirty official ones) was symptomatic of a logorrhea that wore out even the critics after the initial fever consumed itself. Often their effort to reconstruct the moment of perfect plenitude that a literary work was believed to embody was self-defeating because, by resorting to system theory, control theory, and information theory, they inflated rather than sublated instrumental rationality. What was delivered was less a holistic impulse (aesthetic synthesis that "does not do violence to the particular, the suppressed, the nonidentical")—a utopian vision that Chinese anti-Marxist literary critics would like to claim—than an arbitrary totalizing tendency that grew out of the intensification of the modernization process that privileged cognitive-instrumental reason.^[43]

It goes without saying that this methodological revolution of literary criticism took place at a historical juncture that privileged coherence over inarticulateness and system over deviation. Exactly because of this conspicuous correspondence—indeed, collaboration—between aesthetic and social modernity, social historians would look upon the literary critics' fervent search for rationality in the mid-1980s as an encouraging progress syndrome. The fever for well-regulated critical paradigms, when it first started blazing, was a glorious spectacle. Exercise of rigorous logical thinking in the field of criticism was refreshing after centuries of recurrent patterns of intuitive understanding. The triumph of the

Logos over the Dao enjoyed moments, however fleeting, of methodological breakthrough in the mid-1980s. Yet in retrospect, such a drift toward "model consciousness" (moxing yishi ) amounts to nothing other than a compromise of the aesthetic.

For this reason, literary historians as well as readers (who could not care less about system and control theories) should be heartened by the various efforts made by the root-searching writers and the experimentalists, and by Liu Suola and Xu Xing's xiandai pai , to prevent the very collapse of aesthetic into cognitive-instrumental rationality. The linguistic experiment undertaken by each school clearly marked "Chinese modernism" as an oppositional aesthetic that not only ran counter to the telos of social modernity, but that served, more often than not, "as a vehicle of crisis" within the progress syndrome of modernization.^[44] More specifically, it was the creative writers' search for aesthetic (ir)rationality that served to subvert rather than complement the instrumental rationality characteristic of social modernity.

In contrast, the critics' project, because of its complicity with the architects of social modernity, was hardly as subversive and invigorating as the creative writers'. The former's much vaunted program of reinventing the aesthetic rationality of postrevolutionary China proved to be highly problematic. They had to clarify the extent to which their vision of a mediated relationship between the subsystems of a literary work is qualitatively superior to the old and largely discredited nonsystematic, impressionistic vision of harmonious totality advocated by Daoist and Zen aestheticians. Was the language fever and methodology fever that transfixed the field of literary criticism at the apex of the culture craze the beginning of a quest for aesthetic rationality or simply the continuation of social modernity's search for scientific rationality?

The answer seemed obvious. A review of the major events of the field reveals that the critics' methodological fever was part and parcel of a deepened reform consciousness that was both empirically and scientifically oriented. Just as the entire society was carried away by its passion to predict as well as to decipher the "route and dispositions" of economic reform, critics' attempts in the mid-1980s to transform the old epistemological structure and open up a new cognitive space were seen by literary historians as a timely response to "epochal demands" defined in terms of the national anxiety of "vindicating in theoretical terms the inevitability, necessity, and reasonability of reform."^[45] Symposia held at Xiamen, Wuhan, and Yangzhou invariably focused on the search for the point of convergence between humanist values and scientific

rationality—the "unification of the two [contradictory] systems of signs" (the arts and the sciences).^[46] Language was highlighted as the strategic point of mediation between science and the humanities.^[47] And yet in the historical context of Culture Fever, it was difficult to deepen the examination of the issue of language beyond the mere mechanistic application of descriptive linguistics. Conceived and utilized as nothing more than an "instrument" and "raw materials," language ironically recovered the "position of its own subjectivity" as it was reduced to a mere system of arbitrary signs.^[48] Although very few critics at the turn of 1985 would raise objections to the statement that "the shift of literary studies from the experiential model to the scientific one is truly indispensable," yet contrary to what critics themselves insisted, the epochal adventure into the territory of language had not led criticism to a "return to humanity," but to an "alienating world" of insentient indexes.^[49]

