LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 18.35 ( Spring - Summer / printemps - été, 2001):112-9.

Xiaoyi Zhou

Beijing University

The Ideological Function of Western Aesthetics in 1980’s China

The ‘Aesthetics Fever’ of the 1980’s

In the late 1970’s and into the 1980’s China witnessed the rise of an “aesthetics fever.” In the worlds of academe, art, and literature, aesthetics and artistic issues sparked countless passionate controversies. The first of these occurred in 1977, when the poet He Qifang revealed Mao Zedong’s 1961 talk about “shared beauty.” This inspired a debate, which kept being in the spotlight up until 1981, about whether there was a commonality in human aesthetic awareness. Following on this, in the early 1980’s, the translation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 also attracted intense attention and came to be seen as the theoretical foundations of modern Marxist aesthetics. By the mid 1980’s the ideas espoused by Li Zehou and others, of a “subjective” theory and aesthetics of praxis, were absorbed into the academic mainstream.

Looking back, the passion people displayed for aesthetics was truly extraordinary. At that time, aesthetic topics filled a range of academic journals; monographs on and translations of works on this issue filled the bookstores shelves. Many works of Western aesthetic theory were translated into Chinese, including Benedetto Croce, George Santayana, Clive Bell, R.G. Collingwood, John Dewey, Susan Langer, Mrtin Heidegger, Mikel Dufrenne, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Robert Jauß, Max Dessoir, Thomas Munro, and many others.1 Intriguingly, some academic works, which in the West fell outside the ambit of aesthetics, for example studies of semiotics, were published in China as works of aesthetics. For instance, Roland Barthes’ The Elements of Semiology (1964) was published in Chinese translation as Fuhaoxue meixue (Aesthetics of Semiotics).2 This may be said to demonstrate a in literary research. At the time, this general aestheticizing tendency turned into a vogue among academics, and aesthetics become the leading discipline of the humanities.

In parallel with this, throughout the 1980’s there occurred a systematic work of translation and introduction of Western formalist literary theory, taking the text as its core. The major works of Russian formalism, Anglo-American new criticism, the Chicago School, archetypal criticism, and structuralist poetics were translated into Chinese, and there were also detailed introductions of the leading figures of these movements. These translations and introductions fueled the attraction to the ideas of the autonomy of literature and the text. In particular, the appearance in translation of Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature had a broad influence on literary theory and criticism.3 Their distinction between the ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ studies of literature formed the theoretical basis for formalist literary criticism. The associated ideas of the ‘intrinsic laws’ of literature and its aesthetic features - what Jakobson called ‘literariness’ - received particular attention.

This spirited ‘aesthetics fever’ and the accompanying pursuit of artistic autonomy by writers and critics deserves further consideration. Its significance far outstripped the particular theoretical issues then at stake. In the course of those controversies, an entire discourse of aesthetic experience came into being. This discourse was dominated by explorations of the subject, an emphasis on aesthetic feeling, and the study of the autonomy of art and its ‘intrinsic’ laws, and it accorded the field of aesthetics unprecedented importance. It also offered the literary text a depoliticized basis of existence. Literature, it seemed, could escape from ideology and from other spheres of social life, enjoying an autonomous existence. Literature and art were, above all, aesthetic activities regulated by their own laws.

We should bear in mind that previously traditional aesthetic and literary theory stressed rationality and sociality. Lukács and the Soviet theory of ‘typicality’ represented official theory - the dominant body of theory in China since the late 1940’s. The theory of ‘typicality’ stressed the developmental laws of history, and the notion of ‘thinking in images’ stressed the cognitive functions of art. Although these theories did not exclude the existence of feeling in art, and they also acknowledged that the ‘types’ must have vigorous characters and aesthetic features, essentially their significance lay in transcending individuality and feeling. In this sense, they represented a form of negation of human individuality and feeling. Against this backdrop of politicized rationality, the aestheticizing discourse grew constantly, its over-emphasis of the text-in-itself serving, in fact, a kind of emotional emancipation. In these passionate aesthetic debates, aesthetic experience also rapidly became legitimized. In the debate over aesthetic feeling, both affirmative and negative responses forced people to face up to its existence. This became the most effective form of resistance to alienation and the negation of individualism in the ideological and political sphere.

