Browse Exhibits (33 total)

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  情感空间的边界：在临界状态中思考

  刘世鼎

  探讨情感和情绪如何创造出理解当代东亚及中国文化政治的新方式。世界各个角落日益增长的冲 突为重新思考情感的文化政治提供了机会。东亚是个充满诸种不同情感的空间，但人们往往对此 缺乏深刻的理解。主讲人将解释为什么情感和情绪对文化与社会分析不可或缺;将讨论激情和情 感主体如何创造不同的文化形式，文化感受和情感体验对于理解这个区域的文化冲突和困境何以 至关重要。

  2023.6.23举行，微信公众号《谓无名》主办。与谈人包括铃木将久（东京大学）及胡德（Daniel Vukovitch, 香港大学）。

  https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/qXMDlWjSMdQ23NWMBMWML

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  Network Resistance in China (book chapter)

  Shih-Diing Liu and Lin Song

  The book chapter draws on several case studies to reveal novel ways of understanding resistance in the digital age. Specifically, the authors investigate Internet-based communication in China, studying how Chinese citizens have resisted and reacted online when confronted with the government response to issues such as COVID-19, the #MeToo movement, and recent land seizures, amongst others. Their analyses demonstrate that Internet-based communication opens up new spaces for resistance. Moreover, the resultant social energy found in these digital venues can help create a new kind of political subjectivity. The authors show that communication networks such as the Internet and mobile devices allow for the possibility of subverting existing power regimes in new and potent ways. At the same time, the authors temper their conclusions, by rejecting the idea that the internet user can—via their specific forms of resistance—become “post-national subjects.” They argue that in the constitution of public discourse, the state still remains an important subject-producing apparatus. In the end, the chapter makes a case for internet resistance as theexpression of people’s sovereignty under neoliberal depoliticization, while still cautioning against its possible problems in a context of rising populist nationalism.

  https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/right-to-resist-9781350265271/

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  The Politics of People: Protest Cultures in China

  Shih-Diing Liu

  Since the 1989 Tiananmen Square occupation, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau have experienced an increase in and persistence of mass gatherings, demonstrations, and blockades staged as a means of protesting the ways in which people are. In this book, Shih-Diing Liu argues that these popular protests are poorly understood, because they are viewed through the lens of protests and occupations globally, with insufficient attention given to their distinctively local aspects. He provides a better account of these distinctively Chinese-style occupations by describing, contextualizing, and analyzing a range of relevant recent case studies. Liu draws on theoretical concepts developed by Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, and other contemporary critical theorists and shows the importance of considering bodily, spatial, and visual dimensions of these protests. By seeing them as staged, contentious performances, the author demonstrates how these precarious populations mobilize their bodies and symbolic resources offered by the Chinese government to open up temporary spaces of appearance to articulate their grievances, and argues that this kind of embodied and performative analysis should be more widely conducted in studies of popular politics worldwide.

  https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Politics-of-People
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  「哭牆」作為情感空間 "Wailing Wall" as Affective Space

  史唯，劉世鼎

  2020年2月7日，武漢中心醫院眼科醫生李文亮因為在就診的過程中感染了新 冠肺炎而病逝。作為中國最初的新冠疫情「吹哨人」之一，李的離去引起了 中國網民的極大反響，而李生前的微博被稱為中國的「哭牆」，成了網民自我表 達的空間。本文以「哭牆」裡的留言為研究文本，探討在當下中國的社會語境 中，「哭牆」如何透過個體的生活經驗和情感表達為基礎的個體書寫，傳遞出 集體性的感覺結構，又如何形構出一個「情感公眾」。通過對於「哭牆」悼念 李文亮的文本分析，本文聚焦討論由網路串聯在一起的情感公眾，如何打開了 一個跨越私密個體故事的情感空間，展示出個體敘事的政治潛力，特別是個人 的政治性在日常生活的話語中如何呈現。一方面個體敘事干擾和消解了官方所 建構的宏大敘事，同時也生產與具有情感強度和政治潛能的「受傷主體」。