This was especially true when the interpretive models that the critics utilized were borrowed directly from the natural sciences. System theory more than any other such model provides the meticulous breaking down of a text into various subsystems whose mutual interactions answer to a highly constrained network of "two-way feedback" mechanisms.^[50] Such a systematic configuration is programmed into the theoretical model, which then begs the analysis that all literary works manifest such predictable and homogeneous patterns of feedback. The formula is invariably the same. So is the result of interpretation—whether it is a study of the system of Ah Q's personality, an inquiry into aesthetics, or the examination of the value system of modern Chinese literature.^[51]

Other models based on the working hypothesis of structural totality (models such as mythological studies, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics) also enjoyed their respective reigns in post-Mao China and produced a significant corpus of pioneering works including Ji Hongzhen's "Wenxue piping de xitong fangfa yu jiegou yuanze" (The system methodology and structural principles of literary criticism) (1984), Lin Xingzhai's "Lun A Q xingge xitong" (A system analysis of Ah Q's personality) (1984), Li Zehou's Meide licheng (The path of beauty: A study of Chinese aesthetics) (1981), and Wu Gongzheng's Xiaoshuo meixue (The aesthetics of fiction) (1985).^[52] The working of scientific rationality is much less dictatorial in these works because their authors do not take for granted the total accessibility of aesthetic experience to scientific inquiries.

Li Zehou's influence is particularly significant in that he opens up the totalitarian system of interpretive reason to the entry of historical consciousness. The panoramic view of Chinese aesthetics from the Pa-

leolithic Age ("totem art") to the Ming-Qing dynasty ("the aesthetics of urban folk cultural practices") does not so much present a mode of thinking characteristic of model consciousness (although Li Zehou's totalizing impulse is evident) as a museum of the "history of the mind" that leads us into the past from which the future can be projected.^[53] What fascinates the philosopher is the historical continuity of aesthetics (in The path of beauty ) and cultural politics (in his trilogy on Chinese thought). Haunted by the recurrence of such aesthetical and cultural problematics throughout premodern and modern Chinese history, Li Zehou launches one inquiry after another into the so-called sediment of the "social content and social ethos" of Chinese people, which in another context he names as the "cultural-psychological" formation of China.^[54] Although such a highly structuralist account of the shifts in the constellations of aesthetic-cultural discourses and practices makes little room for genuinely irruptive events that may yet put into question his cherished hypothesis about the consistency of historical narratives—a perspective akin to the functional view of scientific rationality—Li Zehou did unfold, with a historian's diachronic vision, the whole spectrum of a temporal horizon that breaks into the spatial enclosure framed by the instrumental paradigm of system and control theories. What is characteristically a modernist project of spatial decontextualization enters into a productive confrontation with history. The result is exhilarating. The evoking of historical memory, albeit a well-tamed one, constitutes a force that countervails science.

The path of beauty was published in 1981. The book predates the Culture Fever and the ensuing onslaught of instrumental rationality. And yet it provides, preemptively, the best solution to the dilemma of the excessive scientification of humanistic values. Historical studies could accomplish what system theory failed to reckon with—the "immediate" and "contingent" nature of aesthetic activities.^[55] With the publication in the early and mid-1980s of Li Zehou's trilogy of Chinese thought, Zhongguo gudai xixiang shilun, Zhongguo jindai sixiang shilun , and Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun (The history of thought of ancient China, The history of thought of pre-May Fourth China, and The history of thought of modern China), the historical macrocosm of his critical perspective established itself firmly as the alternative model to system and control theory while recontaining it at the same time.

