REVIEW OF DENG XIAOPING's SPEECH “EMANCIPATE THE MIND, SEEK TRUTH
FROM FACTS AND UNITE AS ONE IN LOOKING TO THE FUTURE”.
By, Pedro Lara de Arruda.
This speech is considered to be of seminal relevance to understand China's politics still today. In fact, authors like Slavoj Zizek, Paul Ashton, Alain Baudiou, A. J. Barlett and Justin Clements, among others, points that the relevance of understanding the changes operated into China since the emergence of Deng Xiaoping as the Chairman would be important to understand a global trend that they identify with some sort of shift from the so called “democratic capitalism” (or a violent capitalist under the coverage of democratic institutions) towards a clear dictatorial capitalism. The article in itself is full of contradictions, methodological weakness and non-mentioned aspects which, however, should not be read as inabilities of Cahirman Deng Xiaoping but instead, and according to the interpretation of the referred authors, as well intended strategies to use the power of the party and the still alive rhetorical strenght inherited of the Maoist revolution to foster an environment of post-politics in which 'the politics is transformed into police': There's the creation of an environmental perception of impossibility that lead people to accept oligopolistic rights of taking part in politics and the subsequent exclusion of some elements from the mere condition of political subjects (the Homo Sacer of Giorgio Aganbem). A massification and proud exposure of what Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Aganbem called “Bare Life”.
Before understanding the links between this speech and the further changes which launched China as the early symptom of a new global capitalism, it's important to contextualize the very political moment in which it was addressed. The importance of one such task relies, first, in the importance of not dismissing the weak theoretical base of the speech by a reading restricted to its own. The very fact that this speech was addressed in a high board meeting of the Chinese Communist Party at the same year Deng managed to become the Chairman of China makes clear the case that the message of this speech is directly addressed and dependent of the political moment it was part of. Therefore, it must be kept in mind that those words were pronounced as the closing speech in the Third Plenum of the Eleventh National Party Congress Central Committee in December 1978. This Third Plenum, which lasted over a month, is considered to be the biggest turning point in the Chinese history since the Maoist unification of China under the flag of the Communist Party, and those two events are possibly sharing a leading position among all the other events in the Chinese modern and contemporary history.
Among the most relevant issues discussed during this month of Plenum were: The abandonment of mistakes commited in the past and their correction in the present; the abandonment of the issue of class struggle as the main goal and its substitution by the issue of promoting the Four Modernizations; and the substitutions of economics instead of politics on the command of the government actions. Not coincidently, the closing speech of Deng addressed all those polemic issues somehow imposing a veredict on the claims that was by and large biased in favour of his own positions early exposed. The issue of reviewing the history of the Party and identifying mistakes, for instance, gained a large role in his closing ceremony speech (seeking truth from facts), and ended up addressing most mistakes to the factions that he describled as 'leftists', therefore unfolding the way for his non-admited 'rightist' administration and even managing to invert the veredict regarding the 'rightist' involvement on the Tiananmen Square incident (1976) and the removal of Peng Dehuai (1959).
More than simply noting that he imposed such veredicts and policy lines for he had strenght enouth in the Party to do so, what is made particularly clear in light of the positionment of key alies in the Political Bureau during the month of Plenum (e.g. Chen Yun as additional Vice Chairman and Hu Yaobang as member of the P.B., Secretary General of the CCP and head of the Party's Propaganda Department), it's important to note that he refrained from a more radical review of history for he would further make large use of the Maoist charismatic inheritage to use the Chinese people and popular cultural aspects to solidify his new patterns of impossibility and subsequent new cathegories of marginalized and non-existing political subjects. According to one such interpretation, which we will further develop, the preservation of Mao's personal identity was not only a reflex of Deng's fear of facing a popular unrest in case he directly confronted the charismatic ghost of Mao Tse Tung but, most of all, the clear perception that the power of Mao among people could be distorted into his own interests.
However odd this interpretation may sounds the fact is that it can be positivelly defended in light of Rancière's Arche Politics according to which the political restriction is given by communitarian shared beliefs and value systems, therefore the elitist capitalism Deng was in the way to built would be more solidly built if backed by an Arche Politics. In a negative sense, this same interpretation can prove reasonable in light of the fact that in cases where Mao's charismatic legacy were not necessary – not usable in the built of an Arche Politics – he was simply dismissed, as was the case regarding Deng's opposition to the “two whatevers” (support whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made and follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave) and the severe critiques of the Great Leap forward (even though such critiques were always presented with the pedagogic argument that the mistakes taken by Mao couldn't lead to a serious judgment and re-evaluation of his historic role for his achievements were of utmost importance to China as a whole).
