Editor's Note
The standard of literary criticism in the new era is to think in the depth of history and the folds of the present
The source of power, the way of unfolding and the social effects of literary criticism undoubtedly constitute a key link in the healthy development of socialist literature and art at present. Recently, the Central Propaganda Department and five other ministries and commissions jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Strengthening the Work of Literary and Art Criticism in the New Era", emphasizing the need to "improve the standards of literary and art criticism, regard the people as connoisseurs and judges of literary and artistic aesthetics, unify political, artistic, social reflection, and market recognition, and put social values in the first place" [1]. The standard issue of literary criticism has been pushed to the cusp of the storm, so it must be seriously studied and clarified.
The characteristics of people's nature, politics, artistry, sociality and market recognition pointed out in the Opinions highlight the complex connotation and basic unity of literary criticism standards in the new era. However, how to grasp the dialectical relationship between these qualities, how to understand the higher unity of the standards of literary criticism in the new era, and how to make the standards of literary criticism in the new era achieve their contemporary mission are not simple questions. In my opinion, from the two aspects of "historical depth" and "current challenges", we may be able to provide ideological resources and realistic support for the healthy ecology of literary criticism in the new era. Therefore, this article attempts to clarify two questions: First, how to understand the "political standards" and "artistic standards" in the historical experience of contemporary literature, and what kind of enlightenment does the variation of the relationship between the two provide for current literary criticism? Second, how to face the impact of new technologies, new media and new sensibilities on inherent literary concepts, and how can the standards of literary criticism in the new era reshape their own orientation?
Guiding Opinions on Strengthening literary and art criticism in the New Era,
Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, August 2, 2021.
One
It is a fact that cannot be ignored is that we cannot find the historical continuity of Chinese socialist literature and art in the literary concept alone; rather, it is regulated by the nature of the socialist state. This is related to the 1942 "Speech at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art", which clearly stated that "literature and art should be made a good part of the whole revolutionary machine" [2]. It has also become a historical starting point for the study of the standards of contemporary literary criticism. Although with the change of the historical situation, the connotation of "politics" has changed in a certain sense; "especially when the 'revolutionary machine' is transformed into a 'state machine' for the whole society and the whole people in the conventional sense"[3], the connotation of the speech itself has been discussed more diversifiedly, and at the same time it has been constantly "historicized" - to a large extent, re-embedded in the historical context of the Yan'an rectification. However, "historicization" cannot obscure the universal significance of the Speech. The reason for this is that the Speech is a text that "has the right to scripture". In repetition (including the commemoration of the "speech"), it is constantly born as a text pointing to the "present". What is more dialectical is that only after the initial historical qualifications have been abandoned can the "Speech" reflect the substantial continuity of China's socialist literary and artistic practice. The so-called "political standard, but also the artistic standard ... Any class in any class society always places political standards first and artistic standards second"[4] Can a new and appropriate understanding be obtained.
Mao Zedong: Speech at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art, People's Publishing House, 1953
With regard to "political standards first" or "literature and art are subordinated to politics," the "Speech" has actually made a relatively sufficient explanation: First, "politics" refers to class politics and mass politics, involving class antagonism and the relationship between the enemy and ourselves, and also related to the creation of new people and a new world. Second, there is no abstract and absolutely unchanging political standard, and politics is related to the specific situation and the balance of forces. [5] This definition applies not only to the context of the War of Resistance, but also to the state of cultural confrontation in the Cold War pattern. It is particularly important to note that the Western bloc has created a combination of political militarization and aesthetic liberalization to "oppose communism"; in order to suppress and subvert communism, it has developed an interdisciplinary "think tank aesthetic". In short, the "political standards" of Cold War culture were implemented through the appearance of "freedom" and "science." [6] The crux of the matter, therefore, is not that the West does not regard "political standards" as "first", but that the political appearance and governance mechanisms of the West are different from the way the socialist "revolutionary machine" operates. With the end of the "short 20th century"[7], the connotation and appearance of "politics" once again changed dramatically. The relationship between "literature and art and politics" has once again been questioned. "Political standards first" has ushered in a new way of understanding it as never before.
