Reporter | Lin Zi people Edit | Yellow Moon
On May 21, eight Chinese and French thinkers gathered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai for a "Night of Thoughts" for the audience. In 2016, nuit des idées was founded in Paris to promote the dissemination and exchange of ideas between people of different cultures, disciplines and generations. Every year on the same night, a global audience will hear guests from different fields discuss the most important issues in the world today.
This year is the first time that "Night of Thought" has landed in China. The theme of the Shanghai station is "Family: Near, Far Away", derived from the theme of this year's "Night of Thoughts", "Proches", focusing on family and intimate relationships, trying to dissect the profound changes in family life in recent decades and people's anxieties and desires, demands and visions. The agenda consisted of three roundtable discussions on "What is family relationship", "How to be together" and "Out of The Family".
Modern ideas such as free love and the nuclear family originated in Europe and changed modern China in the early 20th century, but chinese and French intellectuals do not have the same focus when discussing these issues. This discrepancy is evident almost from the beginning of the "Night of Thoughts" agenda — lectures by François de Singly, professor emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Paris, and Xiang Biao, professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford. The former is about the French family's recognition of the individual and the importance of emotional attachment between people to form today's family, while the latter is about the great contradiction between the Chinese family as a sacred institution and a community of interests.
However, in both France and China, people face a common problem: at a time when individualism liberates the individual from various communities, the sanctity and stability of marriage and the family are also under attack, and a "post-family era" seems to be coming. At this moment, how should we understand the emotional bond in the family? How to deal with the closeness and alienation from loved ones? How do you see the impact of socio-economic changes on individual families?
In his keynote speech in the "What Is Family Relationship" section, Sangley reviewed the changes in the European family from the 12th century to the present day. He traces the European concept of "romantic love" to the 12th-century love story "Tristan and Isolde" and points out that since then, the dominance of arranged marriages has been challenged, and more and more people have begun to pursue free love marriages, rather than family decisions for life based on the principle of maximizing the interests of the door-to-door pair. This change has accelerated further since the 20th century. Sangeri pointed out that since the 1970s, the marriage rate in France has decreased while the divorce rate has increased, people can freely combine in the form of cohabitation and civil contracts, and some couples do not even live under the same roof, so the stability of marriage is weakened.
At the same time, people's understanding of intimacy has also changed. Individual uniqueness and free will are increasingly emphasized, people want to be recognized and respected in intimate relationships, and emotional attachment between people is becoming more and more important. Sangerly believes that the above changes have led to two tensions in the current family, one is the tension between the self-will of young people and the expectations of parents for their children; the other is the tension between the hope of personal recognition and the continuation and maintenance of the patriarchal hierarchical family – for many women, it is difficult for them to get out of this contradiction.
In his keynote speech, Xiang Biao questioned the idea that the family is a sacred sanctuary. According to his observation, there are four contradictory relationships in family life in China today. The first paradox is that the family still has its sacred aura, but as demonstrated by the People's Park Blind Date Corner and Judicial Interpretation III of the Marriage Law, it also seems to be rapidly becoming a contractual relationship. For some Chinese couples, even if the emotions have been broken, the form of marriage must be maintained, and behind this contradiction is a multifaceted utilitarian calculation including economic interests and personal dignity and status.
The third is the contradiction between the privatization and socialization of family care, after the reform and opening up, a large number of family care work returned to the family (especially returning to women), but through the market mechanism to produce a new socialization, forming a highly competitive field. When Xiang Biao did fieldwork in the northeast region, he found that it is a common phenomenon for preschool-age rural children to go to kindergarten in the county, which shows that the concept of refined parenting has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people in China at present, and this has also caused a huge economic burden for individual families. Finally, the contradiction between the consumption function and the investment function of the family, the family is not only a consumption unit, but also an important investment unit, from the purchase of real estate to the education of children, there is no need for people to allocate family resources, accurate calculation, and seek the highest rate of return. "[Family] seems so vague in the facts, forming all kinds of contradictions, so everyone has a huge sense of anxiety and insecurity in life, and of course, a lot of ethical and moral loss." Xiang Biao pointed out.
Sangerly said that according to Xiang Biao's account, Chinese families are more like property families whose main function is investment, which reminds him of the French bourgeois family in the 19th century, but now European families face other contradictions and problems. Xiang Biao responded that we need to pay attention to the inequalities created by the family property mechanism within the capitalist economic system in the 21st century. He argues that the current state of the Chinese family provides an interesting perspective for understanding family relations and even individual-social relations: family relations change with changes in the socio-economic environment on the one hand, and vice versa — people grow up in the family, acquire a fixed set of life concepts, form an understanding of what economic relations are worth pursuing, and thus produce the consumer-laborers needed by today's capitalism, who emphasize individualism and individual freedom, but do not know how to connect with others to carry out collective action.
