| The dissertation argues that the trajectory of the Chinese 1980s is characterized by a venturing out and a return that is also a falling back. The chapters chart this trajectory, especially the far out point where a voyage is envisioned that never takes place. Chapter One examines Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism by juxtaposing it with other theories of modernity, including Deleuze's reading of Kant, Benjamin's concept of the origin, Freud's theory of the unconscious, and de Man's reading of the Kantian sublime. I explain why Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism---understood not as an identifiable type of political system but rather as a set of conditions that are intrinsically modern---is relevant to the Chinese 1980s. Chapter Two reads Luo Zhongli's painting, Father. I attribute its disturbing effect on the contemporary audience to the fact that the ordinary has become impossible, due to the ideological propagation of "representative" images. The rediscovery of the ordinary involves no less than a transformation of the structure of perception itself. Chapter Three reads Chen Kaige's film, Yellow Earth. The central questions here are how the People is forged and what culture has to do with this process. Drawing on Haun Saussy's reading of the Prefaces to The Book of Odes, I argue that cultural programs, such as folk-song collecting, function as essential mechanisms of political mobilization. Reading the film's two series of landscape-derived figures against the convention of mass parade in Tiananmen Square, suggest that what Yellow Earth shows is a counter-parade, or, rather, a landscape that is simultaneously the seismic tearing of the Square. Chapter Four offers a conclusion by way of looking at Jia Zhangke's Platform, a film about the 1980s. By focusing on its use of popular culture and its juxtaposition of visual and auditory images, I show the ways in which the film captures something elusive yet essential to this decade: its nomadic yearning for an outside. Platform is a dream of the 1980s; as such, it shows that in order to grasp the essence of an era, one first must be able to re-image it. |