Pamela M. Lee,Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (The MIT Press)
The "Speech" theoretically reminds us of the political and militant nature of literature and art itself, reminds us to study the profound significance of the laws of literature and art on the battle of existence, and reminds us that individual ideological exploration and aesthetic creation are ultimately in the relationship with the collective universal historical movement. [8]
This is a kind of "cultural politics" understanding, that is, Zhang Xudong's so-called positioning of the collective and universal appeal of literature and art within the "political ontology". However, the relationship between "political standards" and "artistic standards" in the "Speech" can be further explored. Here it is worth introducing a theoretical frame of reference for investigation: the discussion of the "disintegration of romantic art" at the end of Hegel's Aesthetics (Volume II). That is to say, continue to ask what the so-called "unification" of "political standards" and "artistic standards" means under the new vision of "cultural politics". If Hegel's Aesthetics implies a philosophical summary of the state of bourgeois literature and art as a whole in the 19th century, then The Speech is a manifesto on how revolutionary literature and art of the 20th century overcame bourgeois culture. Here, however, the unity of premodern art, which Hegel mentioned earlier, is all the more comparable.
Aesthetics (Vol. 1), by Hegel G.W.F
"The basis of art is the unity of meaning and image, including the subjectivity of the artist and the unity of his content meaning and work. It is this concrete unity that provides substantive standards for content and its expression that permeate all works. [9] Hegel's so-called "concrete unity" is not only the unity of the meaning and image of the work itself (the unity of content and form), but also includes the unity of the artist's subjectivity and the work, that is, the unity with the specific content of "a certain worldview and religious view", and there is a firm belief in it, "which will be treated with real seriousness and its expression". In a sense, this more primitive, wrapped-up unity is the "political standard." Not only is it unrelated to simple political statements or political jargon, nor can it be reduced to modern politics in the narrow sense. In Hegel's view, the so-called "true seriousness" is not so much a subjective confirmation as it is from the unity of the artist and the community in which he lives. For artists:
This content is for him the infinite and real thing in his own consciousness, and he is in a primitive unity with this content in his innermost subjectivity, and the image he uses to express this content is the final, necessary, and best kind of the soul that expresses absolute and ordinary things. Since the substance of the material is inherent in himself, he is bound to adopt a definite form of expression. [11]
The absoluteness of the content, the requirements of the content for form, and even the constraints of the writer to adopt a certain definite form all remind people of some characteristics of "socialist realism". The so-called artists who are in a state of unity with "content" cannot help but be reminiscent of revolutionary writers with firm beliefs such as Liu Qing and Zhou Libo. This also helps us to understand the political-philosophical meaning of "content and form" itself in a deeper sense. Dialectically, Hegel's exposition of the arrival and "end" of "romantic art" depicts the gradual disintegration of this "unity". "All peoples have been educated to think and criticize"[12] After that, art became an "instrument of freedom". There is no content, no form, that is directly identical to the physical essence of the artist's heart, nature, and unconscious, and "the artist is not divided into any kind of content or material" [13]. This is the intention of Hegel in his discussion of the question of "humor", as if he had predicted the nihilistic side of modern art: "[Humor] it removes the connection between the character and a particular limited content, it can make all qualitative wavering, even to eliminate it, so that art transcends its own boundaries." ”[14]
In a translation note of Zhu Guangliang's Aesthetics, he once believed that the unity of the individual and society in the socialist era, and the true freedom and infinity of everyone being the master, would surpass Hegel's pessimistic judgment on the "era of prose" and "the disintegration of art". [15] This line of thought, which "follows" Aesthetics, expresses precisely the impulse of socialist culture to "negate the negation" of the former "negation" (the "prose tone" that has disintegrated the "unified" modernity). The dialectics of literary and art workers transforming their minds, "going deep into life," and "teaching and learning, which are opened up by the "Speech," undoubtedly correspond to the efforts of revolutionary China to recast "unification." Of course, such an effort must accommodate and digest the "upbringing of criticism and thinking"[16] and properly address the enduring challenges posed by art as an instrument of freedom. Thus, if we follow the logic of Hegel's Aesthetics, the "political standard" touches on the fundamental question of the "foundation of art"; it is only that the practice of contemporary Chinese literature with the Speech as its program conceives of a reunity in a higher sense.
