Back in the early 1980s, and long before Kong Yongqian briefly turned the printing of ironic or pithy Chinese phrases on T-shirts into an art form, I remember seeing one T-shirt with the words meiyou meaning “nope, haven't got it” printed on its surface. Visit any state-run Chinese department store in those days and you would know why. Barked out across millions of shop counters, these words were often uttered, not because of scarcity or rationing, but because socialism had turned the tables on the power-geometry of the sales counter and left workers in charge. As the opening lines of Laurence Coderre's new book demonstrates, however, it wasn't supposed to be like that. Drawing from Chinese short stories set in one department store, the retailer was supposed to turn out like Lei Feng, not the “soup Nazi” from Seinfeld. It is just this kind of disjunction between theory and practice that propels Coderre's investigation into the relationship between people and things in the direction of the Chinese new-born socialist thing. This is because such new-born things live to resolve such disjunctions.
Conceptually, however, the new-born socialist thing, much like Coderre's book of the same name, is almost impossible to fully or clearly define. Coderre might trace the term back to a 1959 definition but, as political conditions changed, so, too, did the new-born thing. Conceptually, it retained the character of what has been called a precursive form of socialism, such as Marx's description of the joint-stock company. As Coderre brilliantly demonstrates, however, if the new-born socialist thing is treated simply as a precursive form, then it is robbed of its multiplicity of function and form, not to mention its ability, in certain circumstances, to redefine the Cultural Revolution itself.
To illustrate this latter point, think only of Alexandro Russo's or Alain Badiou's analysis of the Cultural Revolution while recalling one of the few new-born socialist things that Coderre doesn't look at, namely, the three-in-one or revolutionary committee system. Chosen by Mao in place of the Shanghai commune model, for Badiou and Russo, this particular new-born socialist thing marked the systematic end of the Cultural Revolution. Coderre isn't interested in this particular new-born thing any more than she is interested in ascertaining whether or not it came to constitute a marker of revolutionary betrayal. Rather, for Coderre, there are other questions to be asked and an altogether different approach to be taken toward the new-born socialist things.
New-born socialist things offer her the opportunity to carry out a “thought experiment” in which she examines “the material with the social” and can thereby produce a way of “thinking with or through things” (p. 18). There are acknowledged traces of Latourian actor–network theory (ANT) here as this is a study squarely focused on the (re)mediation of people and things. Yet this is a study being bent away from this debate toward other theoretical concerns. Metonymy plays a key role in driving this narrative and does so through a series of rhizomic-like connotations that tie the new-born socialist things together into a veritable string of dots that remap some of the journeys of late Chinese radical socialism. As these new-born socialist things began to contour everyday life, even the quirkiest and apparently most marginal of things is shown to have diagnostic value. Maoist mirrors give rise to ontological reflection while posters of revolutionary heroes point not to imitation, emulation or mimesis but to a Deleuzian sense “of becoming.”
As new-born socialist things are disinterred, they are led by a string of associations into other questions. Hence, sound imagery, when tied to modernity and its representational forms, lead to spatialization and an “acoustic topography of the Cultural Revolution” (p. 30). That acoustic topography then leads to a discussion about one of the most important socialist new-born things, the Yangbanxi (model opera). While amateur performances of that particular socialist new-born thing would spread the revolutionary message, it was the ubiquitous loudspeaker that spread the word. Hence, technologies of socialist sonic imagination not only produced the basis for an examination of national(list) soundings but also, simultaneously, revealed a radical Chinese positivism undergirding it. Such is the rhetorical style of Coderre's argument that, rather than offer a summary of the book's content, it is probably better to offer a few remarks on the way this book constitutes a novel approach to area studies. As this book weaves its way through myriad themes and an impressive array of material, the function of the new-born socialist thing in the book becomes clearer. Her “new humanities”-dominated reinterpretation of Chinese area studies interdisciplinarity produces a novel approach. Unlike area studies, which tends to use interdisciplinarity to bolster claims of a fuller or more complete account of area, culture or society, Coderre's use of interdisciplinary is to sharpen her theoretical knife around areas such as representation, (re)mediation, disjunction, hybridity and one area I haven't picked up, commodification.
On this, I have to say, as brilliant and pathbreaking as this approach is, I wondered whether this retracing of old Left concerns through the lens of postmodern theory might not constitute a movement and moment in American rather than Chinese Left thinking? That is to say, are the theoretical and philosophical questions that are circled around inspired more by American Left values, or should this approach be seen as simply a new and exciting academic perspective that brings new ideas to light and happens to be Western? My own work is not free of such concerns or anxieties. A second concern was the rather humanistic Marxist approach taken toward the commodity form. Given the type of Marxism the Shanghai radicals who wrote the political economy textbooks believed in, I wondered whether such a humanist approach was somewhat out of place. All these issues, however, not only open a Pandora's box of other issues that cannot be answered in this short review, but also detract from the more important and positive message I wish to convey about this brilliant work.
