Daniel Vukovich’s China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C.offers an alternative assessment of the West’s ways of speaking about and understanding the Orient as it applies to the case of China, a country that was never actually colonized by the West but which certainly experienced many of the same depredations due to the West’s imperialist interference and adventurism. Vukovich’s stated aim, then, is to apply postcolonial and decolonization theory to another, more recent version of orientalism being applied to China. He calls it a new Sinology of “sameness” between China and the West, a sameness of capital growth and political liberalization that China is in the process of realizing (with the West’s “help,” of course), but which is still being diverted or spoiled as a result of the political residua, not of oriental backwardness, but of Maoism, the alternative path of development that interrupted the process of modernization up to 1949 and for which Vukovich advocates. Thus, while traditional orientalism is premised on an absolute cultural difference between China and the West, the new Sinology/ orientalism involves a telos(or alternatively, “civilizing mission”) of capitalist development, one that must inevitably (so its advocates believe) triumph over Maoism, the real stumbling block to China’s future despite claims that Maoism itself might somehow contribute to that future.
In Vukovich’s zeal for a more correct appraisal of Maoism, questions of art, form, style, or cultural idiosyncrasy do not seem to matter very much. It is all window-dressing for use by the new Sinologists and pseudo-pluralists to distract us from a worthier aim: to show how Maoism, for whatever its flaws,[1]is still key to arriving at a truer, albeit alternative, Chinese future—that of a just, egalitarian society. Such is the ambitious alternative Vukovich has in mind. Art and bogus scholarship (like the new orientalism) simply conceal and divert us from these aims while true politics, and Vukovich’s more committed brand of scholarship, reveal and justify their functionality against the aesthetic ploys of the privileged to maintain the injustices of unfettered capitalist development. Art, artifice, style, form, the new Sinology of “sameness”[2]—unless such notions specifically advocate for a Maoist solution in China, they remain distractions from the political essence of things; to suggest otherwise would be gravely disingenuous or pathetically naïve in Vukovich’s view.
Avant-garde art, however, engages in a kind of exposure of or engagement in politics, but it does so through the pretense of still being art(though there are obviously many instances, as in the work of the Berlin Dadaists or the Paris Situationists later, when participants explicitly announced their work as politics). To this extent, one would think Vukovich would agree that such a strategy is in line with a politics of unmasking injustice and reforming society—if perhaps not also at the cost of Tibetan sovereignty or millions of peasants’ lives. On these latter points, however, he still seems to disagree, going to great lengths to explain such things (or explain them away) in a long excursus on The Great Leap Forward. As a result, one comes away from his study with the sense that his commitments are too rigid to see avant-garde technique as anything but another liberal democratic pretense at social criticism and thus another hindrance rather than aid to exposing the mechanisms of false ideology or to helping shake off oppression.[3]
This predisposition comes out very clearly in Vukovich’s discussion of Don Delillo and Andy Warhol. While Warhol’s avant-gardism is at first begrudgingly acknowledged to be all about “commodity fetishism”—as Fredric Jameson calls it (Vukovich 91; Postmodernism158)—Vukovich undermines its potential significance by later calling the artist’s mass-produced silkscreens “anti-political” and thus mere simulacra without a meaningful origin. At the same time (and contradictorily), he gives Warhol’s portrait of Mao a very precise symbolic reading as the “original” of an entire “chain of equivalences” that operate in Don Delillo’s novel Mao II, equivalences that range from Maoism itself to the cult of the “Moonies,” the Iranian Revolution, and various Middle Eastern terror groups (89). Altogether, these equivalences connote—through their ambiguation in the bourgeois individual’s mind[4]—the persistent, Western horror of crowds and of the politics of the crowd(87-88). It is a phenomenon that originates, Vukovich explains, in the Western anxiety about oriental masses potentially organizing in a totalitarian way, a way that is perceived as repressing individualism and thus as a threat to the West, at least insofar as Cold War politics characterized the situation. Vukovich thus unhesitatingly appropriates the avant-garde simulacrum to invoke a modernist origin and to attribute a modernist symbolism to Warhol’s work as it applies to the Orient. By doing so, he neutralizes the critical distance that avant-garde and postmodern artists place between themselves and modernist sensibility. Instead, their works are reduced to a negative political strategy that ends up reinforcing conservative, reactionary, or imperialist messages even though they have also been dismissed at other points in his book as merely “anti-political” (putatively non-political and thus merely fatuous). Unless it’s Maoism, all strategies somehow contribute to Imperialism here. In this way postmodernism and the Avant-garde are negatively assimilated to Vukovich’s intention of justifying Maoism as China’s only acceptable future in the modern context because it is the only viablepolitical program representing an indigenous, popular aspiration for a genuinely egalitarian society (as against the cultural necessity of forcing capitalist modernity onto the East to enhance the globalist, hegemonic powers that be). Vukovich performs this critical operation in a few deft strokes (about two pages) as a result of which the visual Avant-garde, represented solely by Warhol’s blue silkscreens of Chairman Mao, is invoked and quickly dispensed with.
