The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture, and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam

7 From Antigone to the Kneeling Woman: A Genealogy of the Real from Socialism to the Preparation for Marketization

CHAPTER 7 From Antigone to the Kneeling Woman A Genealogy of the Real from Socialism to the Preparation for Marketization IF THE FIRST PART of this book examines market freedom, and the second explores how the government oversees such freedom, this third part focuses on how the realm of cultural production deals with such freedom and its governance. Governing with the market requires the simultaneous deployment of technologies of rule that draw on both an empiricism of social “realities” and an assertion of a cultural truth, on bothchoiceandcoercion,toproduceadifferentiatedpopulationof consumersandworkersforaneoliberaleconomydomesticallyandtransna tionally . The presence of a market and its incitement to freedom to produce and consume must be processed beyond the domain of government as the Communist Party and its state apparatuses no longer have the monopoly on the production of social imaginaries in society. Yettheproblemof ideologyreappearswithgovernancethatdeploysboth senses of the real and true, both choice and repression. Clearly citizens are no longer invited to see themselves exclusively in relation to a social scientific truth in the form of a Marxist historiography drawn by its vanguard, the Communist Party. And, apparently, not all citizens are invited to think of themselves in all domains of life as the free subject whosechoiceneedonlytoconformtowhatexpertssayisgoodforthem. Theissueof culturalrepresentationof socialimaginaries,modesof imagining social reality, and how to reconcile the simultaneous and contradictory modes of differentiated governance now fall under the purview of an emerging commercial popular culture in the form of writings and films.Thisisthefocusof thenexttwochapters,wherethischapterpro185 vides a genealogy of realism as the predominant mode of social representation in the popular culture of the day. In the Giai Phẩm Mùa Đông journal of 1956, which would become one of the focal points of intense repression by the new socialist state of theDemocraticRepublicof VietnamintheNorth,theParis-trained legal and literary scholar Nguyễn Mạnh Tường tells the story of Sophocles’ Antigone, under the column heading of the relationship between “government and the people.” More than thirty years later, a collection published in 1988 to great impact presents another woman appealingtoalawtruerandmorejustthanthatof governmentofficials. ThecollectionbearsthetitleTheKneelingWomanandincludesmostly selections of reportage on local conditions over the three regions of the country.Butratherthansimplyupholdanalternativevisionof thegood andtrueagainsttheactionsof thestate,thewritingof dissentfromtwo points in time—one at the beginning of socialism and the other duringthepreparationformarketization —indifferentwaysengagedincomplex contestations over the sense of the real. Both, however, deployed the feminine as markers of social realities. This chapter traces both state actions and dissent at the beginning of thesocialiststateinthe1950sandatthebeginningof marketreforms in the 1980s to explore the history of the relationship between governance and realism—its senses of the real and the true—in cultural representations of society. As the most continuously and widely available form of cultural production prior to 2000, literature has received the most attention from the government in the five decades since independence . Asmentionedinchapter3,almostimmediatelyafterwinning the war against the French in 1954, the state in the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam became embroiled in a battle with intellectuals —writers, artists, and knowledge experts. The socialist state, an entity encompassing government agencies and Communist Party organizations that had begun to penetrate most aspects of the daily lives of citizens, proceeded to curb the autonomy of artists and writers while enfolding their organization into its apparatuses, a process most evident in what was later called the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm affair of 1956–58. It had become a commonplace cold war practice simply 186 Part III. To the Real to point to such an episode as an illustration of the repressive nature of the socialist regime. Such an indictment does not really reveal why the Communist Party would need to crush artistic and intellectual autonomy, nor does it explore the manner in which dissent took place beyond the discourse of political dissent. On the other extreme, there have been explanations of the Vietnamese revolution as being continuous with Vietnamese traditions, overlooking instances of contention .1 Arguing against these theorists of continuity, Kim Ninh has offered the most convincing and nuanced account by showing the drama of building a modern socialist state, which required the ideological service of writers, artists, and experts in the task of transforming the whole of society. Here, I focus on just one aspect of this contest between some writers and the party: how social reality is to be imagined ,andrepresented.Thesuppressionof dissidentwritersof theNhân Văn–Giai Phẩm group has been often explained in terms of opposition to the party. Zachary Abuza, like most analysts of this period, argues...