China

Sino-No-Futurism (a comment)

Elegy to the reopening of Wuhan.

Image: HighGreat, Lighting the Dawn of Victory (drone celebration of the reopening of Wuhan)

By now the Chinese, by now the barbaric Aras too,
would have passed beneath our yoke …
Rome, if you have such love
of evil, wait until you have forced all the globe
to submit to Latin laws—then turn your hand
against yourself!

—Lucan, Pharsalia I.17–23

To describe the order of the world emerging from the pandemic, Dino Ge Zhang has offered the phrase Sino-no-futurism. My own decomposition of this intriguing term runs as follows.

0 (Futurism): Mass politics is demobilised in quarantine, but thought is not. The idea that catastrophe overwhelms all philosophy, that all thought must fall silent in the face of unfolding disaster, is as attractive as it is wrong. Catastrophe functions as the best and ultimate proof of thought: it is “precisely that which impels us to further assert ourselves within the world” (Moynihan). Beneath its burning shadow decrepit forms evaporate into mist. When it brings a system of thought to failure it is not because the world stopped making sense—it is because the intellectual universe never made sense to begin with.

In different states this impulse is now manifest politically in a new futurism, a futurism of necessity that has already realised tremendous political and economic innovations: the introduction of universal basic income, fantastical new financial devices, coordination of entire sectors of the economy by the state. With striking contempt for the past, governments have struck through the certitudes of neoliberalism and instituted a new dominion of biopolitical emergency before which everything else has bowed its head. Systemically this is a defensive action, not the beginning of a postcapitalist order: yet it represents a qualitative shift in the functioning of capitalism unlike anything seen since the first entry of China into the world-market half a century ago, and perhaps since the Great Depression.

1 (Sino): The West is at last confronted by the nightmare of seeing the image of its future reflected in a mirror it has made alien. COVID-19 has struck a tremendous vengeance for the techno-orientalist fabrication of China as a distant authoritarian society in the future with vast resources at its disposal. Sinofuturity has been pushed to the point of parody as Chinese people witness events they have already lived through unfolding with perfect predictability in the West. Perhaps this is not surprising: nightmares have an unfortunate inclination to become real.

All the more nightmarish for Westerners, China’s empire of data-flows has come to serve an eminently positive function—so de Seta. Politically, this does not so much discredit the “illiberalism” of China’s hydraulic information control as articulate what, in fact, contemporary illiberalism means. Illiberalism is, simply, what the suppression of a virus demands—on this, the sad anxiety over Chinese political methods is entirely justified.

A cyclone of feverish emotion is gathering around this revenant-image even as mass politics itself lapses into impossibility. Polling suggests an absolute majority of Americans want reparations from China; higher numbers still want it to be punished one way or the other. In the academic world it is easy enough to understand the fury of those who had made it their business to market the West to Asians and have suddenly found themselves divested of authority. Yet denial and sickened worry have emerged even among the very people who once embraced the prospect of a world no longer wholly dominated by their culture, or who looked to China itself as a potential model.

Not like this!—the realisation that the game of political speculation has ended and reality has come to take its debt: more than anything else, this reaction demonstrates that a true cultural rupture is taking place.

From China itself an opposite reaction has sprung. Newly justified nationalist disdain for the West’s failures and anger over its accusations have joined for the moment, in many quarters, with fresh confidence in the Party’s exclusive ability to tame the turbulence. The clash between these American and Chinese impulses has increasingly distorted the pandemic into total information war—but the stake is not yet the world; it is the definition of China itself, control of the image at the centre of the maelstrom, and, with it, the pretence to incarnate the destiny of the world.

2 (No): In contrast to its Communist predeceased, however, it is not the declared business of the Chinese government to bring about a future utopia. There is quite enough future already—just as there is quite enough history.

By a strange event one of the more prominent pictures that emerged from China’s coronavirus crisis was an image of a Chinese student in hospital reading Fukuyama. Taken at face value, very little in recent events has in fact discredited Fukuyama’s most infamous hypothesis. The irrepressible transformation of all political problems into technical questions has continued apace, and the pandemic itself has only accelerated this process, throwing down before the world a single, awful technical question to overwhelm every political debate.