The whole creativity and dilemma of socialist culture is presented in this process of pursuing "unification." On the one hand, the "revolutionary literary cause" has summoned countless literary and art workers who have "gone deep into life" and can "give shape" to the rhythm of the times, and countless "mud-legged people" have begun to read and hyphenate and describe the world. This kind of literary experience consciously inherited and developed the May Fourth new literature, and can actively transform local and folk traditions. The first 30 years of literature returned to the overall practice in a highly conscious way, thus breaking down to a large extent many barriers between literature and politics, city and country, individual and collective, elegant and customary. But on the other hand, we have also witnessed the increasing bureaucratization and administrativeization of the "revolutionary machine", and the simplification of "politics" in a special context into a sharp division. The differences between urban and rural areas and the body and brain have not really been overcome. In the context of the Cold War, "content" more directly grasped "form." To a large extent, the link of "art as a tool of freedom" has only been falsely discarded, and the unity of artistic image and meaning, and the unity of artistic workers and content meaning, is to a large extent only a subjective and superficial unity. The short-circuit between politics and art also affected literary criticism, and "sticks" and "hats" became the accent of anachronism.
Li Tuo: "Breaking the Traditional Technique", published in Literature and Art Daily, No. 9, 1980
The era of reform actually loosened this demand for the immediacy of "unity", and at the same time gradually gave an important place to the "education of thinking and criticism", and no longer bound the element of art as a "tool of freedom". However, the demand for "unity" necessarily contained in the collective "basis of art" has not disappeared, but rather revealed in a more "realistic" way. Although the "class struggle" has been replaced by the "realization of the four modernizations", the core position of the "political standard" has been clearly inherited: "Whether it is beneficial or harmful to the realization of the four modernizations should become the most fundamental criterion for measuring the right and wrong of all work." In terms of serving the "central task," shaping new people, and paying attention to social effects, Deng Xiaoping's 1979 congratulatory speech demonstrated the cultural and political continuity of the two periods before and after the reform and opening up—of course, this is not the continuity of the narrow political line, and the continuity of literature embedded in the "revolutionary machine." Because the relationship between "politics" and "literature" has been loosened to a certain extent, the deeper "political" foundation of literature has been revealed. In 1979, Min Ze argued that the fundamental reason for the setback suffered by literature and art in the first thirty years was not "the principle of serving politics itself, but the influence and interference of the 'Left' ideological trend in the political field, and the simple, crude, and even pragmatic attitude of literary and artistic leadership that violates the laws and characteristics of art, and there are often serious problems in the understanding of both politics and service." His understanding of "politics" corresponds to the ideal state of literature and art as part of the "revolutionary machine.".
Politics is by no means a question of class struggle forever... The production and life of the masses of the people, the improvement of their spirit, sentiments, culture, education, morality, etc., cannot be excluded from revolutionary politics by any true proletarian revolutionary. Literature and art serve politics, or rather, serve the fundamental political interests of the proletariat. Anything that can promote people's positiveness, give people a noble spiritual, emotional, moral inspiration, can enhance their aesthetic ability, and legitimate entertainment, is conducive to the cause of the proletariat and should therefore be actively supported... To understand serving the fundamental interests of the proletariat as serving political movements of one kind or another, of serving the central work of all kinds, of all kinds of policy provisions... This makes our literary and artistic works have a serious tendency to conceptualize, and the theme, style, and content are also very monotonous and uniform, and finally make literature and art lose its political and social function. [18]
It is precisely because of this "political" understanding that Minze did not approve of changing the phrase "literature and art serving politics" on the eve of the introduction of the basic literary and artistic policy of "literature and art serving the people and serving socialism". Minze's intention may be to use "politics" to continue the legitimacy and priority of "unification". But conversely, the overburdened wording of "politics" is bound to be replaced by new formulations in the "new period". However, this substitution did not fundamentally change the political connotations conceived by Minze, that is, it retained the expectation of the unity of the "foundation of art".
