Socialist Commodities: Consuming Yangbanxi in the Cultural Revolution By Laurence Hiley Smith Coderre A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Chinese Language in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Andrew F. Jones, Chair Professor Sophie Volpp Professor Jocelyne Guilbault Summer 2015 Abstract Socialist Commodities: Consuming Yangbanxi in the Cultural Revolution by Laurence Hiley Smith Coderre Doctor of Philosophy in Chinese Language University of California, Berkeley Professor Andrew F. Jones, Chair Whereas contemporary postsocialist China is typically depicted in terms of rampant, ideologically vacuous commodification, the Mao era––and especially the apogee of Maoist fervor, the Cultural Revolution (1966-76)––is normally cast as a time of ubiquitous politics and scarce goods. Indeed, the Cultural Revolution landscape of things has been strangely stripped of the mundane: with the exception of the likeness and words of Mao Zedong, the material culture of the Cultural Revolution is most notably characterized as a void out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption sprang fully formed. This dissertation instead examines how interactions between individuals and things during the Cultural Revolution were themselves intertwined with the circulation and consumption of ‘socialist commodities.’ I focus on objects associated with the yangbanxi, or ‘model performances,’ as a critical part of ‘real existing’ Chinese socialism, with which individuals interacted on a daily basis. Hailed as the pinnacle of socialist artistic production, the yangbanxi repertoire of Beijing operas, ballets, and orchestral works was intended to act as vanguard in the revolution in the performing arts. Objects promoting the yangbanxi were therefore produced spanning every conceivable form. I focus here on paraphernalia in three ‘media’: recorded sound, porcelain statuettes, and amateur bodies. Interactions with these instances of yangbanxi remediation, I argue, constituted a critical way in which revolutionary subjects and socialist commodities produced themselves as such. Moreover, this dissertation ultimately contends that, in this way, socialist commodity consumption made the consumer subjectivities of the postsocialist period possible. I begin by focusing on the theorization of the socialist commodity and its role as articulated in Chinese political economic texts of the Cultural Revolution. I argue that these works, intended to counteract the enchantment of commodity fetishism through the popularization of Marxist political economy, were themselves fetishistic in their privileging of discourse over materiality. A similar predicament arises with the notion of the ‘newborn socialist thing’ (shehuizhuyi xinsheng shiwu) as well, supposed herald of the transition to commodity-free communism. Too often the relational nature of newborn socialist things meant that they were not really things at all. I ask how we might nonetheless benefit from thinking about the yangbanxi—quintessential newborn socialist things in their own right—as relationally complex, systems of remediation and, 1 furthermore, how those systems’ economies of signification mirror the workings of the socialist commodity. As I argue in my second chapter, the production and organization of revolutionary space was enmeshed with a complex topography of consumption in which persisting pre-revolutionary notions of (bourgeois) domesticity played an enduring role. Drawing on vinyl records, flexi-discs, and published photographs, I examine the positioning of the citizen-subject as an aural consumer of yangbanxi in a ‘public’ soundscape, which was nonetheless facilitated by that most ‘domestic’ of recorded sound technologies, the record player. The home itself remained a crucial site of socialist consumption, and in my next chapter, I consider the importance of yangbanxi porcelain statuettes, as components of politically au courant home decoration, in emplotting subjects in socialist time as well as a temporality very much reminiscent of the always-already passé postsocialist commodity. Moreover, these pieces of home decor also constituted idealized, prescriptive models for the sculpting of bodies and subjectivities, particularly for amateur performers of yangbanxi, the focus of my final, full chapter. Implicated in a highly (re)mediated system, the performer’s very body is ultimately rendered as exchangeable and consumable as the record or ceramic tchotchke. I close the dissertation with a coda, in which I analyze contemporary discourse on collecting Cultural Revolution memorabilia and what I read as a continued longing for an alternative to the—now explicitly capitalist—commodity- form. 2 Contents Contents i Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 