Liu Qing, Zijiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University, believes that both France and China are witnessing a shift in modernity, that is, the will of the individual is becoming more and more important. When personal will is given supreme values, religions, or traditions lose their normative role, emotions are found to be unreliable in intimate relationships. Liu Qing said that the concept of entering into marriage contracts and starting families through free love is only 200 years at most, and it is promoted by a series of historical conditions. The "marriage for love" family model has been very stable for a long time because men and women need to rely on each other in the organization of the family, women need men to provide family income, and men need women to take care of the family. However, with the development of society, especially the marketization of domestic work and the entry of women into the labor market, both men and women have begun to have the possibility of independent living, which determines the instability of the family. To do this, we need to prepare for the advent of the "post-family era", need to be aware of the limits of intimacy – everyone will get something different from it, at a cost – and need to think about what kind of family is better and more ideal.
According to Sangley's statement that romantic love began in Europe in the 12th century, Zhang Nian, a feminist philosopher and professor at the School of Humanities of Tongji University, pointed out that the concept of free love did not become deeply rooted in China until the 1920s, and it became one of the core contents of the "conceptual revolution" set off by the may fourth generation of young intellectuals, and 80% of the content of The New Youth magazine was actually talking about marriage and love. At the same time, Zhang Nian believes that China's social culture has not taught us how to think positively and define intimate relationships, which has largely led to Chinese naturally regard the family as a small gear in the socio-economic operation, a micro-society.
Xiang Biao pointed out that the rapid politicization of love during the May Fourth period led to the above results to a certain extent, and in the entire Chinese society, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, people's ability to narrate intimate relationships was quite weak. He told xiaobai, a writer on the spot, that this may be a task for Chinese writers, that is, to find the right tools to speak, to summarize and organize people's understanding of intimate relationships into texts that can guide thinking and feeling. In addition, Xiang Biao also believes that the free individual as a precondition for discussing intimate relations is a Western way of thinking, but man is a social animal, and individuals cannot escape from various social relations, and the Chinese intellectual circles can provide new ideological resources for how to discuss a more social intimacy that does not start from the free individual.
Liu Qing responded, "Individualism is not the difference between east and west, but the difference between ancient and modern. "The formation of the capitalist economic system has gradually removed the individual from the original organic community, people leave the countryside and land, enter the city, enter the factory, and the increase in mobility means that a person can withdraw from one community at any time and join another. Thus, individualism—the ideology of understanding man as an independent individual—is not invented by the individual, but a dominant social reality, "and "will become a common imagination only if this set of discourses can explain man's life." And it's a prerequisite for us to rethink intimacy.
In the keynote speech of the "How to Be Together" section, Xiao Bai continued the focus on family relations in the previous roundtable discussion. Human history has been witnessing the evolution of family-social mechanisms, and in the long history, societies lack the technical capacity to intervene in family life and must manage and control the family through intermediary forms (such as clan management in traditional Chinese society). With the establishment of social management mechanisms such as the census system, this situation changed in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the family began to shift to the model of the modern nuclear family. At the same time, individual emotions and desires are gradually sanctified, and people begin to think that the necessary condition for a happy marriage is mutual satisfaction, but as Liu Qing discussed earlier, this exacerbates the instability of the family, and one of the consequences of it is that society seems to have more reason to intervene in the changing modern family.
In just one or two hundred years, the family-social mechanism has been undergoing drastic changes, and from the 20th century to the present, we can find that the evolution is accelerating. Xiaobai reminds us of the important shaping effect of technological development on family and intimate relationships: the popularity of household appliances has reduced the difficulty of housework and historically changed the relationship between the sexes in family life; the development of information technology has changed our understanding of space and distance, and people's feelings about distance and proximity in intimate relationships have also undergone unprecedented changes; the development of brain neuroscience and cognitive science has revealed the biological principles behind the production of love, and perhaps also made our understanding of intimate relationships have produced different ideas Virtual reality allows people to gain new identities and run new lives in a virtual parallel world, which may also mean that people do not necessarily need to enter intimate relationships in real life.
French writer Dominique Sigaud argues that only by understanding the fundamental problems of intimacy can we better meet the challenges of today's world, which is to eliminate systemic inequalities between the sexes. "Men are desirers, women are desired, men determine women's positions, men lead the world" – this masculineist narrative has been increasingly questioned, and it has been recognized that women have the same intelligence and value as men, women's narratives are equally effective, and it is important to establish more equal and open gender relations.
Yet violence against women is largely an unreflected systemic problem, and the killing of women is still fairly common in areas of extreme poverty, which Sigo believes has important implications for our collective unconscious—the continued devaluation of women has made the notion that men are superior to women, and men determine the laws of the world. This also largely shapes men's visions and desires for their partners in intimate relationships, and forces women to maintain a submissive posture in intimate relationships, ignoring or belittling their desires and needs.