However, the problem has become complicated for the standards of literary criticism. First of all, the refutation of "literature and art as tools of class struggle" that emerged in 1979 has something in common with Minze's practice of saving "politics" from "class struggle", but it is stronger to call the "life" category to replace "politics", that is, it is materialistic to examine the relationship between "literature and art and life", and too much concern about the relationship between "literature and art and politics" will lead to idealism. At the same time, this theory also particularly elevates the status of "authenticity", and rearranges the "role of literature and art" with the framework of "truth, goodness and beauty"—proposing the equal importance of the role of cognition, education and aesthetics. [20] As Marxist demands are gradually suspended and marginalized, the understanding of the so-called "life" and "authenticity" can only be grasped more from the individual. Thus, art, which has always troubled "unity," as an "instrument of freedom," begins to seep very clearly into the fabric of literary criticism. On the other hand, the role and function of literature and art have been "differentiated". In Deng Xiaoping's "congratulatory speech" and Minze's interpretation of "literature and art serving politics", the functions of cognition, education, aesthetics, and entertainment ultimately need to be "unified" above the "fundamental task", but the concept that was subsequently developed was that the understanding, aesthetics, and entertainment roles of literature and art almost had a parallel coexistence relationship. Therefore, literary criticism will largely abandon the efforts of "convergence" and "unification" and simply acknowledge the coexistence of multiple functions of literature and art. This diluted or even replaced the original ambitions of new Chinese literary criticism.
"Congratulations at the Fourth Congress of Chinese Literary and Art Workers"
Since the 1980s, a radical reconstruction of literary concepts has begun. In view of the core elements of "socialist realism" such as "characters", "structure", and "themes", the practice of "doing the opposite" is carried out one by one. [21] On the one hand, this further frustrated the idea of "going back to seventeen years", and on the other hand, it also began to strengthen Hegel's so-called subjective freedom of the artist in the face of material and form. Li Tuo's "Breaking the Traditional Technique" is a symptomatic work, and he not only uses the legitimacy of "now and now" to further dismantle the solid connection between "content" and "form", but also almost announces the end of the inherent "mass" aspect of socialist literature and art.
It cannot be required that the work of every writer be understood and welcomed by readers of all strata of society... Don't put too much emphasis on inheritance in times of literary change... It should be said that breaking tradition should not only break the tradition of Confucius and Mengmen's literary and artistic thought, but also break some traditions of the past thirty years, such as the tradition of Soviet aesthetic thought. We still hold on to the set of aesthetic theories accepted in the 1950s as our own theoretical tradition of so-called revolutionary realism. In fact, there are many problems that make us suspicious, such as the typical problems that Comrade Wang Meng just talked about. Whether our literature must focus on shaping characters and characters, it is difficult to say... Since childhood, I have formed the idea that since ancient times, whether east or west, only realism is the mainstream of literary trends. Not really. [22]
Although Li Tuo may sincerely believe that "breaking the traditional method" is conducive to "forming a new period of literature and art that is compatible with the historical period of China's construction of the Four Modernizations", his phrase "what cannot be understood can not be read" actually declares the "unity" implied by the "foundation of art" to shake. This kind of literary "rebellion" is essentially producing the "freedom" of artists on the whole thing—of course, subjectively hoping to intervene in the culture and politics of the new era. This is also the hidden origin of the literary concept of the 1980s. After the Fourth Congress of the Chinese Writers Association in 1984, "creative freedom" was explicitly mentioned. At the same time, literary and artistic leaders and critics have written articles advocating the need for "freedom of criticism." Although their ideological spectrum is not consistent, the target is quite similar: the party once led literature and art and failed to guarantee literary and artistic freedom. This time, "literary criticism" was given more of a "scientific" color—"a true revelation of the objective laws of literature and art"[23], while left-leaning "politics" became the ultimate enemy of "telling the truth". "In this social atmosphere of the 'Left' political movement, which has no guarantee of freedom of speech and the legal system, literary critics are extremely unfree in their hearts, and they dare not even tell the truth, and where can they say that they can express creative insights?" [24] Here, perhaps "telling the truth" should not be understood as a feat of truth in hand, rather as a product of the impulse of the subject at a particular historical period. There is no problem in saying that literary criticism should tell the truth; the question is how we understand the "truth" and the relationship between the "truth" that we personally identify with and history. If we look at the historical genealogy of the standard of literary criticism, highlighting the "freedom of criticism" is tantamount to probing the boundaries of this "freedom" and the boundaries of the community to which literary criticism belongs. In this process of exploration, the inherent "unified" demand of socialist literature and art will be temporarily suspended, while the production of subjectivity will be continuously strengthened.