What has emerged is not, of course, the pleasant liberal world order Fukuyama himself envisaged in the ethereal sunset of the 1990s. The end we are facing is something else—the wholly technicised world, in which mass politics has retreated into irrelevance behind the closed doors of quarantine and hyperregulated biological control. As governments retreat into arcane committees, freed of direct political accountability, information war is waged through Internet phantoms and flickering conspiracies. This is, in some sense, precisely a reflection of the cybernetic world imagined in the 1990s, though a reflection seen through haze and moonlight. We’ve heard enough of “Dark Deleuze”, “Dark Derrida”, and the like: the question at the heart of the present conjuncture may instead be more intractable: how can we defeat Dark Fukuyama? Should we?

My original title for this post was “A World Where Little Changes”. This will seem bold, even bizarre, in our present context of unimaginable economic turbulence and apparent viral-political upheaval—not least, indeed, in the context of the new political futurism I mentioned above. But the measures taken in response to this crisis are likely to repress further change for a long time to come. The advent of UBI, the coordination of the economy, the massive expansion of central bank involvement—all this amounts to a moment of enormous defensive consolidation, and in the midst of a pandemic there is little that people can do to stop it. They can merely plan around it.

As inefficient as planning-by-central-bank is likely to be—and already has been in Japan—the total consolidation of particular capitals will do much to suppress the effects of the classical cycle of capitalist crisis on the commanding heights of high finance.

If this is decay, we are not in any case reliving something like the fall of the Roman Empire. The world is one—so Jiang Shigong has observed—and there is no human power waiting outside, no great untamed expanse from which peoples can wander in. We face the wages of decay as one species, and within this limitless terrestrial horizon a transition of leadership from America to China, for all their profound political and intellectual differences, would represent only a redistribution of power from one potential pole of empire to another, the signing over of the cemetery in which History is buried. (Chinese leaders seem quite aware of this.)

I don’t believe this conjuncture will last forever. The Typhonic pressures of climate change, for one, continue to gather strength, and our seamless imperial circle is unlikely to survive them. This complacent world of endless paper-driven growth, brought into such shameless relief by the stock markets’ sterling performance amidst endless data of economic collapse, is resilient enough on its own terms, and will almost certainly survive this pandemic quite intact on new and yet more powerful synthetic supports. But reality, in the end, insists on itself.

Such a world cannot physically continue forever. If the new futurism of the coronavirus shows anything truly positive, it is that its intractably crumbling heart may well serve as an eventual exterior to the system itself, and here, only here, welling from empire’s intensive local contradictions, there could be interstices from which new forms will proceed, or old forms brought to fulfilment at last.

The diagnosis should then be—no future—for now.

Viral Empire

The throne of universal empire may be raised above the ruins of universal catastrophe.

The world is out of joint. Each day brings news of a different sector of the economy buckling under unprecedented pressure; each evening, governments and central banks scramble to plug the holes. With every new financial artifice the economy becomes ever more synthetic. The beast lumbers onwards on bionic limbs.

A fund report recently forwarded to me observes that, while Western markets gyrate upwards and downwards on scales unknown since the Great Depression, investors have taken flight to Chinese equities markets because of their “more policy-driven” character. All of a sudden, capitalists are quite happy to favour planning. And as dollar liquidity evaporates, the renminbi has increasingly borne the currency markets’ load.

The present crisis has had the formal aspect of a world war. Markets have panicked, borders have slammed shut, governments have scrambled to mobilise resources, liberal freedoms have been swept away by the stroke of a pen, and huge swathes of the labour force have been temporarily withdrawn. In some respects, true, the quarantined world is an “anti-wartime economy“: the foremost planning task is to coordinate the shutdown of disparate economic sectors rather than to ensure total mobilisation; the stock of capital is not being destroyed. But in its cultural, political, and administrative implications, the analogy of war is accurate enough.

It is far too early to claim with confidence that this “war” is bringing about the end of American hegemony, yet a new systemic order is clearly in emergence. The virus, as viruses often do, has only accelerated this process. If there is any past model it bears resemblance to, it is the crisis-dampening managerial capitalism predicted in the early 20th century by such economists as Rudolf Hilferding and Joseph Schumpeter. Their prophecy once seemed discredited: Schumpeter’s prediction that the heightening organisation of capitalism meant that crises were increasingly a thing of the past was made only months before the catastrophe of 1929; Hilferding’s warnings of the advent of a general cartel of magnates that would coordinate the entire productive process have looked quaint to modern seekers of market disruption. But things are changing at a drastic pace.

