Xie Jin. Two Stage Sisters, 1965. Film still. Jiang-bo introduces Chun-hua to Gu Yuan’s woodcut, “Xianglin’s Wife,” the protagonist of “New Year’s Sacrifice.” The subtitle reads, “She was widowed twice and people shunned her as a bringer of misfortune.” 72 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.72 by guest on 02 October 2021 The Name of a Desire: Recollections of Socialist Realism in East Asian Art Cinema DAVID E. JAMES I Twenty years ago, a debate in an American cultural journal brought into sharp focus two antithetical visions of a progressive, anticapitalist global culture that, though constructed with reference to literature, may easily be translated into cinematic terms. First, citing Lu Xun’s story, “Diary of a Madman” and Ousmane Sembène’s novel, Xala, Fredric Jameson argued that the separation of per- sonal/libidinal life from the wider world of public politics that he believed characterized culture in the West had not yet occurred in what he called “third- world” literature. Consequently, accounts of interpersonal relations in such texts could—and in fact had to be—read as national allegories, specifically as allegories of the struggle for liberation and decolonization: “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”1 In his reply, Aijaz Ahmad generously overlooked the anachronism of Jameson’s use, as an example of third-world literature, “Diary of a Madman,” a story that was published in 1918 when China had suffered relatively slight colonial penetration and that predated the Soviet Revolution and hence predated the conceptual possibility of a second, let alone the third world. But Ahmad did dispute the inevitability of such allegorical structures and proposed as counterexamples writings in Urdu that he thought not to be nationalist in the way Jameson asserted. More fundamentally, he attacked Jameson’s category of the third world itself, arguing that though it might have a function in polemics, it had “no theoretical status” because the third world could not “be constructed as an internally coherent object of theo- retical knowledge.”2 Returning to the Marxian concept of the mode of produc- tion, he argued that the notion of three worlds should be replaced by a binary: one world formed by capitalism and the other by socialist resistance to it. And disputing Jameson’s proposal that the only alternatives for third-world litera- ture were its “nationalisms” or “global American postmodernist culture,” he rhetorically asked: Grey Room 26, Winter 2007, pp. 72–93. © 2007 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 73 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.72 by guest on 02 October 2021 Is there no other choice? Could not one join the “second world,” for example? There used to be, in the Marxist discourse, a thing called socialist and/or communist culture which was neither nationalist or postmodernist. Has that vanished from our discourse altogether, even as a name of a desire?3 Allowing him to exploit Jameson’s unnecessarily hyperbolic claim that third- world literature was always an allegory of national liberation, Ahmad’s return to the theoretical model of the global struggle between the two contrary modes of production seemed to have won the debate. Yet only for a short time. Thirty years earlier, his axiom that socialism “is simply the name of a resistance that saturates the globe today”4 may have been credible; but three years after his essay was published, it could echo only nostalgically through the ruins of the Communist states. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the domestic turn of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to capitalism and class division and its entry into the system of global capital heralded a decade of which the best that can be said is that it was not as vile and violent as the first of the new century that followed it: a massively renewed neo-liberalist imperialism under the banner of one form of religious fundamentalism and opposed to it another whose only redeeming feature was its opposition to “global American postmodernist culture.” Socialist or Communist culture nowhere existed, “even as a name of a desire,” its place preempted by a new name: “globalization”—itself, as Henry Kissinger proposed, “really another name for the dominant role of the United States.”5 Since then, the “globalization of culture” has come to mean, if not the hege- mony of “global American postmodernist culture,” then certainly the interna- tional hegemony of the form of cultural production exemplified and largely directed by the integrated U.S. film, television, and music industries. Major components of the global culture industries are transnationally owned, that system includes productive centers outside the United States, and, of course, it contains “differences and disjunctures.”6 The recent success of the South Korean film industry in competing domestically with Hollywood, developing a strong export record in East Asia, and even beginning to establish a reverse flow into the U.S. market is a dramatic example of the several recent challenges to U.S. domination of global cinema. But the achievements of this Korean blockbuster filmmaking were enabled only by its rejection of previous attempts to build a national film style and a national cinema on the heritage of traditional culture (most notably, Im Kwon-taek’s “national allegories”) and its corresponding turn to the vocabularies and values of Schwarzenegger action films and MTV. Even where aggressive local industries with strong export markets have developed significant stylistic vocabularies of their own (as was the case with the Hong 74 Grey Room 26 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.72 by guest on 02 October 2021 Kong industry in the 1990s), their innovations have simultaneously reaffirmed and renewed the mode of cultural production of the U.S. media industries, the system with which they compete: to wit, cinema as the production of com- modities and films that mobilize styles and narrative structures that present no substantial challenge to the ideology of neoliberalism and capitalism itself. At the time of the present writing, the economic system this global culture sustains does face unprecedented national liberation struggles, related to each other in the vision of a totalitarian Islamic internationalism. No less than the hegemony of Empire itself, this continues to obliterate the force, even the memory, of a cultural internationalism contrary to both of them; that is, the socialist culture that Ahmad invoked, especially the projects of the Communist Internationals before World War II and the linked forms of national resistance to U.S. neocolo- nialism in the Cold War period after it. These and all the other socialist or protosocialist cultural initiatives, of course, possessed differences among themselves that reflected local geographi- cal and historical conditions, so much so that the history of twentieth century Marxist aesthetics retrospectively appears as a minefield of contradictions. Nevertheless, this history can be seen to have revolved around two theoretical epicenters, one designating the content and/or style of a socialist work of art and the other a socialist mode of cultural activity or production: socialist film and socialist cinema respectively. Since for cinema the production process is so expensive, complex, distended, and technologically dependent, the issue of mode of production was inescapable and recognized as impacting the form and content of the art work much more fundamentally and forcefully than was the case for mediums such as poetry or even the novel, whose aesthetics were less integrally linked to their material instantiations. The early 1970s attempts of the Groupe Dziga Vertov to make political films but to make them politically is a summary instance of this interdependence between the work of art and its pro- ductive process, between filmic object and cinematic practice. Though concep- tualized as a Maoist attempt to apply Marxist-Leninist ideas of self-criticism and cultural revolution to cinema, the group’s priorities looked back to Vertov’s own attack on the form and content of the acted fictional narrative film and to his notion of a popular participatory cinema; for example, to the “network of camera- men in the provinces” sending material to the “experimental film station” where the Kinopravda, the “periodical of events summarized into an agitational unit” was to be edited.7 And, despite manifold categorical differences, their emphasis on collaboration both among multiple producers and between filmmakers and their audiences also aligned their work with the various “Third” and “Imperfect” Cinemas of Latin America and Vietnam of the same period.8 James | The Name of a Desire: Recollections of Socialist Realism in East Asian Art Cinema 75 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.26.72 by guest on 02 October 2021 More generally, however, arguments about socialist cinema have not thoroughly engaged issues of a participatory socialist form of production, and had Ahmad seriously thought what “a thing called socialist and/or communist culture which was neither nationalist or postmodernist” might be, he would have been obliged to confront the fact that the only candidate of any substantial historical credi- bility was socialist realism, an official art whose axioms were