However, from the mid-1980s onwards, a new element of political economy entered the territory of literary and artistic practice, eventually creating a "literary loss sensational effect". With the deepening of reform and opening up, the socialist commodity economy and market problems have penetrated more and more into the process of literary and artistic production; on the other hand, socialist culture, which has always adhered to the requirements of politics and religion, cannot abandon its own position, which has given rise to the following seemingly contradictory expression: "Socialist literary and artistic products are commodity, but they are not commodities." [26] It is now clear that after the 1990s, the last umbrella of the system could only adopt passive defense or simply reach a collusive relationship in the process of literary and artistic marketization. In the trend of commercialization and marketization, the entertainment function of literature has been greatly released, forming a mass culture pattern with strong consumer atmosphere and political and religious colors. In view of this situation, two points need to be clarified: First, although the politics and religion of socialist literary culture have always lacked interest in governing the elements of entertainment, there is no lack of experience in dealing with "popularization". Its inherent totality of vision also makes it not too anxious about the "literary loss sensational effect". What was really uncomfortable with it, however, was the group of people in the 1980s who saw art as an "instrument of freedom", so the "humanistic spiritual discussion" of the 1990s could also grasp this thread. Second, it is commodities and market elements that have a substantial impact on the unity of the "artistic foundation" of socialism. This is actually the political economy counterpart of Hegel's "romantic artistic disintegration". The revolutionary literary and artistic tradition that began with the "speech" in 1942 did not, to some extent, encounter this well-fledged opponent. Instead, in the 1980s, the reform and opening up we ourselves launched activated this aspect. The civilization and political and religious interests of socialist countries are bound to be in a highly entangled relationship.
Two
In a sense, our "current" literary and artistic situation is on the extension line of "literary loss but sensational effect". However, it should be noted that the connotation of this "literature" has changed dramatically. This point was earlier pointed out by Wang Xiaoming's "six divisions of the world" (the redivicing of the literary landscape due to the rise of online literature)[27] and Li Yunlei's "end of new literature" (the "new literature" as a whole from the May Fourth new cultural movement to the literature of the 1980s has declined). For "literature", the current situation is like a piece of paper that has been kneaded into a ball, and all the vitality and secrets are presented as irregular folds. Literary criticism needs to find an ability to flatten the folds.
First, for both creators and critics, they have to face the fact that the view of literature since the 1980s has been saturated and has lost its power. To some extent, the "new literature" of the reform era quickly retook the path of "bourgeois" literature in a conscious or unintentional way by overcoming the political and religious demands of the "revolutionary machine" (the so-called "literature is the textbook of life" and "literature and art serve politics"). For example, from the "subjectivity" of the author's freedom, the "privatization" of the reader's reading, the experiment of stylistic style, the "return to language itself", until the final reconstitution of "literature" into a social critical force of "solitude and arrogance", all of this undoubtedly shapes a "pure literature" system on the basis of the existing socialist literature and art. However, from the mid-to-late 1990s onwards, such literature eventually "lost its sensational effect". With the arrival of the tide of marketization and commercialization, the popular literature and art industry with more sensory stimulation and daydreaming colors has quickly taken place. These situations have precisely opened up a space that overflows the literature of the new era. Although the space itself is highly capitalized, the more secular literary-cultural, which has lost its "self-discipline" status, has objectively deposed the absolute status of pure literary installations. In this sense, I prefer to regard current literary practice as the result of negation. For example, in online literature, we can see a more direct emotional interaction between "literature" and "life", as well as the writing of the nameless, and even the collective writing of successive generations. This brings us back in an unpredictable way to the question of how literary practice should be reintegrated into new, desirable forms of life. In fact, relevant literary researchers have keenly opened up this dimension of discussion.
