Editor's Introduction

Paul Festa's essay, "Mahjong Politics in Contemporary China: Civility, Chineseness, and Mass Culture," looks at the people-as-consumers, the regulatory market economy, and state political powers in Chinese mass culture. Observations about individualized popular pleasures refine and forward Festa's belief that aesthetic regimes of accumulation supplement political economies. Such regulation shows itself in everyday cultural pleasures like skilled gambling at mahjong. Festa is showing us the state of a game-in-play. Mahjong, he makes quite clear, is ideologically infiltrated, yet ultimately—because in play—never fully subject to state capture. Indeed, according to him, like mahjong politics, Chinese cultural nationalism since 1999 has reconfigured itself in specific, observable ways. A concern for Festa is that critical scholarship addresses the singular historical relations among aesthetic forms and economic flows. Another preoccupation that he voices eloquently and that other contributors raise, too, is the need to alter theory in relation to historical singularities. Responsible scholarship must historically periodize cultural practices.

The obligation of critical scholarship to illustrate strategies of capital accumulation and perceptible shifts in the mass culture surfaces in Jesook Song's "Family Breakdown and Invisible Homeless Women: Neoliberal Governance during the Asian Debt Crisis in South Korea, 1997–2001." Song shifts our focus from the pleasure industry to the care industry, which she uses as her optic for examining logics of neoliberal value. But she, too, is seeking to periodize a significant historical moment through the strategy of cultural critique. Song's essay illustrates how, under the name of nationalism, South Korean regulatory government welfare agencies and allegedly critical civil-society moralists undertook to care for jobless citizens in strikingly similar fashion. The resulting discourse of homelessness reinforced stereotypes about joblessness as an exclusively masculine problem; the response to the crisis was the reconstitution of an explicitly pro-patriarchal social dicta. Welfare was understood as workfare. The deserving were separated from the undeserving poor. Female, street-living poor vanished into the social categories reserved for immoral and thus self-harmed outcastes. Threaded through her field study of policy-in-play, Song's ideas illustrate how a new generation of theoretically sophisticated scholars analytically link general social theory to singular political events.

Mary Ann O'Donnell's "Attracting the World's Attention: The Cultural Supplement in Shenzhen Municipality" draws a distinction between Mao-era exercise of mass political power and the pleasures, within contemporary mass culture, of star power in the entertainment industry. The old saw, "you are what you play," in fact fuses the problems of mass audience, powers of performance or performativity, and the erotics of power into one historical moment. Cultural politics is literally the merging of power plays and aesthetics. Performance is seen to be an instance of power exercised. Social belonging, O'Donnell argues, is precisely the social value of the event. O'Donnell's long-term objective may be to rework Marx's theory of value, but her short-term aim is to describe specific moments or periods in the development of Chinese politics and arts. Moreover, O'Donnell's focus on discourses of nation as these emerge from the invented city of Shenzhen does not in itself reinscribe the nation as such. What it does, as in the work of Festa and Song, is to work the project of social theory through a singular, untranslatable locale. Case and generalization fuse. There is no way to "apply" this sort of theory to a new case, for the project of theorization as such must be subject to constant revisions. In this respect, this special journal issue illustrates an emergent and exciting refocusing on the analytic possibilities that so-called Asian studies imposes.

The recurrent claim in this scholarship that aesthetics and performance are power leads to questions of why this is the case and to theoretically sensitive, groundbreaking histories of the present. In her "Governmentality and the Aesthetic State: A Chinese Fantasia," Haiyan Lee measures the historical depth of theories of the modern "aesthetic state." Voiced first in Schiller's German romanticism, this political theory is expanded by Lee into a mode of modern political rationality that aestheticizes government. For...