Li's formative influence on the younger generation of literary critics can hardly be overemphasized. Although undoubtedly coming into being in response to the new epoch's emphasis on methodical awareness,

the works they produced bear palpable imprints of Li Zehou's influence, particularly in the manner they redeem the mechanistic vision of the methodological revolution. I want to mention in particular one such work, "Lun 'Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue'" (On "twentieth-century Chinese literature") (1985), a long essay co-authored by Chen Pingyuan, Huang Ziping, and Qian Liqun.^[56] As one of the critical works that enables us to speak of the potential intersection of "system consciousness" and "open-door consciousness" understood in symbolic terms, the long essay is a miniature counterpart in literary criticism of what Li Zehou did in aesthetics and philosophy.^[57]

As Chen Pingyuan and Huang Ziping indicated, the essay delivers a "macroscopic viewpoint" of a holistic literary system that incorporates the late nineteenth century (jindai ), the twentieth century (xiandai ), and contemporary (dangdai ) Chinese literature.^[58] Although all three authors proclaimed their adherence to the standpoint of system theory in their emphasis on the functional coherence of temporal orders (the unity of the past, present, and the future), they hardly de-historicized the subject under study. The tension between taming history methodologically and retrieving the genuine "historical content commonly shared by all" is never resolved in the essay itself, however.^[59] Although what is delivered in the end is a reductive "holistic frame that is hidden behind" the literature and the impressionistic portrayal of the "social psychology" of Chinese people—"a strong totalizing consciousness [zhengti yishi ] characteristic of the theories of methodologies" in general—the critics rescue their essay involuntarily from its categorical enclosure in scientific rationality by means of their proposal of a "retrospective mode of thinking."^[60]

What they have in mind is the hermeneutic perspective of reinventing history from the standpoint of the present—"to envision modernity from [the horizon of our] contemporaneity" and thus to trace the "historical origin" of contemporary problematics back to the history of twentiethcentury literature. The implicit logic of this "inverted order of narration" (daoxu ) imparts to the essay an acute historical consciousness that cannot be fully recontained by the instrumental rationality of system theory.^[61] And yet the authors themselves seem to have remained unaware of the meeting of the two conflicting views of history in their writings. How they can reconcile the hermeneutic understanding of history—the continual merging of temporal horizons—with the structuralist one—a stabilized temporal scheme—is never mentioned in the essay.

The paradox, however, remains relatively obscure, given the fact that what underlies the treatise proper is dominantly the structuralist concept

of history seen as a consistent form and norm. And the unidentified rival theory against which the authors pit their structuralist view is by no means hermeneutic, but the Maoist view of history understood as discrete moments of violent ruptures and permanent revolution. This suggests that Huang Ziping, Chen Pingyuan, and Qian Liqun's conversion to the scientific view of literature is ideologically motivated in the first place. Their revulsion for such concepts as disjunction and revolution cannot be accounted for merely by their reckless acceptance of a system theory that privileges continuity over discontinuity. Theirs is a generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution, a generation that faithfully enacted the revolutionary doctrine "rebellion is correct, revolution is irreproachable" (zaofan youli, geming wuzui ). Everything that the Revolution sanctified then has to be desecrated now. The disenchantment with ruptures of history exacerbates the critics' total embrace of the concept of continuity. System theory emerged at the right historical juncture to provide those disenchanted with the myth of discontinuity with a ready-made idiom for hidden ideological critique. To the newborn vision of the system consciousness of twentieth-century Chinese literature is attached a repressed critique of the Revolution and all that it entailed: "cataclysmic break," "permutations," "epoch-making changes."^[62]

The retrieval of this ideological subtext from the surface text of Chinese critics' fascination with system rationalization in the mid-1980s should serve to remind us that China's postrevolutionary quest for scientific rationality did not simply result from the elite's mindless response to the importation of foreign models. The quest was ideologically rooted in a common historical memory that they tried in vain to suppress. Huang Ziping and the other two critics' insistence on the continuity of the May Fourth literature with premodern and post-Mao literature is symptomatic of the deep psychology of a whole generation of culture elite who square accounts with the violence that Revolution incurred by disclaiming the radical creed of epistemic breaks. However, the swing of the pendulum may bring them, all unaware, to disruption of a different order; the conceptual thinking of "continuity" often ends up committing violence to the particular and the nonidentical. This categorical framework of binary thinking (discontinuity versus continuity) appears to leave a choice ultimately only between an uncritical Maoist affirmation and a radical negation of China's socialist past.

