Revolutionary tourism

Richard Wolin, author of The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, describes his recent trip to China, and the delicate business of lecturing on subjects which are generally taboo in academic circles there (via):

[T]he Cultural Revolution is generally not discussed at Chinese universities. Along with the Great Leap Forward, it stands as one of the yawning “black holes” of post-revolutionary Chinese history. The wounds that it caused remain traumatic; the dislocations it set in motion have not yet fully subsided. Since the Cultural Revolution is rarely discussed in public, the idea of an American declaiming on this theme is quasi-heretical. The only thing that saves me is that, in my lectures, which I am required to submit in advance, I treat the Cultural Revolution indirectly, through the oblique prism of its reception among students and intellectuals in France. 

What Wolin has to say about modern China is interesting - if more than a little depressing - but this is fun:

Jian Feng, the journalist from the Oriental Morning Post, informs me that a year earlier he had interviewed the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Kristeva had not returned to China since a rather infamous episode of “revolutionary tourism” — the time-honored Potemkin village routine — in 1974, at the height of Tel Quel’s “pro-Chinese” phase. It was, of course, an era of fervent “third worldism” and global revolutionary struggle. The idols of Western youth — as well as a growing contingent of French intellectuals — were Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and the Great Helmsman, who, like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, had recently been immortalized by Andy Warhol (“Art is what you can get away with”) silk screens. “Political power grows at the end of the barrel of a gun,” Mao had famously quipped (“Problems of War and Strategy,” November 6, 1938). It was a slogan that played especially well among Western leftists — the “gauche caviar,” as they are pejoratively known in France — who were repulsed by democracy’s depredations and readily seduced by the aesthetics of political militancy. Thus, among a wide swath of French intellectuals, Mao’s China — “the other half of the sky” — became a projection screen, a Rorschach test for their otherwise frustrated fantasies of revolutionary redemption. In this way, Cultural Revolutionary China was avidly embraced as a political promised land, the land of a “radiant utopian future.” 

Kristeva and her confreres Philippe Sollers and Roland Barthes returned to France to pen lengthy and fulsome odes to the joys of communism à la Chinoise. Barthes observed that, since communism had cured “alienation,” psychoanalysis had been rendered superfluous in China... In Les Chinoises (Chinese Women), Kristeva went so far as to justify the traditional Chinese practice of foot-binding as merely a harmless, female variant of male circumcision. In any event, remarked Kristeva, Chinese habitudes and mores could not be judged by Western standards, since the latter were pervaded by petty bourgeois biases and prejudices. 

Whatever she might think of these misapprehensions and misjudgments from 36 years earlier, Kristeva confides to Jian Feng that she much preferred the China of the Cultural Revolutionary era, that she finds the sauve-qui-peut (every man for himself) freneticism of post-Mao China off-putting and distasteful — a 21st-century dystopia.

"Barthes observed that, since communism had cured “alienation,” psychoanalysis had been rendered superfluous in China". It'd be difficult to come up with a clearer demonstration of the idiocy of certain strands of left-wing thought than that. Though Kristeva's justification of foot-binding would be a close contender. It's a reminder that making excuses for the most extreme manifestations of misogyny, as long as they're practiced by non-Western societies, is a form of blindness that has a long and discreditable history among sections of the feminist left. 

Comments

[Bob-B]

Wolin's 'The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism' is very interesting.

[JM]

I left a long comment here and it's completely disappeared. Odd.

[Mick H]

I certainly didn't delete it.

[JM]

OK, I'll try again. I posted a long comment I found on the Net from the famous linguist Professor Larry Trask ripping to shreds a book Kristeva had published on his specialised subject. Here it is:

"Among those followers is the egregious Julia Kristeva, Bulgaria's revenge on France for some ancient defeat at football. Kristeva is among the French dimbulbs targeted by Sokal and Bricmont in their celebrated book.

About ten minutes after defending her PhD, she was awarded a chair of linguistics in Paris. I guess academic progression works differently in France. Having received that chair, she then foolishly attempted to write about linguistics. Big mistake.

Among her attempts is a volume purporting to be a textbook of linguistics and entitled 'Le langage, cet inconnu'. Well, she certainly succeeds in demonstrating that the subject is unknown to her.

All of the minuscule linguistic content is copied out of other people's books, and from ancient books. The tiny bit of phonetics is copied from Saussure, for god's sake. The only phonology is an unintelligible scrap of American structuralist phonology, copied incomprehendingly from an appalling American book of 1953, and garnished with some confused falsehoods of Kristeva's own invention. There is no morphology. The syntax consists of two brief excerpts,the first on IC analysis and copied from an American book of the 1940s, and the second copied from Syntactic Structures -- which, dating from 1957, is the most recent source she uses.

There is no semantics. There is no pragmatics. There is no discourse. There is no psycholinguistics. There is no acquisition. There is no neurolinguistics or disability. There is no sociolinguistics. There is no cognitive linguistics. There is no computational linguistics. There is no sign language. There is no historical linguistics. There is no writing systems. There is no typology or universals. There is no grammatical categories. There is no languages of the world.

Most of the book consists of some haphazard remarks about the history of linguistics, some drivel on semiotics, and a long chapter on psychoanalysis -- a topic admittedly neglected in most textbooks of linguistics.

And somebody decided that this festering mess was worth translating into English. So, even if you can't read French, you too can enjoy Kristeva's discomfiture as she attempts to expound on a subject which is as familiar to her as the surface of Neptune."

[Mick H]

Well yes, he's not impressed, is he?

One of the best demolition jobs on French "theorrhoeists", I think, was Raymond Tallis's review of a book on Jacques Lacan, "The Shrink from Hell". - http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/en/Shrink_from_Hell.htm

[JM]

Heh. Got any more like that?

There was a bit of a fuss in France a few years ago when Roland Barthes' journal of his trip to Maoist China was finally published. It turned out to be embarrassingly banal. The thing that most outraged Barthes was the poor quality of the cuisine on his Air France flight. How piercingly anti-bourgeois.

[Mick H]

No more like that to hand, no.

[Richard Powell]

Mao's China and today's China of crony-capitalists have few positive features in common. But one of them is that neither would give house-room to a posturing ninny such as Kristeva.