The 1980’s witnessed a carnival of aesthetic sensuousness. The theme extolled in the 1980’s was the humanistic spirit, a theme in the same vein as psychological aesthetics and formalist literary theory. The development of classical Western aesthetics, especially in Germany, also embodied this theme of liberation. As Habermas has stated, Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man “constitute the first programmatic work towards an aesthetic critique of modernity.”4 Schiller believed that modern society fragmented the individual, making it nigh impossible for people to escape alienation. The process of rationalization turns society into a machine, with the further result that people are reified into components of this machine. Consequently, their “enjoyment and labor, means and ends, efforts and rewards are mutually divorced.”5 Under these conditions, people in fact are at odds with their emotional existence. Aesthetics attempts to use art to emancipate the human from this process of reification.

In 1980’s China art was also granted this role of imaginative emancipation. The autonomous laws of aesthetics and literature became one of the forms of expressing humanistic thought. Aesthetics was regarded as possessing universally effective standards, and art became an expressive form of this universalism. Wang Meng’s stream-of-conscious novels, the ‘misty’ poetry of Bei Dao and Gu Cheng, the ‘searching for roots’ fiction of Wang Anyi, Jia Pingwa and Mo Yan, the urban-folk novels of Deng Youmei and Lu Wenfu, all were heavily colored by an aestheticist aura, bore the brand of aesthetic valorization. The folk and primitive characteristics of these works were framed in abstractionist and formalized ways: their objective was that of expressing universal aesthetic principles as a means for cultural cosmopolitanism. Implicitly, these universal principles rested on rich individual sensuousness and respect for the individual.

The decline of traditional aesthetic theory and the aestheticization of everyday life in the 1990's

Since the end of the 1980’s, Chinese literary theory and aesthetics have undergone fundamental transformations, and aesthetic theory slipped into marginality. This is not to say that aesthetics as a discipline disappeared - aesthetic theorists keep work and their scholarly contributions continue to appear - but aesthetics no longer enjoys its previous glory and it once so many passionate readers. In sum, aesthetic issues are no longer popular concerns of wider society. Aesthetic theory seems to have exhausted its potential and retreated to a corner of purely academic research.

The decline of aesthetics has a profound social and cultural background, and it is directly related to the retreat of the aesthetic and the artistic in the spheres of literary and artistic creation. The highbrow aesthetic ideals of the 1980’s have been displaced by populist tastes. Artistic works have shifted towards the decadent, the sensual, the vulgar, and the sensational, and the language of art and literature has also become debased: crude cultural fast food. Aesthetic appreciation has been displaced by sensation. The liberation of aesthetic feeling opened a Pandora’s box and the temple of art became a place of riotous rivalry. The end of art, which Hegel predicted in the nineteenth century, has now become fact. The spectacle of contemporary literature and art is, when pitted against the 1980’s aspirations of aesthetic supremacy and artistic autonomy, a massive irony. Aesthetics and art were released from the role of political megaphones, but they rapidly shifted from their original design into handmaids of the commodity society. In Literature and Art under Market Conditions (1999), Qi Shuyu offers a comprehensive overview of the state of contemporary art. He observes that the artistic works of this period are suffused with “images of morbidness, ugliness, filth and cruelty.” “Most of the novels of this time are suffused with sickening scenes, and appalling atrocities and deaths.... In the view of traditional poetics, these scenes and descriptions would have been seen as non-literary elements and excluded.” Qi also notes that “the authors of this period (including the poets) are challenging the principles of this traditional poetics.” “Poets have introduced these ugly images not to deprecate them, but for pleasure and playfulness. This embodies a new, new poetic principles striking different from those of the 50’s and 60’s and also from the misty poets.”6

What factors, then, created such a striking disparity between the two decades? Was it the decay of aesthetics itself as a discipline, or was it people’s shifting aesthetic tastes? Was it the development of social life which encouraged people to become more concerned about other social issues, or was it because aesthetics could not keep up with the tide of history and experienced a crisis of its own? Certainly, the issues which were the subject of passionate debate during the 1980’s - the literary subject, the structure of aesthetic experience, the Gestaltist relationship between the objective and subjective, and the reading experience of the text - no longer offer significant elucidation of the current-day transformation of our lives. That is to say aesthetics as an ideology now has difficulty representing our present-day existence. Under the assault of contemporary mass culture, the emancipatory role which this set of aesthetic theories granted to art has lost all significance, and therefore it has also been shunned by people.