  On 2 February 2020, Li Wenliang , known for raising awareness of early COVID-19 inflections in Wuhan, died after contracting the virus while treating patients. As one of the few whistleblowing doctors who tried to warn about the coronavirus outbreak but was investigated for allegedly spreading rumors, his death has sparked widespread public sentiments in mainland China. His Weibo page was soon turned into a 'wailing wall' where netizens come to pour out their grief and other emotions. This article takes the messages posted on Li's last entry as the focus of analysis, investigating the way such emotionally charged private narratives - which are based on the lived experiences of the individual - have brought into being a distinct structure of feeling and formulated affective publics" in China. Through an analysis of the collective mourning of Li, this article focuses on the way the affective publics open up an affective space of private storytelling and render the personal political through daily-life narratives. This is manifested in the private narrative's disturbance and dissolution of official grand narratives and the formulation of the "injured subject" marked by political intensity and potentials."

  http://routerjcs.nctu.edu.tw/news-info.asp?new_id=136

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  Politics of ambivalence: how Zhou Shen’s androgyny survives under Xi Jinping

  Shih-Diing Liu and Wei Shi

  Since the recent state crackdown on effeminate stars labeled as niangpao (sissy pants), “insufficient” masculinity has once again become a focus of political controversy in China. Among these stars, Zhou Shen, a male pop singer known for his feminized voice and image, continues to enjoy immense popularity and perform in official programs. His growing fame and tolerance by the state call into question his cultural-political strategy. Conceptualizing Zhou’s androgynous performance as a political effect of a series of co-optation, compromises and negotiations, this essay offers a contextualized reading of the complex ways in which competing and contradictory influences shape his expression. In tracing the practices that configure his stardom, we investigate how Zhou’s androgyny paradoxically reaffirms and unsettles hegemonic norms in non-antagonistic ways. We describe how his engagement with Xi Jinping’s China Dream creates an ambivalent space for negotiating established norms. We argue that Zhou’s phenomenal success rests with the fusion of contradictory elements into his performances and his ability to cut across binary classifications. This process has nurtured a politics of ambivalence marked by ambiguity, confusion and contingency. It also sheds light on the limit and possibility of doing gender politics in an increasingly illiberal setting.

  DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2023.2183355 

• Be my boss: Migrant youth and the contradiction of hope labour on Kuaishou

  Min Zhou and Shih-Diing Liu

  This article explores the platformisation of a popular short-video platform Kuaishou and its impact on Chinese migrant youth. Based on 4 years of field observations, this study examines how Kuaishou’s platformisation process has paradoxically empowered and constrained the agency of migrant youth through the construction of ‘hope labour’. This hope labour seeks to benefit from Kuaishou’s attention economy at the expense of growing uncertainty and precarity. In particular, with the intervention of the state and fierce market competition, Kuaishou’s operation is moving towards a Douyin model to attract more urban youth, resulting in less diversity and more uniformity. This article illustrates how the joint forces of the market and the state push the platforms towards increased homogeneity. It shows how Kuaishou configures a digital assembly line for migrant youth, reproducing the precarious hope that everyone can become his or her boss.

  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448221141828

  

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  Lin Song and Shih-Diing Liu: Demobilizing and Reorienting Online Emotions: China’s Emotional Governance during the COVID-19 Outbreak

  Lin Song and Shih-Diing Liu

  This article examines China’s emotional governance by analysing the emotional politics behind the wide circulation of the Fang Fang diaries during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak. By highlighting the flexible and creative reorientation of online emotions in the Chinese state’s governance approach, the article investigates how the diaries’ reverberation of negative feelings – such as grief and indignation – engendered contentious affective publics and amounted to a moment of dissent. The article also explores how the state used multi-layered strategies to demobilise and reorient public sentiment and opinion into regime-supportive nationalism. In doing so, the article offers a more nuanced understanding of state–society relations, online expression and authoritarian resilience in China than interpretations that emphasise suppression and censorship.

