Jiang Qing, Nietzschean terror
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I’ve written an article that I would like you to read: Madame Mao’s Nietzschean Revolution.
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I have several intentions here.
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The first is to explain the aesthetic reorganization of the Cultural Revolution.
It is apparent that Jiang Qing’s project was not the glorification of the masses that socialist art is lampooned as—not the celebration of the herd, huddled together against their enemies, nor of the shepherd watching over them, but the lioness with blood at her muzzle. The ideal hero served as the leader of a Dionysian rite, who draws from the frenzy of the crowd but still stands alone. The hero does not serve but leads the collective by the force of their own will.
The most convincing explanation is the one advanced by commentators after her arrest, when they tried to bury her as a social fascist: she was a Nietzschean. This is obvious. It can be proved.
This link to Friedrich Nietzche can be traced up from radical artists and theorists of the New Culture Movement, including the founders of the Communist Party and the members of its cultural bureaucracy. It can be traced through the influence of the Bolsheviks, later. And let’s remember that Lu Xun, who became the patron saint of socialist literature after 1949, was one of the foremost interpreters and translators of Nietzsche—and Jiang Qing idolized him, placed him above Mao Zedong, when it came to culture, and kept his unexpurgated works by her side deep into the Cultural Revolution. The psychopolitical project undertaken after 1949, but especially after 1966 is illegible without Nietzsche.
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Another intention is to answer Tani Barlow’s call to take Jiang Qing seriously.1 This is the most basic way to understand the era.
Barlow takes as an example the contention between Wang Guangmei and Jiang Qing, which is usually written off as a “catfight or a smokescreen.” To understand the situation requires taking seriously also Wang Guangmei, not simply the wife if Liu Shaoqi, but the leader of a Socialist Education Movement work team, who had been dispatched to lead a purge at Tsinghua as part of a Cultural Revolution work team. Jiang Qing’s assault on Wang Guangmei, conducted through Red Guard leader Kuai Dafu, was based clearly on ideological differences. For Barlow, this comes down to a fundamental disagreement on the nature of socialist womanhood.
Jiang Qing could think: there is something called Jiang Qing Thought. This has to be taken seriously.
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Finally, this is a provocation. It’s written in support of Jiang Qing Thought. These are ideas that are still vital.
"What is to be done?" Jean-Luc Godard asked in 1970. Learn from Comrade Jiang Qing, he concluded. Whatever project he had in mind for Jiang Qing Thought, he was correct that it was an inversion of everything he detested. It is an inversion, too, of everything I detest. In an age for the antihero and tyrannical irony, when high art is reserved for a shrinking minority, this is the polar opposite.
It is an accusation of corruption against the prevailing cultural order, high and low, and a means to overturn it with beautiful things. The fact that the art she produced and curated is still startling and beautiful is proof of its vitality. There are lessons embedded in it to resist the misery of ressentiment.2
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This call is given most clearly in “Jiang Qing, Seriously,” but is taken up, also, in the book that followed, In the Event of Women.
I appreciate Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of ressentiment as, “the sentiment of the person who transforms a sociologically mutilated being—I am poor, I am black, I am a woman, I am powerless—into a model of human excellence.” Of course, he suggests his idea of reflexive sociology as the solution, not Jiang Qing Thought.