Nature, Contingency, and the Limit of Socialist Literary-Artistic Practice: A Review of Zhu Yu’s Socialism and “Nature”

Abstract

As a review of Zhu Yu’s recent book on socialist literary-artistic practice, Socialism and “Nature,” this essay explores the cultural-political concerns that underlie Zhu Yu’s comprehensive discussion of socialist artistic genres. While Zhu Yu touches on the aporetic structure of the production of socialist artworks through examining different texts and contexts, his emphatic delineation of the problematic culminates in his illuminating reading of the artistic practice during the Great Leap Forward movement. Pushing Zhu Yu’s argument to its extreme, the essay holds that, if the self-effacing and self-negating nature of the cultural-political radicality of socialist artistic practice leaves a paradoxical trace in the history of socialist China, it is the impulse of attributing “meanings” to everything eventually leads this practice to its self-destruction. When the contingency of “everyday life” appears spectrally as “nature” that is both representable and un-representable, neither representable nor un-representable in socialist literature and art, we are one small step away from the motivation of cultural creations in the 1980s, which attempt to rehabilitate the so-called “authenticity” of everyday life through a wholesale critique and negation of the revolutionary “grand narrative.”

Keywords

Socialism and “Nature / ” socialist literary-artistic practice / contingency

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