Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-10259442
Ban Wang
Chen Qiufan's sci-fi novel Waste Tide attests to the dual alienation of nature and humans. Global capitalism, geopolitical conflict, the scramble for natural resources, and rash development have destroyed the rural community, ruined the health of local populations, and eroded the natural environment. Technical advances—artificial intelligence, brain-computer interface, biochemical technologies, and cyborg construction—aggravate metabolic rifts in the human-nature relations, threatening human bodies, regional culture, and local traditions. Driven by profit motives and the desire for power, the advanced technologies are accelerating the alienation of humans from their bodies, from one another, and from nature.
{"title":"Chapter Eight: Toxic Colonialism, Alienation, and Posthuman Dystopia in Chen Qiufan","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-10259442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10259442","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Chen Qiufan's sci-fi novel Waste Tide attests to the dual alienation of nature and humans. Global capitalism, geopolitical conflict, the scramble for natural resources, and rash development have destroyed the rural community, ruined the health of local populations, and eroded the natural environment. Technical advances—artificial intelligence, brain-computer interface, biochemical technologies, and cyborg construction—aggravate metabolic rifts in the human-nature relations, threatening human bodies, regional culture, and local traditions. Driven by profit motives and the desire for power, the advanced technologies are accelerating the alienation of humans from their bodies, from one another, and from nature.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77494814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-10259462
Ban Wang
“Ecotopia” describes the social ecology of a world whose socioeconomic institutions are premised on the utopian dream of the reconciliation of the human and nature. The Mars Republic of Hao Jingfang's novel Vagabonds is built through advanced technologies that allow humans to terraform the planet and adapt to the arid environment along with the construction of an ecologically sound social and economic system. But the visions of ecotopia are challenged and interrogated by cultural and political clashes and differences between environmentally degraded Earth and utopian Mars. Through planetary travels, exchange, and conflict between the two planets, Vagabonds tells a story of mutual shocks and critiques among interplanetary travelers, capitalists, artists, and Martian youth. In their personal growth, the Martian youths question and explore their identity, belonging, and the balance between society and nature.
{"title":"Chapter Ten: Critical Ecotopia in Hao Jingfang's Vagabonds","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-10259462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10259462","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 “Ecotopia” describes the social ecology of a world whose socioeconomic institutions are premised on the utopian dream of the reconciliation of the human and nature. The Mars Republic of Hao Jingfang's novel Vagabonds is built through advanced technologies that allow humans to terraform the planet and adapt to the arid environment along with the construction of an ecologically sound social and economic system. But the visions of ecotopia are challenged and interrogated by cultural and political clashes and differences between environmentally degraded Earth and utopian Mars. Through planetary travels, exchange, and conflict between the two planets, Vagabonds tells a story of mutual shocks and critiques among interplanetary travelers, capitalists, artists, and Martian youth. In their personal growth, the Martian youths question and explore their identity, belonging, and the balance between society and nature.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78034794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-10259432
Ban Wang
The romantic and ecological legacy of Homo faber sheds light on Han Song's Regenerated Bricks. In that novella the victims of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, guided by an architect, produce bricks by using debris, straw, and corpses. Regenerating lives and hopes of the victims and furnishing building material, the brick testifies to a practice that combines labor and art and a biological rebirth associated with the fertility of the earth. The brick is not only useful but also aesthetically resonant. Working closely with the workers in the fields and workshops rather than from urban offices, the elite architect transforms into a “barefoot architect.” On the other hand, the culture market, neoliberal ideology, and digital media quickly turn the brick into a simulacrum and a consumer icon, alienating the brick and the creators from their vital connection with nature and the earth.
{"title":"Chapter Seven: Art and Labor in Han Song's Regenerated Bricks","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-10259432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10259432","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The romantic and ecological legacy of Homo faber sheds light on Han Song's Regenerated Bricks. In that novella the victims of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, guided by an architect, produce bricks by using debris, straw, and corpses. Regenerating lives and hopes of the victims and furnishing building material, the brick testifies to a practice that combines labor and art and a biological rebirth associated with the fertility of the earth. The brick is not only useful but also aesthetically resonant. Working closely with the workers in the fields and workshops rather than from urban offices, the elite architect transforms into a “barefoot architect.” On the other hand, the culture market, neoliberal ideology, and digital media quickly turn the brick into a simulacrum and a consumer icon, alienating the brick and the creators from their vital connection with nature and the earth.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73450176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-10259372
Ban Wang
Environmental writers have sought to retrieve ecological wisdom from traditional Chinese thought to critique anthropocentrism, but the rediscoveries remain a disembodied discourse and ignore the relationships among humans: the political, social, and economic structures and power relations rooted in repressive hierarchy and class and gender oppression. This chapter targets political, social, and productive relations as the crucial areas for diagnosing the ills of ecological degradation. Rather than a question of how humanity as a whole stands against nature, the chapter contends that the all-too-human power relations in economy, hierarchy, and oppression are the real culprits for environmental disasters. Humanity's domination of nature is necessarily linked to the domination of other humans and of inner human nature. This perspective illuminates Kang Youwei's ecological visions in his writings about the great world community. Kang regarded nature as the foundation for culture and civilization, valorized the public principles of common goods and equality over private property, and linked women to a vital, regenerative nature. Kang heralded the eco-socialist notions of public economy, fair distribution of wealth, and wise uses of natural resources.