For the vital role of changing history without dismissing the charismatic influence of the heritage of Mao, Deng used the whole first part of his speech, entitled “emancipating the mind is a vital political task”, to overwhelm only the Gang of Four with all the grave mistakes commited during the Cultural Revolution. Also, and in order to avoid directly confronting the population with the guilt of the political lines they supported during the Cultural Revolution, Deng was cautious enough to deposit the guilt in the Gang of Four or else in a 'historical specific structure' that accounted for four main forces: First, the Gang of Four ideological taboos and forbidden zones; second, over-concentration of power in a non-democratic centralism of the Party; third, the absence of a clear differentiation between right and wrong; fourth, the parochial aspect of the Chinese society, still quilted in the small producers habits and values.
Despite the validity of the arguments which points to the links between the Maoist organization of China as an alienating structure, the development of Deng's speech and the concrete actions which followed his leadership of China didn't really checked the issues he criticized, but simply changed the members and ideologies carried out through this same logics. In his 2009 book, entitled “First as Tragedy, then as Farce”, Slavoj Zizek showed how the Maoism settled the grounds for the further development of an authoritarian capitalism in China by establishing the very policy of taboos and centralized decision-making processes which latter served to the market oriented approach of Deng Xiaoping to overcome the class struggle heritage and develop the bases of contemporary China. In that sense, its not unreasonable to think that Deng strategy concerned the 'change of history' as a way to preserve the mechanisms created to Maoism at the service of his own distinct ideology.
The speech we analyze here is full of evidences of one such appropriation of the Maoist authoritarian political system by the market oriented ideology of Deng Xiaoping. A clear example is the festive celebration of the reverse of the Tiananmen Square incident as the overcome of pure justice over politics without noticing that this new judgement may have been just an adaptation to the new forces in handle of China. In that case the so much mentioned self-critique of Deng Xiaoping didn't observe the natural imperative of debating possible links between the coincidence between the juridical revision and the political transformation, prefering to simply not discuss one such theme and neglect it to the same taboo zones he accused the Gang of Four to make use of.
It's also controversial that his startingly claim for decentralization and democratization rapidly evolved to a claim for unity and stability, as pointed in the third part of his speech, called “solving old problems with help people look to the future”:
Stability and unity are of prime importance. To strengthen the unity of people of whatever nationality, we must first strengthen unity throughout the Party, and especially within the central leadership
Still in this section of his speech, where he starts moving from the pure rhetorical romantism and passes to a more technical information of the new Party lines, there's a clear controverse as he stresses the importance of aknowledging and correcting errors from the past but clearly skips the duty of judging Mao Tse Tung. As already mentioned, the careful manipulation of Mao's image would prove to be more useful than his trial, therefore it was preferable to Deng to contradicts himself twice than to abide this tool of popular acessment that was the heritage of Mao's charisma. On doing that, however, the double intern-contradictions committed were: First, the absence of judging per se, since he considered that judgements of the past as a whole were a duty of his times; second, the absence of judging this particular feature – Mao – whose ideas were so opposed to the ones he was about to implement.
The way he poses this eminently political judicial revision as a mere technical achievement itself anounces the content of the ideology he would make use of the Maoist authoritarian mechanisms to disseminate. If, as we have shown, the manipulation of history and carefull handling of the image of Mao in this speeched served the purpose of maintaning the very centralized authoritative institutions he criticizes so much, the technical approach with which he tries to vest the Tiananmen incident is already revealing of the ideology of consciously substituting the political debate by technical decisions. Reflecting on this issue Zizek points that here the effort is to deny political space for discussions concerning different desires of action and, instead, to limit politics to the choice between measures which work and those which doesn't work, some sort of preclude to Fukuyama's tale of the end of history. The failure in Fukuyama's precocious 'End of History' (or should we say, attempt of 'murdering the history'), however, is the fact that the mere evaluation of what can or can not 'work' is in itself the outcome of an untold and silent struggle for settling standards of impossibility, which, curiously, accounts for one of the most classical definitions of 'Politics as the art of the impossible'. Here Zizek makes clear how this traditional definition of politics is not referring to the hysterical characteristics that the capitalist speech usually attaches to the so called 'utopians', but, instead, it was directly addressed to the effort of delimiting criterias of impossibility without even being noticed. The art of politics than would be its invisibility, not properly the art of making choices, but the utmost effort to delimiting patterns of choice itself.