The crisis in traditional aesthetic theory and the loss of ‘literariness’ and ‘artness’ in artistic creation, however, does not imply that aesthetic concerns have disappeared from real life. On the contrary, the aesthetic as a social phenomenon, rather than artistic, has never been more prominent than today. When in the past were aesthetic experiences in real life as rich and abundant as today? When were objects of beauty as commonplace in everyday life as they are today? If we set aside for the moment complex theoretical elaborations about the essence of beauty and understand beauty and the experience of it at its most commonplace level, from city streets to shopping malls to television commercials, from the basic necessities of life to the entire lifestyle, from fashionable models to luxuriously bound books and gifts, ‘beauty’ pervades every sphere of social life. ‘Beauty’ has become the object of unprecedented and fervent pursuit. Our aesthetic perceptions are constantly being expanded, and the aesthetic subject is time and again being shaken by entirely new images from life. Every facet of life is being constantly infused with beauty. Fredric Jameson has said that today the most outstanding artists are the group producing advertising, and his statement is not without truth.7 The total aestheticization of social life has expanded the borders of the aesthetic perceptions of the subject and, more importantly, has brought about a major repositioning of aesthetic phenomena: the aesthetic has fled from the sphere of theory and art to that of social life.

What is the significance of this rise and fall? Perhaps some would say that the movement for aesthetic emancipation has completed its mission. The rapid expansion of aesthetic perception into other spheres of social life is a “logical” continuation of the aestheticism of the 1980’s. The total dominance of political reason of that time has been transformed. However, is the real situation as simple as this optimistic assessment suggests?

The paradox of aesthetic liberation

In their Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno observed that, “In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”8 The academic debate in recent years over the loss of the humanistic spirit signifies the aftermath of Enlightenment as analyzed by Horkheimer and Adorno’s has already materialized in China. In the aesthetic sphere this aftermath is particularly striking: present-day aesthetic not longer possesses any revolutionary and emancipatory functions. And the Enlightenment and humanistic significance it once held has been transformed. Since the expansion of capital has incorporated our everyday perceptions into the processes of the marketplace, the nature of aesthetic experience has been fundamentally altered. If you can easily buy any art object, activity, or even experience in the marketplace, as if they were commodities, how can aesthetic values evoke Utopian impulses? When an advertising executive bluntly declares that: “Beauty, of course, can also be made to order,” how can aesthetic activities be any longer spoken of in the same terms as the past?9 The wholesale production of the aesthetic and its marketing inevitably lead to the devaluation of the aesthetic. The silence of aesthetics, especially the decay of traditional theory of aesthetic redemption proposed by Schiller, Pater’s and Wilde’s “aestheticization of everyday life”; and the Chinese theorists Li Zehou’s and Zhu Guangqian’s “subjective aesthetics” - is due to its inability to confront this massive shift in the aesthetics of contemporary life; it cannot resolve the acute contradiction between aesthetic activities under a commodity culture and the initial aspirations of the Enlightenment which now stand betrayed. This aesthetic theoretical framework can no longer encompass this totally new aesthetic phenomenon, which engages in total negation of the human.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the aestheticization of everyday life and its negative effects have drawn the attention of the scholars in the west. The Frankfurt School pioneered an aesthetic critique of mass culture. In many sections of his Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno discusses the commodified nature of contemporary art and the reification of aesthetic activities. He applies the contrary principles of emancipation and control in Enlightenment thinking to the aesthetic sphere. He argues “the bourgeoisie integrated art much more completely than any previous society had.”10 Another German theorist, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, observes in Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (1971) that in a commodity society “Sensuality... becomes the vehicle of an economic function.”11 The German aesthetician Wolfgang Welsch contends in Undoing Aesthetics (1997) that, “this everyday aestheticization serves economic purposes,” which is nothing but a “cosmetics of reality.”12 The French theorist Jean Baudrillard decries the world before us as a beautiful and desolate beach; a world in which aesthetic values are infinitely ‘dispersed’ so that we lose our capacity for value judgments. The present state in art, Baudrillard argues in The Transparency of Evil (1990), is disordered “as in cancer”: “the cells begin to proliferate chaotically....The implication is that we have returned to the cultural stage of primitive societies.”13 Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson have echoed these views. Eagleton writes that “the more positive aesthetic tradition has run out of steam, found the system too powerful to break.”14 And Jameson states that in the postmodern era capital and the logic of capital have suffused the aesthetic sphere.15

