Editor's Introduction

"A poet is someone who affirms what is not," Kim Hye-sun tells Don Mee Choi in this first issue of positions sent to press after the burning of the Baghdad Library. Every piece in this issue came to our office before the U.S. preemptive attack on Iraq. Yet, read in the dawn light of George W. Bush's doctrine of New American Imperialism, the majority of these interviews, analyses, commentaries, and scholarly essays have a searching quality that is now, abruptly, more discernible. Jamie Morgan's commentary on the vulgate of neoliberalism seems to amplify the helpless urgency that Kim insists is vested in poetic writing. Who would slight her precision and courage? When Morgan draws into the critique of neoliberal dogma a warning that our job is to seize on catachreses and wrest control, somehow, over the apparatus of value coding, is Morgan including poetics with other kinds of writing? If we can no longer afford to do in the face of this present what we have been doing in the past, then how do we affirm what is "not yet"? Isn't that why Morgan borrows Primo Levi's voice to ask, "If not this way, how?"

Several essays in this issue directly address Levi's question. Namhee Lee's "Between Indeterminacy and Radical Critique: Madang-guk, Ritual, and Protest," for instance, calls into question the historiographic certainties of a previous era's radicalism before moving on to a sustained evaluation of what, in that previous work of popular and elite cultural recoding, could be used today. Lee concludes that the history of new social movement rather than nationalist modernism is the proper context for understanding madang-guk cultural performance, because as anticolonialist events the satires mirrored similar dramatic practices developing in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The groundwork laid in theatrical recoding and social criticism made possible the transformation of spectator into participant when catastrophic political events such as the Kwangju Uprising galvanized crowd and intellectuals alike. Methods of cultural politics shared freely meant, Lee argues, that when the political opportunity came, the technologies for displacement were already in the hands of those who would do the work. Perhaps, to answer Levi, Lee is noting that in the shared history of madang-guk is an example of how to take over the apparatus of value coding and how to critically use the cultural politics of the past today—how, that is, to be an intellectual in social movement.

For as Wang Xiaoming suggests in "China on the Brink of a 'Momentous Era,'" we face a cultural and economic conjuncture so complex that even the example of Lu Xun, critical intellectual of record, cannot help us. In this "momentous" or crisis-ridden world our intellectual reflexes and our theories are not sufficient to grasp the social inequality that is restructuring the conditions of our everyday life. In China a new class system is recoding cultural practices. Right under the eyes of cultural critics, raw new energy is being discharged like effluvia into cultural markets, reshaped around the déclassé migrant consumer. High above the vulgar popular base, at the apex of a miraculating social and cultural pyramid, are the superrich, pessimistic, gluttonous accumulators whose cynicism is impassive in the face of collapsing economy, globalized market culture, and neoliberal "modernization." Wang advocates cultural studies in the face of this "momentous era," a scholarship that is sufficiently strong that it can punch through the new and old ideologies of class. Wang echoes Lee's point. What Wang calls without irony "housekeeping," or rummaging through the intellectual, critical heritage for ways to bring the new hegemonic class ideology into focus, is the imagined job of cultural studies: it is a way of affirming what is not yet, in another way.

In "Rural Taste, Urban Fashions: The Cultural Politics of Rural/Urban Difference in Contemporary China," Lei Guang examines ideological formations with a slightly different eye, but her sense of outrage is equally discernible. What is this but Wang Xiaoming's...