Roland Barthes' Utopia Thought And Chinese Imagination

This paper aims to elaborate Roland Barthes' s utopian thought in terms of language and ethics,his representation of China and the logic of its imaginary.The first chapter focuses on its traditional heritage.We highlightits three characteristics in chronological order: the spatial,the temporal and the philosophical features.Then we critically analyze the various definitions of utopia and propound its attraction.Both imprints Barthes' s utopian writing.notion as a genre in the narrow sense and as a mode in the broad sense.Finally,we choose More et Fourier as two intertextual figures: the former makes travel and euphemism into constitutive parts of Utopia,while the latter harbors Columbus Complex as an inspiration for invention and proposes the theory of passionateThe second chapter concerns with three dimensions of Barthes' s utopia,namely its relevance with ideology,language and ethnics.Firstly,Mythology exposes the invisible ideological violence of the “natural” phenomenon of daily life.The downside lies in its pretension to deconstruct the so-called “francité”,collective culture identity as the ethical-mythological core.Secondly,he puts forward a linguistic utopia by repudiating representation,by advocating the death of author,by celebrating productive role of readers.All these lead to his formalism literary theory.Thirdly,the ethnical dimension reflects on three processes: the corporal joy in reading,the timbre in speaking and the gesture in writing.The third chapter elucidates the contents of Barthes' s representation of China and its logic of imaginary.His diary creates the image of China in three aspects: political discourse,model plays and his morality of assent.His critique of doxa,stereotype and topoi contributes to the contemporary political discourse analysis;furthermore,he compares model plays with Greek tragedy and Brecht's conscious plays and states the following views: on one hand,model play lacks of theatricality in that its performance is divorced from its sense production;on the other hand,model play is manipulated as a mouthpiece for ideology and as a result degenerates into a didactic play.The third section is the kernel of this paper which explains the mechanism of Barthes' s imaginary of China with regard to the tradition,the zeitgeist and personal factor.Generally speaking,there are two currents writing about the Orient in the Western tradition,namely orientalism and utopia.Barthes prefers utopian to orientalism in two ways: he proposes not only the end of the hermeneutics to avoid the will to truth and to knowledge,but also the end of travelling narration to reject the pursuit of reality in favor of fictional account of utopia.As for the zeitgeist,the French Maoism movement gives rise to a phenemenon of revolutionary tourism in China.The pro-Chinese intellectuals make pilgrimage to China and by means oftheir accountseagerly engage into political affairs.By contrast,Barthes adopts the stance of professional intellectuals.Through utopian discourses' function of education of desire,he endeavors to improve the one dimensional individual mentioned by Marcuse.By this means,he succeeds in achieving the injunction of reinventing politics of Badiou.Then,we tackle the personal factor in regarding to a singular feature: Barthes' s accounts of China are composed by three different and successive texts.It corresponds to Badiou's idea of artistic truth: historical component,subjective component and artistic component.Precisely speaking,Barthes makes diary's historical account into the article of Alors la Chine'artistic truth.In this way he accomplishes the procedure of subjectivity.Barthes' s representation of China renovates the traditional utopian writing and metamorphoses it into a new genre—bitopie.We define it as an imaginary country who nevertheless has the same name of a real country.Its form is fragments and its materials come from the daily life which Barthes has picked up by strolling in the streets.Therefore,he implements Michel de Certeau's theory of urban practices.What is more,he inaugurates cultural studies,everyday studies and urban studies.Despite of the same name,Bitopie is distinct from orientalism by combining ethnological discourse and literary discourse.Finally,the reading pact demonstrates its nature as a frank lie.With the literary honesty Barthes has succeeded in solving the dilemma of Said: take account of a strange culture or civilization without manipulation or abuse.