Extending the analysis of the technical approach with which Deng tried to vest the judgment of the Tiananmen issue to his broader political lines defended in this speech of 1978, one can clearly recognize that one same tendency – of transforming policy into technical decisions – was directly mentioned when the goal of supressing class struggle was substituted by the goal of promoting development of the 'four modernizatios', and also when the Party officially changed the preeminence of politics for the preeminence of economics, claiming a bigger role to technocrats and technicians as if ideology could step out of the Chinese reality. By doing that he was clearly working out what Zizek would further cal the ideology of post-politics.
It's not a coincidence that Zizek identified China as the first and most intense representative of what some authors call radical centralism or radical moderated, in a sense that they radicalize the political setlement of referentials of impossibility to one such extent that any political choice is really possibly but simply the pursue of their non-spoken ideologies through the so called technical decisions. Along with China he also identifies the Bill Clinton's police and the British New Labour among the expressions of this trend that he claims to be growing in the global capitalism.
In his attempt to understand the specific process through which this background manipulation imposes ideological limited choices, Zizek refers to three logics of political conflicts suggested by Rancière and suggests one extra of his own. Its very important that we briefly define those four processes here as to highlight the reasons why the already mentioned handling and manipulation of Mao's image was preferable to Deng than the simple dismissal, and also to understand the other process which made wide use of the technocrat lines he claimed to be followed by the Party in the speech we analyze here.
The first of those mechanisms is the alerady mentioned Arche-Politics which relies in organicaly structured social homogeneities as a way to avoid dissidence and deny political space. Zizek defines one such example referring to the Japanese outcasts – the Burakumins – which are basically excluded from having a political role because society as a whole shares some values that isolate them from constituting social relations to the minimum extend needed to make themselves politically voiced. A situation just similar to the traditional exclusion of Dalits, Advasis, OBC's and tribal comunities in India. In the particular case of China the preservation of Maoist rhetoric appeal, as well as the preservance of Marxism and Leninism commitments despite the complete distortion of their ideas, served as a tool through which Deng and the reformulated Party could foster people to endorse the limits of impossibility which the leading cadres decide to be apropriate.
The greater difference between Mao's use of such mechanism and that carried on by Deng Xiaoping and his followers was concerning the shift from a socialist ideological choice for combating class domination towards the market oriented goal of modernization. In both cases, however, the social notion of counter-revolutionary was fostered with the purpose of adding legitimity to the discriminatory restriction regarding those who have the right to participate in the anounced politics and those who are organically excluded from it – the Chinese Homo Sacers.
The second mechanism of post-politization which was largely used in China was the 'Marxist Meta-Politics' or else (Utopian Socialist Meta-Politics), according to which the political choice is transfered to another times and realities, in a situation according to which the choice is always portrayed as an award to be reached in the future if one suceeds on the technical imperatives of the present. The traditional messianic view of a better society for which present sacrifices are to be done – including the sacrifice of the right of choice itself, presents this desired future as a technical success under the given limits of impossibility settled behind the revolutionary claim at a given time. In general terms one can account for the tautological impossibility of this ever regaining the right of choice since the messianic Marxism prescription of a 'liberated society' accounts for some sort of automatic harmony and perfect functioning of the society so that dissents and choices wouldn't be there as well. In short, during the revolutionary process choice is not there because the struggle for freedom demands technical obedience, and after achieving freedom the choice will not be there as well because the very notion of utopian freedom is built upon impossibility limits that does not recognize that one can not be satisfied in such scenario.
In the more specific case of Deng's China, the 1978 speech and its multiple references to the messianic aspects of Mao, Marx and Lenin – which in several cases are the outcome of misreadings and other sort of manipulations of their ideas – is basically an attempt to keep this spirit of ever present sacrifice for the messianic promise of Communism alive so that the concrete interests behind the new lines of the Communist Party could be better served, even when those present sacrifices involve sinking deeper and deeper into the market traps.