The literary avant-garde, on the other hand, is given more space in an extended discussion of Delillo’s Mao IIwhere the critical strategy of dwarfing a work’s possible significance to irrelevance is done with greater subtlety and care, though it amounts to the same thing in the end: the pluralism and critical potentiality of the Avant-garde and the postmodern are again reduced to condemnable modernist pieties and practices. As a postmodern author, Delillo can be seen as a literary descendent of the Avant-garde, but instead he is equated almost exclusively with high modernism and thus the new orientalism in ways that often miss the point of Delillo’s representational techniques.[5] Though Vukovich is correct to show that Mao IIdemonstrates a general commitment to free individual expression and the integrity of such expression, Delillo is still primarily postmodern and pluralist in outlook, not exclusively modernist in rhetoric and thus paranoid in outlook as Vukovich insinuates (87, 90). The novelist’s prognostications about extremist ideologies in the book are not paranoid, 1950s screeds[6]against collectivity per se but against the kind of politics that exploit collectivities for maximum propagandistic advantage in an exercise of will to power (though one might justifiably blame Delillo for inadequately covering establishment parties and administrations in that indictment).
That said, Vukovich does at least intuit, vaguely, the possibility that the main characters he castigates do not actually constitute the novel’s most important postmodern elements, elements captured instead in Delillo’s characterizations of other, more decentered, more marginalized figures, about whom Vukovich expresses more ambivalence. The chief protagonist of the novel is Bill Gray, a fictional author (and thus a sort of “unacknowledged legislator of the world”) who bemoans the loss of his positional superiority to other “leaders” who represent for him the unconscionable manipulation of the modern crowd—the terrorist, the cult leader, the extremist politician, or other media-savvy prestidigitators. These despotic (and thus “oriental”) types are fictionally substantiated through the characters of Abu Rashid and George Haddad, leader and representative, respectively, of a Maoist Lebanese terror group whom Gray makes contact with in Beirut in an attempt to free a kidnapped Swiss poet. Though Vukovich focuses his critical sniping at Gray (the modern, literary aesthete) and Haddad (caricaturally depicted by Delillo as a heartless rationalizer of mass death for the cause (94)), he wisely turns his attention away from these conspicuous male figures to the more vestigial one of Karen Janney. The “arc” of Janney’s character development in the novel is that of a brainwashed member of the Unification Church (the “Moonies”), to her “post-cult” phase as Gray’s mistress, and finally back to a more collective identification with mass politics through what is described as an “affirmation of her desire for oneness if not of her implied ‘mass politics’” (96). One is immediately surprised by the affirmative way in which Vukovich describes Karen’s desire, one that “speaks to a different type of need, the human as a social and community-centered animal on a large, deeply meaningful … scale” (96). But this quality of poetic seriousness is quickly undermined when Vukovich resorts, disparagingly, to a quote of Jeoffrey Bull, a Delillo scholar who links Karen’s desire for oneness with such ominous-sounding things as “totalism” and “symbolic immortality” (96). Thus, while a kind of collective humanfeeling is temporarily invoked by Vukovich, the dreamy evocations of “immortality” and the sinister ones of “totalitarianism” quickly reduce the fictional device of a sympathetic, socially-responsive character to a level of a romantic idealism or pathological extremism and thus, again, to irrelevance in Vukovich’s view: another gesture, another distraction that he can dismiss as a pretense at plurality unlike the more effective initiatives he identifies with Maoism and “mass”-oriented ideologies, initiatives he believes have a more genuinely pluralistic potential. Because Bull has framed Karen’s sentiments as a form of “spirituality,” Vukovich imputes a similar impulse to Delillo and can therefore dismiss Karen’s “desire and compassion” as something “depoliticized” or as “false consciousness” (96). Such false consciousness derives, he insists, from a Cold War, cultural-studies tradition of reading Russian critic Bakhtin in terms of a liberalized “heteroglossia” of speech rather than in a way that conforms to what Timothy Brennan calls Bakhtin’s unequivocal support for the lowest kinds of speech: “an affirmation of ordinary, crude, unruly speech, populist rebellion, and mass, socialist politics” (Brennan qtd. in Vukovich, 96). It’s a remarkably dexterous critical performance but still seems stretched, a deliberate recourse to alternative texts to avoid reading Delillo more explicitly and thus to avoid attributing any genuinely pluralist impulse to him but rather to discredit any evidence suggesting such an impulse. He thus reaffirms what seems an unshakable incapacity on the part of certain materialist critics to recognize experiments of form or genre as genuinely contributing to the critique of modernity, a critique the materialists have presumably “cornered” in theoretical terms, thus invalidating anything else.
[1]One could number them in the tens of millions.
[2]Sadly, this “sameness” seems to be happening in reverse these days with an American President (Trump) vying with totalitarian heads of state like Xu to be more autocratic and less democratic than ever before (even if Mao himself gave an excellent example of just how well one might fulfill such an impulse).
[3]I guess hundreds of thousands, even millions, of deaths constitute a more accurate criterion for what counts as a genuine politics for Vukovich.
[4]As Vukovich notes, Spivak calls this “an assimilation of the Other through non-recognition” (89).
[5]Though Vukovich also says, apropos of Delillo’s “new orientalist” agenda, that “To be fair, Mao II sees this as a universal, not explicitly “Oriental” Geistand problem…” (90). One has to love this apparent concession to critical decency.
[6]Vukovich seems never to have seen Ihab Hassan’s famous columnar lists of competing modern and postmodern concepts. As a result he associates paranoia with the postmodern, while Hassan clearly and persuasively associates it with the modern, in contradistinction to postmodern schizophrenia. See Hassan’s “The Concept of Postmodernism.”
