Rethinking Subjectivity João Biehl, Byron Good, Arthur Kleinman

31183_U01.qxd 9/15/06 2:29 PM Page 1 Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity joão biehl, byron good, arthur kleinman This book is an extended conversation about contemporary forms of human experience and subjectivity. It examines the genealogy of what we consider to be the modern subject, and it inquires into the continuity and diversity of personhood across greatly diverse societies, including the ways in which inner processes are reshaped amid economic and political reforms, violence, and social suffering. It is an ethnographic conversation, with authors con- fronting specific forms of social life in particular settings, and it is a theoretical conversation, exploring the debates and disciplinary disagreements about how we think and write about human agency today. The writings in this book suggest that contemporary social formations, with their particular ways of being and the theoretical frames available for analyzing them, have destabilized our observation, thinking, and writing about subjectivity. In editing this collection, we have sought to show the multiple ways in which scholars address the diverse phenomena we call subject and subjectivity. Striving for a single analytic strategy would have been limiting and premature at best. This volume is thus exploratory, aiming to provide new directions for studies of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in today’s distinctive conditions. In the many settings in which anthropologists now work, the vagaries of modern life are undoing and remaking people’s lives in new and ominous ways. The subjects of our study struggle with the possibilities and dangers of economic globalization, the threat of endless violence and insecurity, and the new infrastructures and forms of political domination and resistance that lie in the shadows of grand claims of democratization and reform. Once the door to the study of subjectivity is open, anthropology and its practi- tioners must find new ways to engage particularities of affect, cognition, –s moral responsibility, and action. –o 1 31183_U01.qxd 9/15/06 2:29 PM Page 2 2/Introduction regarding others Examples of remaking subjectivity are everywhere. “Amid China’s Boom, No Helping Hand for Young Qingming,” reads the front page of the New York Times of August 1, 2004. Fearful of being left behind in China’s fast- paced but deeply uneven economic boom, Zheng Qingming threw himself under an approaching train in his rural village on June 4. That day, Qing- ming had learned from a school administrator that he would not be allowed to take the annual college-entrance examination. “I don’t have the money,” he had said. “I don’t care if you sell a life,” the supervisor had replied. One of Qingming’s friends reportedly offered to sell blood to help him out. Without the needed eighty dollars and with his hopes of a college edu- cation and mobility cut short, Qingming fled the school and spent the day wandering through the village. Strangers who saw him that day said that Qingming had talked about working for Interpol—a fact the authorities used to justify their claim that the young man had “lost his mind.” A mental condition (possibly traceable to the “mentally retarded” relatives who adopted and helped raise him) thus became the official explanation for this young man’s profoundly willful act of ending his life. To the grandfather who is now suing the school, the boy he had raised to be a healthy and hard-working man was “upset, not insane.” A scrapbook the grandfather now keeps as a memorial gives some insight into this young man’s subjectivity and his response to the vanishing of familiar values. Qingming had pasted in a magazine article about a farm girl who had been raped and then abandoned by her relatives for the shame she inflicted on them. In the margins of the text, Qingming had scribbled,“We must extend our helping hand to any innocent underdog. Only by so doing can that per- son find a footing in society.” Chinese society is undergoing immense change. From a poor agricultural society beset with political chaos, China has, over a twenty-year period, be- come the world’s third-largest economy with an established, if undemocra- tic, social order. But China’s turn to capitalism has delegitimated the still- dominant Communist ideology just as radical Maoism undermined traditional Chinese cultural traditions. The upshot is a culture of self- interest, rank materialism, and growing cynicism that has prompted wide- spread comment and criticism among the Chinese themselves. In the economy, health-care sector, social-welfare programs, and everyday lived experience of peasants and urbanites, the public emphasis on social solidar- s– ity and the righting of historical social inequalities to help the poor and the o– marginalized have given way to gated communities, deepening health in- 31183_U01.qxd 9/15/06 2:29 PM Page 3 Introduction /3 equalities, and a symbolic distance between rural and urban realities that harks back to the 1930s, if not the final decades of the Qing dynasty. A bit- ter joke is making the rounds in Beijing: “What is the definition of Com- munism?” Answer: “The longest and most painful road to capitalism.” In this setting, side by side with an improvement in infant mortality and adult mortality,China has seen the emergence or escalation of social-health and mental health problems, from substance abuse and sexually transmit- ted diseases to violence, AIDS, depression, and suicide. Suicide in Chinese society has always been associated with public and domestic injustice, so much so that many people at the margins see it as an acceptable way of cop- ing with failure and hopelessness. Thus, to understand the suicide of Zheng Qingming, we need to see the act as rooted in a particular constellation that connects cultural representations and political economy with collective experience and the individual’s subjectivity. Suicide as social protest and resistance is a historical reality among Chi- nese. Only under the impress of the current phase of globalization is it be- ginning to be reinterpreted as the result of a mental disorder (usually depression but also any mental condition). That change comes from the infiltration of technical psychiatric categories from North America, bio- medical practices, and the media into the daily affairs of the Chinese. A tragic irony exists, however, inasmuch as the mentally ill in China carry a deep stigma that marks them as not fully human and thus, among other things, not capable of rational suicide. Hence, in Zheng Qingming’s suicide we see three aspects of subjectivity that illustrate differences across time and cultural spaces: historically situated differences in social sensibility and what it means to feel and regard oneself as human; cross-cultural differences in cognition, affect, and action; and the peculiarities of each individual. For the purpose of this book, we need to see the increasing medicaliza- tion of depression and suicide not only as the state’s response to a perceived new public-health crisis but potentially also as the spread of a form of dif- fused governance that substitutes everyday commonsense categories and practices for rational and technical ones so as to vitiate the moral and political meaning of subjective complaints and protests (chapters 2 and 6 in this volume). This form of self-governance—new to the modern Chinese state but well established in the West—is linked to the unmaking of time- honored value systems and occasions novel forms of control (Anapnost 1997; Lee 1999; Yan 2003). Subjectivity thus becomes the ground on which a long series of historical changes and moral apparatuses coalesce—in the –s emergence of new kinds of public-private involvements as well as a new –o 31183_U01.qxd 9/15/06 2:29 PM Page 4 4/Introduction kind of political authority. The unintended consequences of this process of societal and personal transformation may include the creation of hyper- individualism, which itself intensifies attention to human rights and, in turn, places new pressure on the nondemocratic state. Equally unintended may be the remaking of the habitual inner sense of endurance and the creation of new forms of desire that go beyond commercial interests to struc- ture new ways of feeling and living, that change the world. ... In her essay “Regarding the Torture of Others” in the New York Times Magazine (May 23, 2004), the late Susan Sontag writes that the horror of the Abu Ghraib photographs “cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken—with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives” (26). Sontag angrily condemns the Bush administration’s attempts to displace the complex crimes of leadership and policy that the images reveal, first onto the photographs themselves—“as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict” (25)—and then onto the individuals who carried them out, as if those actions were not representa- tive of a reigning rationality and modus operandi.“The issue is not whether a majority or minority of Americans perform such acts but whether the na- ture of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies de- ployed to carry them out makes such acts likely.Considered in this light, the photographs are us” (26). Sontag compares the Abu Ghraib photographs to those of black victims of lynching during the 1880s and up through the 1930s—“souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done” (27). The Abu Ghraib photographs mark a shift in the use of pictures though: “less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circu- lated. ...There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves” (27).

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