Ironically, it was the memory of that past that both solicited literary critics' initial subscription to system theory and paved the way for their eventual disengagement from it. The half decade's pursuit of scientific

rationality undertaken by Chinese literary critics came to an end amid lukewarm discussions about a problematic raised predictably by dogmatic Marxist critics like Chen Yong: how can one best connect system theory and Marxist dialectics?^[63] With little effort, the proponents of orthodox Marxism concluded that, methodologically, system theory and dialectics are indeed compatible with each other.^[64] Some crowned Marx the "true inventor of modern system sciences."^[65] Others argued that both systems of thought share the same operating principles of "totality," "structuralism," "dynamism," "interrelationships," and a "stratified" analytic scheme.^[66] A few even claimed that Marxism is superior to system theory because the latter is nothing more than a methodology, whereas the former unfolds an epistemology and extends into a worldview.^[67]

The evocation of Marxism must have alarmed those advocates of system theory who trumpeted the autonomy of literary criticism after walking out of the shadow of the cultural past that dictated just the opposite. Memories of the co-option of literature by political ideology haunted discussions of the palpable links between Marxism and system theory, which appeared more and more convincing even to sophisticated literary critics like Ji Hongzhen.^[68] Few speculations have been lavished on the uneventful demise of system methodologies in the mid-1980s. I am intrigued, however, by the silences and meaningful gaps that Chinese historians and intellectuals cannot afford to fill. It would certainly be politically unseasonable for them to suggest that the discussions of the hypothetical correspondence between Marxian dialectics and system theory took a heavy toll on the further evolution of the latter's critical impetus, which earlier had initiated literature's overdue divorce from politics and "vulgar sociology" in post-Mao China.^[69]

The ideologues' invoking of the socialist past should not be held exclusively responsible for the declining interest in the critics' quest of scientific rationality. The real dilemma that the advocates of system theory had to face was how they could achieve "the synthesis of the two systems of signs," science and Geisteswissenschaften .^[70] It did not take them long to discover that system theory led them to the same methodological deadlock—a uniformity of critical consciousness that the politicization of literature had earlier mass-produced in Mao's China. Ironically, this was the undesirable impasse that Chinese literary critics had hoped to avoid by means of modern Western methodologies.^[71] If the means defeats the end and reproduces what they wish to supersede, critics must undergo a thoughtful reexamination of the vice and virtue of scientific rationality.

Voices critiquing the domination of instrumental reason could be heard from various quarters even at the apex of methodology fever. The call for the return to the experiential, the personal, the emotive, and the evaluative was sporadic at first.^[72] Its predictable alliance with the epochal redefinition of literature as a "human science" (renxue ) toward the latter half of 1985 served to accelerate the blooming of an ontology of literature (wenxue benti lun ) that emphasizes the self-sufficiency and self-regulation of the internal components within a literary text.^[73] Such a view effectively counteracts the aggressive infiltration of scientism into the domain of literature. The growing attention to an aesthetic rationality understood not as an accessory of, but as a means of opposition to, excessive scientific rationality served as the meaningful signal that China's aesthetic modernity was undergoing a gradual differentiation from its social modernity. It should surprise no one, then, that the increasingly focused view of the primacy of aesthetic experience in the field of literary criticism gained its momentum at the juncture when Culture Fever had consumed its utopian energy in 1986.