Before moving into the other two mechanisms of post-politicization and its effects on Deng's China it's important to stress that is precisely the capability to develop a tipically market oriented policy with the easiness of those traditional socialist instruments of depolitization that made the Chinese capitalist experience to be unique and, as already mentioned, to be very likely a simptom of a new sort of capitalism in the era of Globalization. Deng understood that very early and preciselly for that his speech is so decorated with Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ritualistic reverences, which has little or nothing at all to do with the ideas they defended, but were very important to keep alive those socialist modalities of alienation. Also worth of mention; one such comprehension highlights one internal contradiction which otherwise could pass unrevealed, that between his startingly claim against the worship of some books and texts (clearly referring to the books and texts of those authors) despite the fact that he himself only makes ritualistic usages of those authors, only referring to them as a way to keep alive the Messianic devotion and the social support as means of delimiting impossibilities. After all, Deng didn't launch an attack on the worship of books and authors, but simply used the iconic role of those texts to direct the worships towards the capitalist ideas he defended.
The third mechanism of depolitization is traditionally present in the liberal democracies, the so called Para-Politics, according to which the political existence is only extended during the electoral process, afterwards it becomes restricted to the elected subjects. If this mechanism is already dangerous in the tipical liberal-democracies, in which the historical possession of the state foster elites owned politics and pure class dominations, it gets even worst when the previous mechanism acts together with some socialist alienation mechanisms that reduce even more the limits of possibility (shrinking the limits of impossibility) by making use of acute mechanisms of socio-cultural peoples control.
The last of those mechanisms, which is an original contribution of Zizek, not previously describled by Rancière, is the Ultra-Politics one, according to which the conflit is depoliticized through its militarization and the dismissal of several conflicts by simply folding all them in a single 'Us vs Them' logic. Of special relevance to the Chinese case is the fact that this mechanism, traditionally associated to the 'rightist' strategies of delimiting limits of impossibilty, usually through nationalism and other hate-identity bases, was largelly benefitted by the early usage of it against Japanese and US Imperialism even in a moment when the Chinese Revolution was eminently commited to the class struggle, therefore creating a complex historical track on which the concrete necessity for a supra-class anti-imperialism resistence is easily confused with the instrumental claim of Imperialist-resistence as to simply fold up other identity struggles inside China.
The analyzed text is ilustrative of each and everyone of those four mechanism, as well as of the concrete object behind the untold ideology that Deng anounced to carry on. Despite the purpose of depoliticizing the society according to capitalist market-oriented standards of impossibility is not clearly anounced in the text, it demands no more than a quick read of this 1978 speech to see that the only socialist aspects he was really keen to preserve were the two first depolitization mechanisms mentioned here. It's also simple to note that the second two of those mechanisms emerge as indirect consequences of the capitalist re-emergence he was bringing to China. For that, it's not difficult to identify that the real proposal behind his contradictions, ritualistic references to Mao, Marx and Lenim and untold words was basically what Zizek called an authoritarian capitalism updated to the globalization era, or a market-oriented policy made easier through the socialist autoritarian mechanisms of political exclusion. The several declarations of commitment to communism and the ideas of Mao, Lenim and Marx don't find any concrete support on the economic and technocrat guidelines he used to mark the new limits of impossibility since 1978, therefore they should be understood only as long as they play a decisive role on maintaining the governability of a system which sacrifice social and ethic values for the loud voices of capitalist modernization and simple accumulation of wealth.
Regarding the untold social sacrifices inherent to Deng's approach, one can easily point to clear examples coming from the Chinese reality and the Communist Party in that country, such as: The elitist and unacountable rule of the Communist Party; the lack of social welfare; the lack of freedom of expression. In sum, the legalization and normalization of fascist practices toward marginalized and unpoliticized members of a society (what Walter Benjamin called 'Bare Life').
As to the ethical sacrifice made by Deng, Paul Ashton's book on Alan Baudiou biopolitics applied to some practical situations shows how the subjectivation of the Cultural Revolution by Mao Tse Tung oriented the Chinese national ethics according to the traditional four Lacanian elements orienting the perception of the ethics by the subject, which are: Anxiety (angoisse), the intervention of the superego, the courage and the justice. According to one such interpretation, what happened is that the emergence of Deng inherited a very subjectivised state's ethics which enabled him to directly interfer in the equilibrium of those images of ethics or forces shaping the ethics, therefore he priviledged those who benefited the resilience and depoliticization, creating a rather stable and acritique pattern of ethics which he managed to communicate to the society through the open link which was the heritage of Mao's charismatic figure legitimizing the Party.