  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10357823.2022.2098254?journalCode=casr20

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  Becoming immaterial laborer

  Zhongxuan Lin and Shih-Diing Liu

  Macau’s peculiar position as a gambling capital not only demonstrates its potential as a nodal point of logistical worlds but also offers a local illustration of the transformation of labour in the Internet age. As the Macau government and the gambling sector have made huge efforts to promote informational, cultural, and creative industries, this chapter shifts the focus of analysis to the so-called immaterial labour characteristic of the Internet age. In particular, we employ the concept of immaterial labour to explore how Macau’s Internet users become immaterial labourers and engage in new forms of communication, production, and collaboration.

  https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-8333-4

• Why is reconciliation impossible? On the Clash of Emotions between Hong Kong and Mainland China

  Shih-Diing Liu and Wei Shi

  This essay presents an affective analysis of the antagonism between Hong Kong and mainland China. It illustrates the contexts in which the conflicts are driven by an accumulation of emotional experiences and imaginaries. The divergent emotional positions should be understood as a consequence of nationalism and nativism. Fear and pride are two opposing emotional structures that have become the material basis of ongoing confrontations. Each side uses its own experience to erase that of the other, making regional reconciliation difficult. We suggest that comparing the two structures of feeling helps identify the psychological mechanisms at work.

  https://madeinchinajournal.com/2022/03/08/why-is-reconciliation-impossible/

  

• 我们需要新的语言去描述俄乌战争

  刘世鼎

  一场冲突背后往往包含多重新旧因素，叠加起来制造了危机。首先，我们需要从宽广的历史轴线来辨识出这些矛盾因素。其次，我们应当把这些矛盾跟连锁反应看做是一个总体的部分，把这些矛盾和连锁反应与当事者的处境、经验感受、心态联系起来。用“身份认同”差异的视角还不能完全掌握各自感觉的暧昧复杂性和多变性。过去几年我一直主张要从情感、情绪的角度来理解政治冲突，要从历史情绪中寻找答案。我强调要接合宏观和微观、从社会个体的集体经验感受进行症候式解读。虽然情绪显然是这次冲突的动力（厌恶、不信任、仇恨、愤怒、焦虑、恐惧等），很少人把乌克兰和俄罗斯的情绪问题化。当这个两个国家被化约到“前苏联集团”、“非自由民主”的范畴，或是从军事、战略、经济、政治制度的角度来看，缺乏从人作为感觉的主体的视角，他们的情绪感受甚至不构成提问的要素。这些国家的意义被镶嵌在非常工具理性、政策导向的论述中，切断了和政治感觉之间的联系。

  https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fN6c1Ld55hjB15haSksZ8w

• Individuality, subjectivation, and their civic significance in contemporary China: The cultivation of an ethical self in a cultural community

  Lin Yi

  Drawing upon ethnographic data collected from fieldwork among a reading-based community in a coastal city over 10 years, and Michel Foucault’s notion of the cultivation of an ethical self, the primary aim of this study is to examine three issues: (1) how do middle-class citizens articulate and practise the cultural activities that they advocate?; (2) are their practices simultaneously individualized and totalized in the way that Foucault demonstrates?; and (3) do these internally oriented practices have civic significance?

  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0920203X18800877
  

  

• 

  鈴木將久：當中國深入世界

  鈴木將久 編

  本書收錄了中國大陸學者賀照田先生的《當中國開始深入世界……》，以及來自東亞和東南亞的八位知識分子對他不同視角的回應。賀文從「國際感覺」問題出發，直面中國大陸的棘手問題，而這個問題也關聯著整個東亞的現實困局。本書嘗試在中國崛起的現實背景下，將東亞各國家與地區應有的國家感覺與國際感覺問題向前再推進一步，作為從亞洲內部的現實與思想出發去思考亞洲現實問題的第一步。一方面我們所面對問題的複雜性、重要性，要求我們絕不能著急，未經充分攻錯和深思便提出解決方案；另一方面，東亞緊迫的現實又不允許我們悠閒自在地工作，而需要我們竭盡全力面對困境，緊張地工作。
  