"Women need to learn to desire, this desire is a human desire, it is about how a person wants to live, a woman with desire can produce more communication, let new language between men and women," Sigo said, "to build a more democratic family, we need to respect everyone's desires, so that desires can be discussed and accepted within the family." ”
In the free discussion session, Sigo proposed that he wanted to hear men talk about "how to be together" and understand the dilemma of intimate relationships from a male perspective. This request caused the atmosphere of discussion at the scene to stagnate for a moment, and Liu Qing, who was arched by Zhang Nian with the "Radical Method", delivered a speech that caused the warmest applause of the night. Liu Qing does not talk about the specific problems in life ("this is a big risk"), but reflects on the "rationalist patriarchalism" that men unconsciously fall into, that is, the idea that emotional feelings are childish and inferior and need to be improved if they are not expressed clearly and clearly. "This is a very troublesome and dangerous, rationally conceited hegemony. It's not just in men, but males promoting rationalism can be a structural thing. So in my personal (relationship with women) experience, I wanted to respect you, but you didn't make sense. ”
Liu Qing pointed out that in public political life, rationality is very important, but in the process of dealing with human affairs, especially intimate relations, reason has its own effective boundaries, it is like a lamp illuminating a place, but in addition to the light there are dark and dark places. Scholars in the field of political philosophy have also begun to explore the impact of emotions such as anger on public life in recent years, and in private life, the dim spots where reason cannot be explained are even more important. Liu Qing said that this is an important lesson he learned as he grew older, that is, to recognize the limitations of reason, maintain great humility and respect to listen to others, and find ways to hear real and important voices from stories that cannot be sorted out with reason. "I think that's something that everybody – and probably especially men – shaped by culture – has to learn."
In 1879, the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen created the play "Doll's House", which tells the story of the heroine Nala who angrily runs away after recognizing her status as a "doll" subordinate to her husband in the family. This work has aroused enthusiastic response in Europe and China, and "Nala's exodus" has become an iconic image of women fighting for freedom and independence, which has been repeatedly discussed by the May Fourth generation of intellectuals. But to a large extent, Nala's situation is closely linked to the fate of women today, and the marriage and motherhood are still a heavy burden on women today.
French feminist philosopher Geneviève Fraisse said that her generation of French women is the lucky generation in history — France did not allow divorce by agreement until the middle of the 20th century, and as the concept of equality was introduced into the family, the gender division of labor between "male and female" began to be broken, and women began to gain freedom. While it may sound like a cliché, Frese reminds us that women's emancipation presupposes the right to education, the right to work, and economic independence.
In his keynote speech in the "Out of the Family" section, Liu Qing talked about the "double troubles of independent women". In the past 20 years, the number of highly educated single women in China's large cities has been on the rise. They strive to get out of the troubles of traditional patriarchal families and strive for higher professional achievements, but instead they are caught in another kind of trouble: the pursuit of professional success and high income has always been a sign of male success, and women's use of them as their own criteria for success is actually an operation of capitalist ideology, which re-engineers women according to male standards, essentially succumbing to the hegemonic structure of patriarchy-capitalism and becoming complicit in the established order.
This may seem like a very "advanced" and "anti-patriarchal" critique, but Liu Qing reminds us of the cunning of this criticism. This accusation is still theoretically based on a gender stereotype that men's success can only be subordinated to the criteria determined by the hegemonic structure of capitalism and patriarchy, and that women in this case have only two bad choices, one is to stay in the family and continue to be a victim of this hegemony, and the other is to become an alliance of hegemonic structures. Liu Qing believes that the fallacy of this criticism is that it completely dissolves the agency of women as human beings and any possibility of pursuing independence and liberation. At the same time, it tacitly acknowledges that unless a utopian society comes, no one can escape the discipline of the existing social power structure. However, power is not always monolithic, on the contrary, it always has cracks and cracks, implying the possibility of resistance, resistance and transcendence. In addition, this criticism implies a certain idea of returning women to the family, and this proposition is made in the name of "women's independence".
Lu Xun once said that the end of "Nala's exodus" is either depravity or going home, can going home become a woman's choice based on free will? "Returning to the family can only be a free choice if women's exodus and independent living become a truly viable option." I still believe that economic independence is a first step towards freedom for women, even if that first step has to resort to the reward and punishment mechanisms of the existing socio-economic structure. Liu Qing also pointed out that we need to emphasize the importance of women's self-will, "any force of ideological emancipation, needs to be persuaded rather than coercive, to reach the first-person perspective, to become her own will." ”
Today, our understanding of intimacy has changed dramatically— it doesn't necessarily exist between men and women, it doesn't necessarily require the institutional guarantee of the family, and it doesn't necessarily last—which is the consensus and the starting point of discussion throughout the event. But Liu Qing believes that human beings still need intimacy because it brings some irreplaceable experiences to our lives, such as the pleasure of being unconditionally recognized—in the small world created by a beautiful intimate relationship, you are the best. Liu Qing quoted Alain Badio's "Love is the Smallest Communism" to describe the wonderful feelings when in love, "Making you happy gives me greater happiness, and the more I give, the more I become myself." This is a rare moment for the political philosopher to shed the mask of reason and reveal his emotional side.
However, in the following discussion about equality within the family, Liu Qing subconsciously revealed that there is a limit to the male contribution in the family. He believes that babies are naturally more dependent on their mothers until they are about one year old due to the need to breastfeed, and mothers have a higher sensitivity to the needs of their children, and the intimate space between mother and child is sometimes difficult for men to step into. Sangerly responded that we need to be vigilant about this reason, which may be that men use children as an excuse to shirk family responsibilities and maintain the inequality of the division of labor within the family in the name of some seemingly objective science.