Online Literature Book Shadow
Without talented writers, new genres were gradually born... New images began to jump out, and their wives became varied, from yaku to red card aunts, from one to an infinite number of them. Whether I like these protagonists or not, they are new, carrying a new morality, a heroic view, a love view and a political view... And this new birth has nothing to do with publishing houses, with the book trade, with the creative incentives promised by copyright, but entirely through mass movements. A mass movement of literature, not even a single hero shouting in the air, leading the way ahead. High school students, small clerks, low-level civil servants, couriers, unemployed vagrants, housewives, because of a little imagination, a little vanity, a little action, a little boredom and emptiness, a little idle work, plus five opportunities, actually broke through the stagnation of more than twenty years of genre literature, so that the desires, dreams, ideals of this era, even if it is only some fame and fortune, wine-colored wealth, have also been given the possibility of expression in the story, in the virtual public space composed of writing and reading, germination, questioned, change, And grew countless variants, into history, love, family, faith level, break through the monopoly and indifference of political discourse, connected to the daily life of ordinary people. [29]
Chu Huijuan: "Storytellers and DreamWorks: Technology, Law and Online Literary Production", Social Sciences Academic Press, 2019
Although Chu Huijuan's research focuses on the state of online literature before 2013 and she also admits that this "utopian" idea has encountered disillusionment - "IP" and the crazy pursuit of "big IP" by capital, which has led to the arrival of this new world of literature; however, we still need to listen to and learn this way of intervening in online literature. Paying attention to its potential and getting rid of the either-or attitude of moralism is a gesture that literary criticism must endure today. The reason is simple, the current updated literary production is more closely linked to the "daily life of ordinary people"; in particular, the daily emotional state and feeling mode of the younger generation cannot be deduced from the so-called pure literary experience, but can only be grasped from the updated literary practice. In this sense, the "network literature of the gamification dimension" analyzed by Wang Yuxuan in detail has become extremely critical. No one involved in contemporary literary criticism can ignore this: "The digital environment and cyberspace are deeply involved in the lives of contemporary people... Correspondingly, narrative literary and artistic works have also begun to shift from the dominant creative mode of realism based on the 'natural environment' to the gamified mode of creation based on the (digital) artificial environment. [30] While it cannot be said that this mode of creation and the way of perception it has spawned has swept through everything, we must take into account the serious challenge of this new state of affairs to the inherent view of literature. That is to say, contemporary literary criticism needs to rationally analyze what the dominant situation of the current literary situation is.
Wang Yuxuan, "Coding a New World: Online Literature in the Dimension of Gamification", China Federation of Literary and Art Publishing House, 2021
Second, as far as literary reading is concerned, the written reading centered on words since the 1980s has also encountered fundamental challenges. As the term "distraction" suggests, as information dissemination technology accelerates the functioning of society and shakes the stability of words and their meanings, writing and reading themselves become a state of fluid jumping; inability to concentrate, difficulty in obtaining time for reflection. These symptoms point to the current crisis that entire human reading cannot avoid. [31] Correcting or partially resisting this mechanism may be implemented through schooling. Ironically, however, schooling has largely embedded in this accelerated system and shares this distraction. We can no longer actually return to the state of literary reading dominated by the traditional print media, and nostalgic criticism has become ineffective and even reactionary. Therefore, literary criticism needs to actively intervene in the texture of contemporary literary creation and reading, and to experience new individual and collective structures. Japanese otaku culture researcher Higashi Hiroki once proposed the impact of "database consumption" on traditional "story consumption". [32] Story consumption, or worldview consumption, is based on a solid worldview: first there is a core big narrative, and other small narratives reflect the same worldview. By analogy, it may be said that the great narrative of the Chinese revolution in the 20th century was the birth of modern China and the subsequent socialist revolution and construction, and all literature and art revolved around this grand narrative. The process of the decline of the big narrative will continue to produce compensatory small narratives. However, the essence of today is database consumption: the consumer image itself, does not care about the story; may tell many "stories", but it is less entangled in whether to tell a truly meaningful grand narrative. As a result, stories that pursue new worlds degenerate into repetitive fixed-type narrative lines. The depth mode of change has taken a back seat, and a large number of similar images and images have occupied the foreground.
[Japanese] Dong Haoji", "Animalized Postmodern", chu xuan first translation, Dahong Art Co., Ltd., 2012 edition
Therefore, instead of dwelling on some topics stipulated by traditional literary views (such as "human nature" and "beauty"), contemporary literary criticism should directly ask what step the fundamental transformation of contemporary narrative mechanism has developed in combination with the current reader's reading experience. Wang Yujie's research on "network literature with gamification dimension" captures this point: "For readers in the 19th century, to make up a certain picture, the clues needed are 'copying', and many details in the picture need to be reproduced in detail with words... But for the modern reader, the clues needed for brain patching are 'indexed', and everyone has a database in their minds, and the data subjects in the database are not words but images and scenes. [33] This may be the "facts themselves" of contemporary literature. However, whether the big narrative has completely disintegrated, and whether the small narrative and even database consumption have the opportunity to connect to the "big" and "serious" aspects, can still be debated. For example, the recent "Age of Awakening" being sought after by young audiences on major online platforms is a phenomenon worthy of serious consideration and analysis. Contemporary literary criticism needs to open up a new "small big" debate under such new conditions.