  在中國崛起的語境下，探討中國在國際感覺問題上的困境、其歷史脈絡和可能開啟的未來，以及東亞地區的知識分子對此問題從自身歷史和現實出發的回應。

  https://book.douban.com/subject/26780928/

• Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation

  Peter Sloterdijk (Translated by Mario Wenning)

  While ancient civilizations worshipped strong, active emotions, modern societies have favored more peaceful attitudes, especially within the democratic process. We have largely forgotten the struggle to make use of thymos, the part of the soul that, following Plato, contains spirit, pride, and indignation. Rather, Christianity and psychoanalysis have promoted mutual understanding to overcome conflict. Through unique examples, Peter Sloterdijk, the preeminent posthumanist, argues exactly the opposite, showing how the history of Western civilization can be read as a suppression and return of rage.

  By way of reinterpreting the Iliad, Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, and recent Islamic political riots in Paris, Sloterdijk proves the fallacy that rage is an emotion capable of control. Global terrorism and economic frustrations have rendered strong emotions visibly resurgent, and the consequences of violent outbursts will determine international relations for decades to come. To better respond to rage and its complexity, Sloterdijk daringly breaks with entrenched dogma and contructs a new theory for confronting conflict. His approach acknowledges and respects the proper place of rage and channels it into productive political struggle.

  https://petersloterdijk.net/work/rage-and-time/

  

• 

  Guobin Yang: The Wuhan Lockdown

  A metropolis with a population of about 11 million, Wuhan sits at the crossroads of China. It was here that in the last days of 2019, the first reports of a mysterious new form of pneumonia emerged. Before long, an abrupt and unprecedented lockdown was declared—the first of many such responses to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world.
  
  This book tells the dramatic story of the Wuhan lockdown in the voices of the city’s own people. Using a vast archive of more than 6,000 diaries, the sociologist Guobin Yang vividly depicts how the city coped during the crisis. He analyzes how the state managed—or mismanaged—the lockdown and explores how Wuhan’s residents responded by taking on increasingly active roles. Yang demonstrates that citizen engagement—whether public action or the civic inaction of staying at home—was essential in the effort to fight the pandemic. The book features compelling stories of citizens and civic groups in their struggle against COVID-19: physicians, patients, volunteers, government officials, feminist organizers, social media commentators, and even aunties loudly swearing at party officials. These snapshots from the lockdown capture China at a critical moment, revealing the intricacies of politics, citizenship, morality, community, and digital technology. Presenting the extraordinary experiences of ordinary people, The Wuhan Lockdown is an unparalleled account of the first moments of the crisis that would define the age.
  
  https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-wuhan-lockdown/9780231200479

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  Michael Dutton: Policing Chinese Politics

  Beginning with the bloody communist purges of the Jiangxi era of the late 1920s and early 1930s and moving forward to the wild excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Policing Chinese Politics explores the question of revolutionary violence and the political passion that propels it. “Who are our enemies, who are our friends, that is a question germane to the revolution,” wrote Mao Zedong in 1926. Michael Dutton shows just how powerful this one line was to become. It would establish the binary division of life in revolutionary China and lead to both passionate commitment and revolutionary excess. The political history of revolutionary China, he argues, is largely framed by the attempts of Mao and the Party to harness these passions.

  The economic reform period that followed Mao Zedong’s rule contained a hint as to how the magic spell of political faith and commitment could be broken, but the cost of such disenchantment was considerable. This detailed, empirical tale of Chinese socialist policing is, therefore, more than simply a police story. It is a parable that offers a cogent analysis of Chinese politics generally while radically redrafting our understanding of what politics is all about. Breaking away from the traditional elite modes of political analysis that focus on personalities, factions, and betrayals, and from “rational” accounts of politics and government, Dutton provides a highly original understanding of the far-reaching consequences of acts of faith and commitment in the realm of politics.
  
  https://www.dukeupress.edu/policing-chinese-politics