Consumption and the Rhetorics of Transition 2 Model Materialities 5 Structure of the Dissertation 9 1. Dangerous Liaisons: The Problem of the Commodity and the Advent of Newborn Socialist Things 12 Socialism as Interregnum 13 The Paradox of the Socialist Commodity 16 The Socialist Commodity and the Great Leap Forward 19 The Cultural Revolution and the Threat of the Commodity 27 Political Economy for the Masses 31 Narrating (Socialist) Commodity Fetishism 37 Newborn Socialist Things 42 2. Sounding Revolution: Recorded Sound Technologies, Mass Publicity, and Socialist Domesticity 49 The Loudspeaker and the Acoustics of Mass Publicity 51 The Record Player and the Problem of Domesticity 61 Consuming (Counter)revolution 69 3. Porcelain in the Time of Socialism: Stasis, Narrative, and the Temporalities of Display 79 Revolutionizing the Porcelain Industry 81 Aesthetic Lineages 86 Porcelain and Frozen Temporality 89 Emplotting History 95 Decoration and Display 100 Commodity Time 104 4. Remediating the Hero: Transformation and Alienation in Amateur Performance 109 Amateur Performance 111 ‘Becoming’ and the Logic of Remediation 116 The Saboteurs in Our Midst 124 i Unitary Subjects and Promiscuous Characters 131 Bodysnatching and the Making of the Star 138 Coda: The Curator, the Investor, and the Dupe; Or, Meditations on Cultural Revolution Memorabilia 142 The Ethics of Collecting and the Primacy of History 142 Collecting Exchange Value 148 The Souvenir and the Quest for the Inalienable 153 References 158 ii Acknowledgements A dissertation is an opportunity to show one’s mettle as a fledgling scholar, and as a genre, it is therefore preoccupied with flaunting—rather than effacing—the labor that went into producing it. This reversal often makes for an uncommonly tedious reading experience—all the more reason, then, to marvel at those brave souls who read and commented on the many incarnations of the following chapters. To the extent that this dissertation says something important and says it intelligibly, it is thanks to them. I would particularly like to acknowledge the members of my dissertation committee, who have been nothing but supportive throughout this process. Andrew F. Jones has been, without question, the most wonderful advisor and mentor a graduate student could ask for. I am humbled by his insights, eloquence, and creativity. Sophie Volpp is responsible for introducing me to Heidegger’s jug and the problematics of language and materiality in one of the most interesting and enriching seminars I have taken during my graduate career. This project owes much conceptually to that class and has greatly benefitted from Sophie’s continuing guidance. Jocelyne Guilbault welcomed me into her classroom as a naïve second-year and has been challenging me to be a more rigorous and careful thinker ever since. I could not have put this dissertation together without her unflinching assessments of my arguments and steady encouragement to tackle the big questions outside my immediate discipline. I had the good fortune this year to be a Dissertation Fellow at the UC Berkeley Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, in which capacity I was able to interact with and learn from some truly remarkable human beings. I would particularly like to thank the other members of my fellowship cohort—Shannon Chamberlain, Cullen Goldblatt, Ramsey McGlazer, Jocelyn Rodal, Tehila Sasson, and Anicia Timberlake—for their camaraderie and generosity. My thanks also to Julia Bryan- Wilson, Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, and Namwali Serpell—strong and inspiring women all—for showing me week after week what being a giving and engaged academic means. On the subject of female role models, I would be remiss not to mention Michael Nylan, Susan Schweik, and Paula Varsano. For reasons yet unknown to me, each has seen fit to take me under her wing, a gift for which I shall be eternally grateful. They have repeatedly favored me with tales of their own experiences in graduate school, the difficulties of maintaining a healthy work-life balance, and the importance of a thick skin and robust sense of humor. Over the years, I have had many eye-opening conversations about my work with many interlocutors. I suspect most do not realize how important they have been to me, but I would nonetheless like to recognize them here. My most heartfelt thanks to Patricia Berger, Marjorie Burge, Corey Byrnes, Paul Clark, Alexander C. Cook, Jacob Eyferth, Matthew Fraleigh, Maggie Greene, Christine I. Ho, Denise Ho, Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Paola Iovene, Haiyan Lee, Andrew Leung, Jie Li, Li Song, Liu Xiao, Jason McGrath, Laikwan Pang, Meredith Schweig, Evelyn Shih, Jonathan Sterne, Xiaobing