In fact, if we examine the historical record it is evident that the failure of the theory of aesthetic redemption in living practice had a certain inevitability. The “aesthetics fever” of the 1980’s was a re-enactment of the aesthetic redemption movement of China in the 1920’s and 1930’s. From early in the century, when Cai Yuanpei advanced the idea of “replacing religion with the aesthetic education,” and Zhou Zuoren promoted the “transformation of life into art,” countless intellectuals have not only turned towards the Western credo of “art for art’s sake,” they have attempted to put into practice this aestheticist credo. Art has been seen as the dwelling place of life and as the essential route for transforming society - a body of universally accepted truth. The writers and critics Zhu Ziqing, Yu Pingbo, Zong Baihua, Zhang Jingsheng, Zhu Guangqian, Guo Moruo, all believed that “life is a kind of broadly-defined art.” In his book The Art of Life (1920), a minor critic Jiang Shaoyuan even proclaimed that we “must realize life as art.”16

While the transformation of life into art may enhance personal cultivation, as a route for social transformation historical practice has demonstrated its uselessness. After the 1930’s all these aesthetic Utopias disappeared from view; voices promoting aesthetic redemption were drowned out in Shanghai’s cosmopolitan commodity culture. The members of Shanghai’s “decadent” school of literature - Shao Xunmei, Ye Lingfeng, Teng Gu and others - became intoxicated by a lifestyle of sensual stimulation and consumption, with Western aestheticism as their artistic ideal and life pursuit.17 In the contemporary era we can experience how the aesthetic has metamorphosed into our antithesis, becoming a part of a market economy of rampant material desire. In the late 1990’s the total collapse of traditional aesthetics and the traditional artistic spirit in contemporary cultural life bore a logical and necessary relationship with aesthetic emancipation itself. Just as the prelude of the transformation of labor power into a commodity is the laborers’ winning of control of their own physical freedom, the freeing of the aesthetic from political campaigns cleared the path for its commodification. After perceptual existence was decoupled from political ideology, it became the object of control by capital. This is the paradox of aesthetics: its fate was to act as a Utopia, which from redeemer, became reified artifact.

In contemporary commercial society the aesthetic experience has shifted to the realm of reificied psychological states and the quantification of nature. This is specifically expressed in the high degree of professionalization of aesthetic taste in contemporary society, with capital, hired technical workers, and mass production as its basic elements. Aesthetic tastes no longer are a personalized psychological reshaping, but a passive choice, dominated by society, and in the service of professionalization. Just as emotions can be packaged and replicated by advertising and media in high-tech society, aesthetic experience can also be technologically produced and replicated. It is this professionalization and commercialization of the aesthetic, which has led to the mechanical reproduction of aesthetic experiences and their dispersal throughout everyday life, and ultimately it has erased the boundary between art and life. The outcome of the integration of aesthetics and capital is a reification of human feeling. When in a commercial society a display of technological means totally quantifies the aesthetic, this inevitably also leads to the destruction of the redemptive role, which traditional aesthetics laid out for it.

The Ideological Function of Western Aesthetics in 1980’s China

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