“The tendencies towards the establishment of a general cartel and towards the formation of a central bank are converging,” Hilferding wrote in 1910, “and from their combination emerges the enormous concentrated power of finance capital, in which all the partial forms of capital are brought together into a totality.” We have certainly lived through an era of financialisation, and the crisis of 2008 already threw economies around the world onto the intermittent life support of quantitative easing. Now—as the present crisis involves central banks ever more deeply and directly in sustaining the real economy, and large corporations such as Amazon assume the functions of economic planners in the face of logistical breakdown—Hilferding’s claim about the reorganisation of capitalism around a general cartel deserves a second look.

Is this simply a temporary compensation for an unprecedented crisis, as Keynesians would suggest? The pandemic itself will certainly pass—perhaps in much shorter order than the more pessimistic predictions have made out. (Perhaps.) But the extraordinary fiscal and financial methods that have been brought to bear are unlikely to disappear. The world before 2008 never quite returned, and there is little reason to expect that the world before 2020 will be different. There will, in many countries, be a prolonged period of resolving the ruination of economies so fragile they have barely withstood a disruption several weeks long. (We should be thankful that there have as yet been no great power wars in the era of globalised just-in-time production.) Beyond that, the task for the immediate future appears less as the return to intensive productive expansion than as the administration of stagnation.

This new dispensation will place immense pressure on what remains of the post–Cold War world order led by the West, in every component—the unbearable pressure of a double bind. Disintegrative forces threaten the cultural presumption of Western supremacy; the political power of the United States to compel various kinds of action around the world; the economic world-empire of the Federal Reserve; even—whisper it—unquestioned American military predominance, depending on the actions of other world powers in the days to come.

At the same time, the pandemic has posed administrative problems resolvable in principle only at the order of the entire human species. Certain socialists have argued that the virus is a consequence of capitalism; that the future order must prevent such outbreaks through harmony with nature. I see things otherwise: any subsequent order that successfully coordinates the world will deal with epidemiological and other natural crises the likes of which have never been seen before. Carl Schmitt once observed that the notion of a world-state is absurd as long as humanity is not at war with an alien force. Such an alien force has arrived. Its successors will follow. The throne of universal empire may be raised above the ruins of universal catastrophe. Whose empire? Doing what? Stagnate? Perhaps. The gates of play-history seem almost closed.

A postscript on China. The continuing economic shock to China should not be underestimated, yet at this stage, whatever its early role in the crisis, China seems better prepared to deal with its global effects than most. This does not appear to me simply as a matter of superior planning. Xi Jinping’s government presents itself as an administration that exists beyond the end of history. Rather than the grand organic development that incompetent observers of contemporary China have perceived to flow from the mythical perpetuity of Confucianism, under Xi the past has been packaged as material to be rearranged. The “Confucian tradition”, like any other, becomes a building block in a great political edifice.

As the past itself appears to retreat into impossibility, it may be this temporal stance, more than any other, that holds the key to the construction of the world order that administers the new era of cartelisation. Whether the productive force and the aesthetic impulse are available to resolve this protracted crisis of human acceleration—is a question for another time. Certainly, even stagnation has its providential role.

Georges Sorel, “China”

Preface

The following article, which I believe is Sorel’s final published work, is now largely forgotten. It does not appear in many of the standard bibliographies of Sorel, and after an extensive search some years ago I could find it only on a microfilm preserved in the archives of the French National Library. Though short, it is undoubtedly one of his strangest pieces, praising the onset of a Bolshevik world order that will overthrow all existing society and closing with an exhortation for a “Mongol invasion” for Europe.

Written as a review of Émile Hovelaque’s Les Peuples d’Extrême-Orient (1920), Sorel’s treatment of Hovelaque—a humanist Sinophile bureaucrat in the French education ministry—is heavily ironic. Where Hovelaque praises China’s “complete” democracy, its advanced culture and its rationalist atheism, Sorel looks forward impatiently to a Bolshevik China that will overthrow all the “conventional falsehoods” of society. Where Hovelaque hopes that with the twilight of colonialism a new era of mutual understanding between East and West has arrived, Sorel hopes that the boiling hatred of East Asia will force Europe to “bow its head” through “violence”.