The rise of the ontological view of literature in post-Mao China was intricately woven into the epochal discourse about subjectivity (zhuti ). Liu Zaifu, the former head of the Research Institute of Literature at the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, was the master theoretician who identified the aesthetic subject as the utopian site for the ultimate realization of freedom from ideology and subjugation. A lengthier treatment of Liu's theory follows in chapter five, "Romancing the Subject." What needs to be examined here is the conventional wisdom that hails Liu Zaifu as the harbinger of Chinese postrevolutionary aesthetics that features the self-positioning of literature—the "return of literature to its own domain"—as its primary agenda.^[74]

Many of Liu's theories sound anachronistic half a decade later. In the mid-1980s, however, it was daring to claim that "the principle of subjectivity in literature is . . . [conceived in terms of] reconstructing the subjectivity of human beings" and that such a principle "takes human beings as the center and telos."^[75] Liu's humanist voice evoked tremors of empathy from various intellectual coteries. He received accolades from almost every circle of the literary and cultural elite and, no less significantly, the highest honor that an intellectual could garner in China: vehement attacks from Party ideologues. "The Liu Zaifu phenomenon" prevailed for several years until it was usurped by other intellectual trends, among which were anti-intellectualism (such as the "Wang Shuo phenomenon") and the depoliticized antihumanist

stance—two symptoms of the market economy that the elitist, humanist veteran Liu could hardly envision, let alone appreciate.^[76]

One must not forget that, in the face of new challenges and new fetishes, Liu Zaifu enjoyed the glory of his day. A quick look at the limitations of his theoretical framework does not serve to discredit his influence. It only indicates how his theory has served as a timely means of historical intervention. To the extent that Liu Zaifu's thesis on subjectivity is nothing more than a humanist reinscription of literature and a radical reaction to the materialistic view of literature that failed to recognize human agency, one can understand why he stops far short of mapping out the intricate mechanisms of the aesthetic laws of literature. Liu Zaifu is first and foremost a disciple of the school of "art for life's sake." Although he paid his rhetorical dues to the tenet of "art for art's sake," what he is most concerned about is not the self-positioning of literature but how literature can best intervene in life and politics. A realist at heart, he can hardly shoulder the burden of the formal revolution that he triggered but which only critics and writers of modernist persuasions could orchestrate with virtuosity. Is it surprising then that, in one article after another, he reiterates such humanist slogans as "literature is the lore of human soul, the lore of human personality, and the lore of human spiritual subjectivity"?^[77] Even the representative work—Xingge zuhe lun (On the composition of [literary] personality) (1986)—that earned him the title of the critic laureate (however fleetingly he might have enjoyed the prestige) falls short of delivering a profound analysis of the aesthetics of characterization.

By defining the dual composition of personality in terms of the dialectic relationship between the good and beautiful and the evil and unsightly, Liu Zaifu remains deeply imprisoned within the epistemological framework provided by Marxian dialectics.^[78] As if to attest to the hypothesis that Marxism and system analysis could indeed go hand in hand, the critic exhibits a burgeoning system consciousness caught in a congenial liaison with his dialectical mode of thinking. The combination of both perspectives—the scientific and the dialectic—is responsible for his making of an explanatory machinery ruled ruthlessly by the formulaic repetition of bipolar complementality. The list generated by such a dual compositional principle in the Xingge zuhe lun seems interminable. But it is doomed to reproduce itself, because all the bipolar pairs are simply variations of the same motif—endless extrapolations from the parent dialectics of good versus evil. The presence of instrumental rationality once more gained the upper hand. Liu's commitment to aesthetics

turned out to be an aborted cause. It soon became obvious that the Liu Zaifu phenomenon was already passé as some writers' (specifically, the experimentalists') quest for aesthetic irrationality quickened its pace from late 1986 onward.

The notion of aesthetic modernity rendered independent of the enlightenment project of the culture elite—a literary phenomenon peculiar to 1987—was a far cry from Liu Zaifu's purposive inquiry into the subjectivity of literature. Throughout the 1980s, before the entry in 1987 of the impious experimentalists who threw sociocultural and historical attachments to the winds, the characteristic as well as the binding dilemma of the Chinese aesthetic imaginary was indeed the intertwining of the aesthetic and the political. Ironically, no matter how hard they theorized about the ontological view of literature, critics such as Liu Zaifu were unable to divorce the aesthetic from its long lopsided relationship with the sociopolitical.