In that process, the anxiety could be describled as a hysterical tendency emerging from the perception of law as a question without an answer, the superego process would be the counter-balancing trend of the anxiety which would overload the gaps perceived by the subject with laws in such a way that Baudiou and Hegel would agree on calling it the representation of Terror. Courage than emerge as an atidote to the terror, and is best portrayed as being 'an answer without a question', while justice emerge as the most imprecise of those forces trying to establish a relationship with law in absolute opposition to the Terror, therefore claiming for the relativization of the laws in benefit of reality.
Worth of mention here is the way technocracy and depolitization processes lead by Deng Xiaoping basically excluded the space for anxiety, courage and justice in the social structures of the subjectivized state inherited of Mao since the cultural industry rooted in Deng's Party lines were mainly based on overwhelming loads of laws and techncical orientations, instead of questions fostering multiple participations. It wouldn't be exagerated to infer from Baudiou's analysis that the expansion of 'Bare Life' went to the extreme of dominating not only the politically-restricted subjects of China society but even the politically unwelcome selfs of the Chinese individuals. Therefore, the images of justice, courage and anxiety could be understood as the Homo Sacers of the Lacanian Subject (would it be the case of forging the term Self Sacers ?).
One such interpretation can be indirectly noted in Zizek's “First as a tragedy, then as a Farce” in which he show the overall processes through which Deng managed to preserve the remainings of Mao's tragedy – his failled revolution – to use as a base for the post-political capitalism he was about to implement in China – the Farse of Chinese post-1973 socialism. And if in this book the author restricts his analysis more to the material structures of formal politics that Deng took from Mao's failled revolution to built his capitalist empire, in the recent review he wrote on Richard McGregor’s book in the London Review of Books he aimed precisely at the biopolitical appropriation of Mao's structures such as those referred by Paul Ashton's Lacanian interpretation of Baudiou in the Chinese case.
Aknowledging the overcome of superego Terror over the other images of subjective ethics, and agreeing with Baudiou on what concerns the individual subjective root of the Terror, Zizek pointed that, despite all the already mentioned mechanisms to set the basis of the post-political capitalism, it's also extremelly important that the ruling cadres themselves stick to some 'objective ilusion', “the figure of the ‘big Other’ as a background against which they could exert their ruthlessness and drive for power”. The building of the post-capitalist ethtics and its subsequent political structures of impossibility are largely dependent on the avaiability of an unbalanced superego through which the leading cadres temselves could overcome the principles of the rhetoric ehtics of the official propaganda without being able to fully recognize their agency on that – the technical aura of their decisions makes easy to scape from individual responsabilities not by ignorance or lack of intention, but by the passive role they assume towards their implicit choice of what is possible or impossible, avoidable or unavoidable, chosen or imposed. In that same review Zizek quotes the many heart-attacks, sudden deaths and suicides of Communist Party delegates of URSS after Krushev denounced Stalin's crimes in 1956. According to him, and in line with our analysis, those reactions were not an outcome due to unknown facts, but simply the reaction of those delegates due to the displacement of their belief in the otherness behind their own actions. This very reason can be accounted to understand the reasons why the real message behind the 1978 speech are, as we claim, not to be found on the pretty slogans distributed all over it but, instead, on the deep meaning of every incoherence and in the many meanings of each unspoken sentence that, in fact, were the requiem of a dead communism and the silent sleep of a baby new-capitalism conceived by the worst of the modern capitalism and the the worst of the Maoism.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REPHERENCES (not ordered)
JAMES C. MULVENON; ANDREW N. D. YANG. Seeking Truth From Facts: A Retrospective on Chinese Military Studies in the Post-Mao Era
PAUL ASHTON; A. J. BARTLETT; JUSTIN CLEMENS. The Praxis of Alain Badiou. Avaiable at: http://books.google.com/books?id=-22cv5bsJ7EC&pg=PA347&lpg=PA347&dq=mao+tse+tung+subjectivation&source=bl&ots=vPTQTVMp2m&sig=pqmYCqTpOthomVMj7YRzi3rlgGU&hl=pt-BR&ei=qGKcTprtOcbrrQe6jrX3Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=mao%20tse%20tung%20subjectivation&f=false
CLÁUDIO SÉRGIO DUTRA DE SOUSA. Slevoj Zizek e o capitalismo autoritário chinês. Avaiable at: http://claudioesilvia.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/slavoj-zizek-e-o-capitalismo-autoritario-chines/
SLAVOJ ZIZEK. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.
______. Can you give my son a job?. 2010.
HISTORY OF CHINA. Avaiable at: http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/
ALAIN BAUDIOU. THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS.
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