This is undoubtedly an orientalist piece, yet it stands ominously outside the conventions of early 20th century orientalism. Sorel rejects a racial explanation for the condition of Chinese society, mocking the racial theory that the Mongol invaders were merely Chinese nomads “shaking up” their sedentary brothers. In his typical style, he seamlessly transitions from materialist analysis—situating China’s path as a particular economic trajectory bending towards social revolution—to Nietzschean moralism, seeing in the Asian future a “recourse” that will evaporate the West’s protracted decline into a true social catastrophe.

A century on, for all the bombast of this article, Sorel’s prediction that Asian dominance will arrive in the form of a China that has copied the institutions of Soviet power appears strangely prophetic. Whether China, having now gone through the “convulsions” predicted so many decades ago by Hovelaque, will succeed in triggering the kind of shock that would redeem universal stagnation, the exteriority that Sorel yearned for in his final years, remains to be seen.

Vincent Garton

—

—

The excellent library of scientific philosophy directed by Gustave Le Bon has just acquired a volume on China whose reading will be extremely beneficial to philosophers who reflect upon our social future. The author, Émile Hovelaque, is inspector general of public instruction for the English language. He has visited the Far East and has related from there a very lively sympathy for these countries.

Much astonished by the enormous differences that exist between our civilisation and that of China, he has recognised that in order to arrive at a decent understanding of the history of peoples so different from our own from an intellectual point of view, it is necessary to have a good sense of their art. Unfortunately, until recent years Europe has been quite foreign to the Chinese aesthetic, which can only be studied fruitfully in China, in Japan, and in the United States: the European critics considered authoritative have only a mediocre estimation of the ancient masters admired by oriental amateurs; it is fancied that these artists have ignored the elementary principles taught in our schools; in reality, they have dismissed, out of bias, processes that seem to them to introduce prosaicism in their compositions; of really great art, one finds only certain memories in works—for a long time the only known in Europe—that derive from ages in which Daoism and Buddhism had fallen into vulgarity.

Orientals have reflected upon European civilisation much more than is generally supposed. Their modern thinkers accuse it of creating “through its national game [jeu national] injustice, opulence, and poverty to an equally excessive degree, the hatred of classes, mutual contempt and incomprehensions between the castes of the rich and the poor, more closed to one another than those of India, a learned barbarism, a moral anarchy worse than the savagery of the uncivilised” (p. 295). They note that their judgements find a thunderous confirmation in Western literature, of which all the superior works manifest a more and more lively irritation against the existing regime of our society.

“Those of our great writers read enthusiastically by the Orient are prophets as vehement as the soothsayers of Israel, and their inspiration is the same: the inexorable hatred of what is, the infinite aspiration for destruction and a new order.” (p. 278).

Prominent men of the Far East do not allow themselves to be dazzled by the marvels of our industry; they are persuaded that we have applied ourselves to the pursuit of means rather than that of the ends of life. “The ends of life, the meaning of life—in effect, for the Oriental everything is there. One thing alone is important: the interior life; only one culture counts: that of sentiments… Justice and welfare are worth more than the knowledge and domination of natural forces.” We desire knowledge and domination, while the Oriental desires wisdom and interior peace (p. 11–12).

The example of Japan has shown that the Orient “can superimpose upon its profound, unchanged life all the material gains of the West, all our technical processes, all our science, without abandoning anything of its native originality… It has taken from us neither our religions, nor our ideal, nor our customs; and our morality, our sensibility appear in all to it inferior to its own”. (pp. 271–272). Famous Japanese (like marquis Okuma [Shigenobu] and marshal Oyama [Iwao]) say that the last war [World War I] “is only one of the symptoms of our disarray, of the profound disorder of our life, it is only one of the inevitable products of our regimes—not the last. That such a catastrophe could have happened is for them the condemnation of the social order that produced it. For them Europe is going directly into the abyss… Better again than us, they sense to what degree the conquests of humanity, art, gentleness, morality, are feeble and threatened everyday… The Oriental attends this bankruptcy of our much vaunted civilisation and hopes for nothing more than to substitute for our conception of life, so condemned, his own conceptions of life.” (p. 279–280).