{"title":"Chapter One: Confucianism and Nature","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-10259372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10259372","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Environmental writers have sought to retrieve ecological wisdom from traditional Chinese thought to critique anthropocentrism, but the rediscoveries remain a disembodied discourse and ignore the relationships among humans: the political, social, and economic structures and power relations rooted in repressive hierarchy and class and gender oppression. This chapter targets political, social, and productive relations as the crucial areas for diagnosing the ills of ecological degradation. Rather than a question of how humanity as a whole stands against nature, the chapter contends that the all-too-human power relations in economy, hierarchy, and oppression are the real culprits for environmental disasters. Humanity's domination of nature is necessarily linked to the domination of other humans and of inner human nature. This perspective illuminates Kang Youwei's ecological visions in his writings about the great world community. Kang regarded nature as the foundation for culture and civilization, valorized the public principles of common goods and equality over private property, and linked women to a vital, regenerative nature. Kang heralded the eco-socialist notions of public economy, fair distribution of wealth, and wise uses of natural resources.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75061189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-10259382
Ban Wang
Primarily thought of as a critic of Chinese tradition, Lu Xun is less understood as a critic of technoscientific rationality. Walter Benjamin invoked the utopian reconciliation of humans and nature from premodern culture in critiques of modernity. In the same vein, Lu Xun recovered images of the ancient world where rural folks lived in intimacy with nature, worshiped supernatural beings, and observed time-honored rituals. Linking the myth of progress and technology to a chorus of “malevolent voices” by a “hypocrite gentry,” Lu Xun urged that we should rid of ourselves of this hypocrite gentry and retain mytho-ecological beliefs. Examining Lu Xun's stories from Old Tales Retold, this chapter explores the Chinese writer's recovery of the mythical and ecological images from the past in his critique of technocratic modernity. Confronted with the myth of progress, technological fetishism, and the rise of a technocratic elite, Lu Xun sought to uncover and redeem primordial images from archaic traditions.
{"title":"Chapter Two: Lu Xun's Mytho-ecological Refutation of Technocrats","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-10259382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10259382","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Primarily thought of as a critic of Chinese tradition, Lu Xun is less understood as a critic of technoscientific rationality. Walter Benjamin invoked the utopian reconciliation of humans and nature from premodern culture in critiques of modernity. In the same vein, Lu Xun recovered images of the ancient world where rural folks lived in intimacy with nature, worshiped supernatural beings, and observed time-honored rituals. Linking the myth of progress and technology to a chorus of “malevolent voices” by a “hypocrite gentry,” Lu Xun urged that we should rid of ourselves of this hypocrite gentry and retain mytho-ecological beliefs. Examining Lu Xun's stories from Old Tales Retold, this chapter explores the Chinese writer's recovery of the mythical and ecological images from the past in his critique of technocratic modernity. Confronted with the myth of progress, technological fetishism, and the rise of a technocratic elite, Lu Xun sought to uncover and redeem primordial images from archaic traditions.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88913142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-10259452
Ban Wang
Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering call into question the notion of the human in the humanist tradition, causing deep and subtle rifts in human-human and human-nature relations. Examining stories by Chinese sci-fi writer Hao Jingfang, this chapter argues that digital and genetic reconstruction of humanoids undermines the human self-image and blurs the boundaries between human and machine. The creation of AI humanoids cancels out as well as foregrounds the essential needs of human emotional reciprocity and the ritual of working through the trauma of sickness and death. Under capitalism, artificial intelligence creates a neoliberal performative subject, and the all-encompassing digital networks polarize society, manufacture consumer desire, and exert total control of the human mind and body. By denying death and humanly disturbing emotional qualities, artificial intelligence creates death in life.
{"title":"Chapter Nine: Artificial Intelligence, Affective Labor, and Death in Life","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-10259452","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10259452","url":null,"abstract":"Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering call into question the notion of the human in the humanist tradition, causing deep and subtle rifts in human-human and human-nature relations. Examining stories by Chinese sci-fi writer Hao Jingfang, this chapter argues that digital and genetic reconstruction of humanoids undermines the human self-image and blurs the boundaries between human and machine. The creation of AI humanoids cancels out as well as foregrounds the essential needs of human emotional reciprocity and the ritual of working through the trauma of sickness and death. Under capitalism, artificial intelligence creates a neoliberal performative subject, and the all-encompassing digital networks polarize society, manufacture consumer desire, and exert total control of the human mind and body. By denying death and humanly disturbing emotional qualities, artificial intelligence creates death in life.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84114335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-10259412
Ban Wang
In the light of biopolitical production, socialist China's medical practice was marked by a heavy reliance on the creativity of the masses and a rejection of the technical bureaucracy. The anti-epidemic campaign exemplified a popular and grassroots medicine for the people and by the people. In films Withered Trees Meet Spring and Spring Sprouts, the political mobilization of the peasantry, the raising of political consciousness, and mass participation in the prevention of diseases project a vision of healthcare for the people. The biomedical movement targeted an increasingly privileged health program skewed in favor of elites and urbanites and divorced from the wellbeing of ordinary people. The medicine of the “barefoot doctor” entails the ecological understanding of the human body in sync with nature and is rooted in affective labor in healing the rifts between humans and nature.