Stills from The Age of Awakening
Finally, from the perspective of future development trends, literary creation itself will also produce new changes, that is, the creation of human subjects as the center, the shift to human-computer cooperation and even the creation of artificial intelligence itself. As a researcher said, artificial intelligence writing poses a challenge to the humanity of the existing literary production subjects, and the continuous updating and upgrading of this writing technology makes "literary production no longer rely on the writer's intellect." It uses more technologies such as algorithms, deep learning, data mining, and new media such as digital media to build its own literary territory. [34] This kind of artificial intelligence now serves a large part of national security and commercial operations, but it is difficult to guarantee that it will not serve aesthetic exchanges and even ethical shaping extensively in the future. This brings the existing "machine" and governance issues to the forefront in a more comprehensive but extreme sense. Literary criticism alone cannot hinder this trend of artificial intelligence, but it can and must think about the extent to which this intelligence can truly serve the growth of cultural identity and collective consciousness in the "new era".
On the other hand, if we suspend for the time being the idea that humanity has been replaced by "post-humanity," then we must also take seriously the intellectual and intellectual conditions on which contemporary literary criticism depends. In fact, artificial intelligence not only intervenes in literary writing, but also intervenes in literary criticism and literary research: "It has an important impact on literary data analysis, literary literature collation, the establishment of literary quantitative standards, the prediction of literary development trends, the psychological situation of literary reading, the analysis of aesthetic elements of literary genres, and literary rankings." [35] This, in turn, forces us to ask what the point of literary criticism really is. But on the other hand, it also frees us from a certain illusory authority and a solitary individuality. As Wang Yan said, the "new humanities" of the Internet may be able to open up two different types of knowledge of individuals and groups: "Beyond Descartes's 'I Think' - the individual-centered cognitive model, and entered the era of pluralistic cognition of 'Our Thoughts'." [36] Here, individual critics need to reconcile not only with contemporary intellectual conditions, but also with numerous other knowledge producers, and even with "machines". This is not so much expressed as a subjective will as an objective reality. Of course, this does not eliminate the link in which literary criticism exerts judgment, but only that individual judgment needs to be reached through the mediation of various intellectual, ethical and aesthetics.
Group photo of Yan'an Literary and Art Forum
Three
After roundabout thinking about the two links of "history" and "present", in the end we need to face the problem of the standard of "new era" literary criticism, and the thinking will also be bound into a temporary conclusion. General Secretary Xi Jinping once said: Literary and art criticism needs to use historical, people's, artistic, and aesthetic points of view to judge and appreciate works. [37] This is an extremely comprehensive definition. The so-called "historical" view refers to a scientific attitude that returns to the historical context, the so-called "people'" view points to the political and ethical responsibility of criticism, the so-called "art" view involves the entire intellectual state of artistic production in an era, and the "aesthetic" view is concerned with the emotional and emotional state of the vast majority of people. I prefer to interpret these four views as a hierarchical whole. In the "historical depth" of socialist literature, we have seen the "educational" characteristics of socialist countries, the efforts to recast the "foundation of art" and the effort to incorporate "critical and reflective upbringing" into the collective cause. A community that is clearly aware of its own universal claims and tries to maintain its vitality internally is the broad "political standard" on which literary criticism needs to be based, which can also be said to be the "people's" point of view, which I also regard as the fundamental criterion of literary criticism in the new era. This criterion, of course, is not a recourse to a few closed standards of value or political laws, but establishes itself in the process of collision, dialogue and even competition with other cultural formations. On this basis, the "historical" point of view, the "artistic" point of view and the "aesthetic" point of view constitute the second level. For sooner or later, whether it is history, art or aesthetics, it will have to answer the question of its relationship with the mission of this community. Only on this basis can we open up a larger dimension of "community of human destiny".