Hovelaque is not as pessimistic as these oriental thinkers because he believes that the West may rescue itself by borrowing from the Far East certain precious moral enrichments. “The era of contempt and brutal invasions for the purpose of rapine and oppression is drawing slowly to its end; that of spiritual exchanges and the penetration of reason, of intelligence, of morality opens at last.” (p. 13). In favour of this conception of a new sort of internationalism we can invoke the fact that China has, for some time, brought about social conditions that Europe is striving to produce but has not yet fully achieved; it has nothing of religion engaged in metaphysics, accompanied by mysticism, committed to a place for a sacerdotal hierarchy: for China everything comes back to human reason; nowhere is democracy, in the best sense of the word, so complete. (p. 265). “The least coolie,” Hovelaque assures us, “can not just read and write, but paint and compose poems; he enjoys a refined work of art, cares about beautiful language and good manners, and is profoundly and completely penetrated by the essence of his civilisation, which is the prerogative not of an elite, but of all.” (p. 60).

—

Everyone has been astonished by the extraordinary permanence of the principle of Chinese civilisation. Invasions, civil wars, the introduction of Buddhism, despotism, imperious and reforming, have changed nothing in society for several millennia. This phenomenon is not sufficiently explained by saying that the race has remained unchanged—the Mongol invaders, it is claimed, were merely nomadic Chinese coming periodically to shake up their enfeebled brethren (p. 115). It is more probable that family status has been maintained because the economic conditions of the country have not changed; but Hovelaque himself recognises that the traditional life of China “will doubtless ultimately disintegrate, like our own has unravelled over the last century” (p. 13); he thinks that the whole of Chinese civilisation will collapse once the cult of the ancestors has lost its authority (p. 129); the question is then raised as to how the moral lessons borrowed from China could be applied to us despite the habits created by capitalism. In any case, Hovelaque foresees that China will undergo all the revolutionary convulsions our own countries have known (p. 269). This whole part of his book dealing with the future of civilisations is full of uncertainties.

I mention here, however, an opinion that seems to me to merit retention. Hovelaque believes that Bolshevism wishes to introduce in Mongolised Russia a regime with great analogies to that of China. “It will be curious to see what repercussion [Bolshevist ideas] will have in China when they penetrate there. In the Kyrgyz, Chinese mercenaries in the pay of the Bolsheviks, they already touch the country’s borderlands. They will find ground there that has been prepared.” He offers the theory that “the future belongs to peoples that find in Bolshevism a momentary modus vivendi.” (pp. 281-282). It is thus through the intermediary of institutions copied from Sovietism that the West will probably have its greatest chance of being influenced by the civilisation of the Far East. A high dignitary of our Ministry of Public Instruction could not go further into this thesis; we are free to propose here a few of the consequences that can reasonably be deduced.

Hovelaque, who seems to grant that the reform of the West will be carried out by intellectual forces alone, says that to make progress in this regard it will be necessary to cause those prejudices to disappear “that have their root in the witless vanity of the White as much as his unfathomable ignorance” (p. 14). This does not seem easy, since, in the course of his voyage, Hovelaque virtually always found the French living in China incapable of understanding realities and duped by prattle (p. 48). But if the reform of the West is to be the result of a Bolshevist conquest, violence becomes its essential factor and European stupidity will have to bow its head.

The Chinese and the Japanese hate and scorn the European, in whom they have learned to recognise through numerous experiences “immorality and profound hypocrisy. It is in this hatred and this scorn that the real Asian danger resides” (p. 273). Hovelaque recounts to us that several times he had to blush for his compatriots, whom the Chinese regarded as “barbarians devoid of reason as much as civilisation” (pp. 61–62).

It seems the Bolsheviks will not fall short of the Orientals in hatred and scorn for the West. The companions of Lenin show it well in the polemics they sustain among the old spiritual leaders of social democracy, which have caused [Jean] Jaurès to tremble. We may well expect that a Bolshevist conquest will eliminate all our conventional lies—socialist lies as much as bourgeois lies.

We pretend to render the Bolsheviks detestable by representing them as new Mongols, but we must not forget that the Mongol princes raised marvellous monuments in all the countries they dominated (p. 111). We would very much need a Mongol conquest to effect the rebirth of great art, today enslaved to the barbarian tastes of the plutocracy.

These few remarks suffice to show how fruitful Hovelaque’s hypothesis is for the future influence of Bolshevism.

Georges SOREL.

Original: G. Sorel, “La Chine”, La Revue communiste, 1: 5 (July 1920), 429–434.