| Market economy of postsocialist China valorizes "Successful People," a species of possessive individuals who affirm their self worth by property ownership. Against this profit-oriented individualism, this dissertation questions the problematic separation between "personhood" and "ensemble of social relations." It challenges possessive individualism endorsed by developmentalism, and uncovers alternative ways of conceiving personhood through reading works by Cao Yu, Lu Xun, Jia Zhangke, Wang Anyi, as well as some other authors.; I argue that the Chinese market economy in its intersection with global capital imposes on the local life worlds a time-space regime and a metropolitan mindscape. This subjection to the progressive time-space regime of the Benjaminian homogeneous, empty time entails a demolition of community and memory, divisions of landscape and mindscape, and loss of a viable sense of identity. This results in a world where class isolation and the mesmerizing spectacles of consumption hijack one's sense of history. The dark side of developmentalism is so repressed and isolated from the glorious face of success that social contradictions are turning into haunting specters of history, disrupting the possessive individual's sense of autonomy.; To conceptualize a personhood without borders and self-enclosure, I make use of C. B. Macpherson's "possessive individualism," Lu Xun's "the in-between of history," and multifold formulations of "the everyday." As I sort out different modalities of the person, I foreground the intersubjective/interpersonal and the social, historical, aesthetic, ethical dimensions of personhood to push beyond the atomistic and property-oriented ways of envisioning and practicing personhood. Possessive individualism's monopolizing of the scope of personhood and the consequent narrowing of options reveal that identity formation based on possession is an institutional fiction, a fiction that appears real only because of its systematic suppression of other meaning-making efforts. The texts I study give us a pathway to other modes of personhood. They lead to the notions of generating communitarian space, cherishing history and memory, resisting instrumentalism and consumerism, building brotherhood of jianghu, and uncovering dignity and determination of the popular masses. Against possessive individualism's monopolization of personhood, these are seeds of hope. |