The many challenges brought about by the "folds of the present" of literature are actually that the "new era" itself forces literary criticism to adjust the existing standard presets, beyond the literary concept that has gradually saturated since the 1980s. Here, the framework of people-history-art-aesthetics still plays a role, determining the authenticity and validity of the judgments exerted by literary criticism.
exegesis
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[1] "Guiding Opinions on Strengthening literary and art criticism in the New Era", Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, August 2, 2021.
[2] Mao Zedong: "Speech at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art", Selected Works of Mao Zedong (vol. 3), People's Publishing House, 1991, p. 848.
[3] [8] Zhang Xudong, Critical Literary History: Modernity and Formal Self-Consciousness, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2021, pp. 283, 292.
[4] [5] Mao Zedong: Selected Works of Mao Zedong (vol. 3), pp. 869, 866-869.
[6]参看Roland Végs ,The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture，New York: Fordham University Press,2012；以及Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Modernity Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present，Cambridge, Massachusetts and London:The MIT Press, 2020.
[7] See Wang Hui, The Birth of the Century: The Logic of the Chinese Revolution and Politics, Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, 2020, p. 44.
[9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [De] Hegel: Aesthetics (Vol. 2), translated by Zhu Guangqian, The Commercial Press, 1979, pp. 375, 375, 378, 378, 380.
[15] For Zhu Guangqian's discussion, see Hegel's Aesthetics (Vol. 1), The Commercial Press, 1979, pp. 250-251, note 1.
[16] Deng Xiaoping, "Congratulatory Speech at the Fourth Congress of Chinese Literary and Art Workers" (October 30, 1979), Hebei Literature and Art, No. 12, 1979.
[17] [18] Min Ze, "Literature and Art Should Serve Politics", Literary and Art Studies, No. 1, 1980.
[19] On July 26, 1980, the first edition of The People's Daily published "Literature and Art Serve the People and Serve Socialism."
[20] See Shanghai Literature critic, "Justifying the Name of Literature and Art: Refuting the Theory that Literature and Art Are Tools of Class Struggle", Shanghai Literature, No. 4, 1979.
[21] See Wang Meng, "Discussion on Some Literary Concepts", Literature and Art Daily, No. 9, 1980.
[22] Li Tuo, "Breaking traditional techniques", Literature and Art Daily, No. 9, 1980.
[23] Gu Jun, "Criticism Must Be Free," Literary Review, No. 2, 1985.
[24] Lin Fei, "Literary Criticism and Inner Freedom," Literary Review, No. 2, 1985.
[25] Yang Yu, "Literature: After the Lost Sensational Effect," Literature and Art Daily, January 30, 1988.
[26] Feng Xianguang, "On the Commerciality of Socialist Literary and Art Products", Literary Review, No. 2, 1985.
[27] Wang Xiaoming, "Six Points of the World: Today's Chinese Literature," Literary Review, No. 5, 2011.
[28] Li Yunlei, "The End of New Literature and Its Related Problems", Southern Literature Circle, No. 5, 2013.
[29] Chu Huijuan, "The Storyteller and the Dream Factory: Technology, Law and the Production of Online Literature", Social Science Literature Press, 2019, p. 281.
[30] [33] Wang Yuxuan, "Coding a New World: Online Literature in the Dimension of Gamification", China Federation of Literature and Literature Publishing House, 2021 edition, pp. 1 and 11.
[31] See Robert Hassan, "The Age of Distraction: Reading, Writing, and Politics in the High-Speed Network Economy," translated by Zhang Ning, Fudan University Press, 2020, p. VI.
[32] See [Japanese] Dong Haoji," Animalized Postmodern, chu xuan first translation, Dahong Art Co., Ltd., 2012 edition.
[34] [35] Yang Dandan, "Artificial Intelligence Writing and New Changes in Literature", Art Review, No. 10, 2019.
[36] Wang Yan, "Network Technology Reconstructs Humanistic Knowledge", Reading, No. 1, 2020.
[37] Xi Jinping's words, quoted from "China Writers Association Strengthening Literary Criticism Work Conference Held in Beijing, Profoundly Understanding the Requirements of the New Era and Effectively Enhancing the Vitality of Literary Criticism", Literature and Art Daily, December 7, 2020.
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