Browsing by Author "Chow, Rey"

This dissertation applies the concept of a therapeutic emotional style, drawn from the cultural study of the emotions, in a historical and theoretical interpretation of ascendant psychoanalytic discourse in modernist studies. I historicize the ascendance of a “therapeutic style” in modern novels and literary criticism through genealogical analysis of the legacy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I approach the novel’s tradition historically, in terms of Eva Illouz’s account of therapy, and theoretically, in terms of Edward Said’s ideology critique of imperial culture. Turning to novelists Graham Greene and Paule Constant, the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and Karen Horney, and American Vietnam War novels read alongside Robert Jay Lifton’s trauma theory, I establish the basis for understanding why Heart of Darkness has been institutionalized as a paradigmatic text for the therapeutic culture of modern and contemporary literature and literary criticism.

In 1949, Bell Lab mathematician Claude Shannon modeled telephone communication by assigning statistic regularity to the rather irregular usage of human language. His lab mate Warren Weaver took a step further, putting the novel Alice in Wonderland through a translation machine in pursuit of a unified form of intercultural communication. Amidst the ideological polarities of the Cold War, this rationalist pursuit was idealistic. Yet today it still guides the scholarly approach to intercultural communication. This approach to data analysis poses a problem: the corporate sector simply has far superior systems of aggregating data and manipulating information, while individual academics would either have to ally with the world’s most popular social media or be forever trapped in isolation and by deficits. My work, on the contrary, focuses on the advantages of studying deficits. It questions why and how details are deliberately stripped out, why and how experience is transformed into algorithmic power, all for creating the impression of mere “data.”

This dissertation has two main objectives, one inwardly focused, the other outwardly oriented: first, to create a dialogue between literary studies and media studies through discussions of informational loss; second, to shift the narrow focus of North American and German media theory by drawing broadly on the material history of literature, media, and art from modern and contemporary China. China studies, a field born out of Cold War contexts in the West, have thus far developed under the growing pressure to track the particularities of this cultural other like China, without paying much attention to what documents are doing to a history rife with deliberately omitted information. This dissertation rectifies this mistreatment of lost details. Targeting communication scholar Marshall McLuhan’s provocation that “the medium is the message,” we may say that what is missing is the message; preserving what is missing in a cultural other end up making us not see China at all.

How do we approach objects that are opaque and always disappearing from view? This study locates this issue at the intersection of media theory and literary theory through reviewing key historical moments in both fields: this study examines the archival compression of the historical figure and the corpus called “Lu Xun” (1881-1936) to rethink the destructive role of print media in constructing Chinese modernity; returns to the industrial production of “books to lose” in the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) to rethink the inevitable, functional bias of preservation in historiography; reviews the 1980s’ indulgence in a kind of “information fetishism” to reveal that opacity, too, can be a political ideal; and evaluates the claim of China’s 5G and AI “authoritarian networks” to expose the problematic metaphors of informatics. Each of the four chapters draws on literary and artistic texts, including Lu Xun’s untranslated essays (chapter 1), Yan Lianke’s fictional historiographies (chapter 2), Liu Cixin’s politicized science fiction (chapter 3), and emerging media arts in China (chapter 4). Referring to what tends to be hidden by acts of collecting, what becomes opaque, and what gets erased when the technological context is neglected, I borrow the term “lossy” from computer science. This term circumvents the notion of history based on static archives and their imaginary solidity. Interweaving two distinct threads of exposition (media studies and literature), this dissertation provides a multi-fold narrative about history, politics, and China.

The Hole in the Fence examines the design and effects of the contemporary border security

regime. Since 1994, the growth of military-style policing in the lands between the US and

Mexico has radically reshaped the path of illicit transnational migration. Newly erected

walls, surveillance technology, and the stationing of an army of federal agents in the

border territory do not serve to seal off the national boundary. Border security rather

works by pushing undocumented migration traffic away from urban areas and out into

protracted journeys on foot through the southwest wilderness, heightening the risks

associated with entering the US without papers. Those attempting the perilous

wilderness crossing now routinely find themselves without access to water, food, or

rescue; thousands of people without papers have since perished in the vast deserts and

rugged brushlands of the US southwest. In this border policing scenario, the US border

security establishment does not act alone. From corporations to cartels, aid workers,

militia men, and local residents, myriad social forces now shape the contemporary

border struggle on the ground.

The Hole in the Fence draws on the political theory of Michel Foucault and his

interlocutors to argue that the US-Mexico border zone stands as a highly contemporary

governing form that is based less on sovereign territorial defense or totalitarian capture

than on the multilateral regulation of transnational circulation. Accounting for the

conceptual contours of the border scenario thus challenges many of the assumptions that underwrite classical political theory. This dissertation offers a vision of

contemporary political power that is set to work in open and vital landscapes, and not in

fortressed prisons or deadened war zones. I articulate a mode of authorized violence

that is indirect and erratic, not juridical or genocidal. I explore a world of surveillance

technology that is scattered and dysfunctional, not smooth and all-seeing. I assess the

participation of human populations in progressive political intervention as being just as

often driven by practical self-interests as by an ethos of self-sacrifice.

This study draws on a diverse archive of on-the-ground policing tactics, policy

papers, works of mass culture, academic scholarship, and self-authored media by rural

residents to represent the contemporary border security environment. This pursuit is

necessarily interdisciplinary, moving among historical, cultural, ethnographic, and

theoretical forms of writing. Ultimately, The Hole in the Fence asserts that the southwest

border zone is a critical conceptual map for the rationality of political power in the

context of neoliberal transnationalism—a formation that constantly engenders new

modes of persecution, struggle, subversion, and possibility.

My dissertation, "The People's Republic of Capitalism: The Making of the New Middle Class in Post-Socialist China, 1978-Present" draws on a range of visual cultural forms - cinema, documentary, and fashion - to track the cultural dimension of the emergence of the new middle class subject in China's encounter with global capitalism. Through cultural studies methodologies and critical theoretical practices, I explore the massive reorganization of national subjectivity that has accompanied the economic reforms since 1978. How, I ask, has the middle class replaced the proletariat as the dominant subject of Chinese history? What are the competing social forces that contribute to the making of the new middle class subject, and how do they operate? By considering these questions in terms of the cultural cultivation of new sensibilities as much as identities, I trace China's changing social formations through the realm of cultural productions. This project is organized into three parts, each of which attends to a particular constellation of middle class subjectivities and ideologies. In Part I (Introduction and Chapter 1), I explore how the Chinese middle class subject is shaped by historical, political-economic, and cultural forces. I show that the new social actor is structurally dependent on the national and transnational bourgeoisie and the post-socialist party-state. In Part II (Chapters 2-5), I focus on the relationship among fashion, media, and Chinese consumer culture in the socialist and post-socialist eras. By engaging with films such as Xie Tieli's Never Forget (1964), Huang Zumo's Romance on Lushan (1980), Qi Xingjia's Red Dress is in Fashion (1984), and Jia Zhangke's The World (2004) and Useless (2007), I suggest that the representation of fashion and consumption in Chinese cinema, documentary, and new media is a privileged site for deciphering otherwise imperceptible meanings of class, ideology, and history in the formation of the Chinese middle class subject. In Part III (Chapter 6), I attend to the repressed underside of Chinese consumer culture: rubbish. This project reorients our understanding of socialist and post-socialist China, seeing them as underpinned by the contradictions emblematized in the Chinese middle class.