{"title":"Chapter Five: Farewell to the God of Plague","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-10259412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10259412","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the light of biopolitical production, socialist China's medical practice was marked by a heavy reliance on the creativity of the masses and a rejection of the technical bureaucracy. The anti-epidemic campaign exemplified a popular and grassroots medicine for the people and by the people. In films Withered Trees Meet Spring and Spring Sprouts, the political mobilization of the peasantry, the raising of political consciousness, and mass participation in the prevention of diseases project a vision of healthcare for the people. The biomedical movement targeted an increasingly privileged health program skewed in favor of elites and urbanites and divorced from the wellbeing of ordinary people. The medicine of the “barefoot doctor” entails the ecological understanding of the human body in sync with nature and is rooted in affective labor in healing the rifts between humans and nature.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82246975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-10259402
Ban Wang
Rather than a war against nature, a genuine production is premised on the humanization of nature by producing use values while changing human inner nature. Socialist production strives to achieve an ecologically sound economy whereby labor on nature is in sync with the realization of human inner potentials. In the two-part film Young People in Our Village, young people of a small village modify the natural environment, channel water resources, and solve the perennial scourge of water shortage. Rather than being at the mercy of drought, the young villagers launch into a water project. Instead of a conquest of nature, their enterprise represents a necessary life-affirming and life-saving production to modify nature by exercising their sovereignty, intelligence, technoscientific knowledge, and productive skills.
{"title":"Chapter Four: We Are the Dragon King","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-10259402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10259402","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Rather than a war against nature, a genuine production is premised on the humanization of nature by producing use values while changing human inner nature. Socialist production strives to achieve an ecologically sound economy whereby labor on nature is in sync with the realization of human inner potentials. In the two-part film Young People in Our Village, young people of a small village modify the natural environment, channel water resources, and solve the perennial scourge of water shortage. Rather than being at the mercy of drought, the young villagers launch into a water project. Instead of a conquest of nature, their enterprise represents a necessary life-affirming and life-saving production to modify nature by exercising their sovereignty, intelligence, technoscientific knowledge, and productive skills.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"330 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80476987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-10259392
Ban Wang
Sensitive to modernity's estrangement of human bonds to nature and the rural lifeworld, Shen Congwen affirms an ecological understanding of writing and life. The writing self sinks its roots into nature and enmeshes with nonhuman worlds. Animistic language immerses bodily sensations, pleasure, and feelings in organic environs, connecting humans to the millennial entwinement of the archaic ways of living with the soil, landscape, and the earth. Targeting the modern city's erosion of rural simplicity, authenticity, and vitality, Shen's ecological writing evinces a deep appreciation of unconventional sexuality, affirming the biological and ecological union between inner and outer nature.
{"title":"Chapter Three: Romancing Landscape and Human Animal","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-10259392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10259392","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Sensitive to modernity's estrangement of human bonds to nature and the rural lifeworld, Shen Congwen affirms an ecological understanding of writing and life. The writing self sinks its roots into nature and enmeshes with nonhuman worlds. Animistic language immerses bodily sensations, pleasure, and feelings in organic environs, connecting humans to the millennial entwinement of the archaic ways of living with the soil, landscape, and the earth. Targeting the modern city's erosion of rural simplicity, authenticity, and vitality, Shen's ecological writing evinces a deep appreciation of unconventional sexuality, affirming the biological and ecological union between inner and outer nature.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82266953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-10259422
Ban Wang
In the post-socialist and market reform era, the power of the market and the developmental imperatives are creating metabolic rifts between humans and nature, between producers and the land. The film The Piano in a Factory tells a story of the working class trying to rekindle, amid new alienations, past pride and solidarity. Chinese documentary films have proven an effective medium in critiquing ecological rifts and disasters, staging a stringent critique against eco-destructive economic trends. Against a visual landscape dominated by billboards, glamorous stars, and images, documentary filmmakers expose the conditions of alienated labor and the environmental and human costs of unfettered development.
{"title":"Chapter Six: Dignity and Misery of Labor","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-10259422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10259422","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the post-socialist and market reform era, the power of the market and the developmental imperatives are creating metabolic rifts between humans and nature, between producers and the land. The film The Piano in a Factory tells a story of the working class trying to rekindle, amid new alienations, past pride and solidarity. Chinese documentary films have proven an effective medium in critiquing ecological rifts and disasters, staging a stringent critique against eco-destructive economic trends. Against a visual landscape dominated by billboards, glamorous stars, and images, documentary filmmakers expose the conditions of alienated labor and the environmental and human costs of unfettered development.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"114 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85064919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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