Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

The Chinese Reception

First, I would like to say something about the dissemination of The Anti-Aesthetic. It is very interesting to learn that the book was simply entitled La Posmodernidad when it was translated into Spanish in 1985, because, as Joaquín Barriendos said, the debate over the Western philosophy of art in Spanish in the 1980s “concerned postmodernity, rather than the anti-aesthetic.” Meanwhile, Hal Foster informed us that “it did disturb me when the English publisher retitled it Postmodern Culture, because it wasn’t about that primarily.” This means that, on the one hand, you cannot make a clear-cut distinction between postmodernity and anti-aesthetic, between European postmodernism and Anglo-American postmodernism, or even between modern and postmodern or aesthetic and antiaesthetic , and, on the other, that the same terms may have different connotations in various cultural contexts. The Chinese translation of The Anti-Aesthetic came out much later. The only version was published in Taiwan in 1998. Moreover, it is, in fact, incomplete. Two essays by the October people, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” by Rosalind Krauss and “On the Museum’s Ruins” by Douglas Crimp, were deleted as a result of copyright concerns. Because of such deletions, the Chinese version of The Anti-Aesthetic does not appear to be very “parochial.” As a matter of fact, the translator was trying to relate it to the postmodern scene in Taiwan. As mentioned in the translator’s preface, the so-called first wave of postmodernism in Taiwan followed the 1987 visits of Ihab Hassan and Fredric Jameson to Taiwan and the 1989 publication of Postmodernism and Culture Theory in Taiwan, based on the 1985 series of lectures given by Jameson at Peking University. There was, then, a second wave of postmodernism in Taiwan after 1995 with the appearance of “Postmodern Fictions,” a special issue of Chinese and Foreign Literature, and the translation and introduction of several theoretical books on postmodernism. The Anti-Aesthetic was one of these books. With such a background, the Chinese translation of The Anti-Aesthetic immediately became very popular in Taiwan when it appeared in 1998. The situation in mainland China, however, has been different. Even now, there is no translation of The Anti-Aesthetic with simplified Chinese characters, despite the great number of Western texts in the humanities and social sciences that have been translated in the past several decades. Hence, it is worth noticing that although it was not very difficult to get a Chinese version of The AntiAesthetic published in Taiwan with complex characters, the book has not seemed the chinese reception Geng youzhuang Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 130 1. Yin Jinan, Post-Modernism/Stepmotherism : A Close Look at Contemporary Chinese Culture and Art (Beijing: Sanlian, 2002). 2. Pan Zhichang, 《反美学：在阐释中理解当 代审美文化》，上海：学林出版社 (Anti-Aesthetic: Understanding contemporary aesthetic culture) (Shanghai: Xuelin, 1995). to attract much attention in mainland China, and few scholars and critics cite it. One of the reasons might be that postmodernism became a cliché in Chinese academic and artistic circles in the 1990s, soon after Fredric Jameson brought it to China with his influential 1985 lecture series at Peking University. Of course, this does not mean that postmodernism is no longer a theoretical issue in mainland China, but rather that the term has been overused and abused as a result of the overwhelming changes in theory, art, and social life experienced in the country. This is indeed surprising if we remember that Modernism used to be a sensitive topic, even taboo in China during the 1970s. An indication of this phenomenon can be perceived by the title of a book published in 2002 by a brilliant art critic: Post-Modernism/Stepmotherism.1 With the coinage “stepmotherism,” the author clearly tries to express his discontent with the superficial understanding of postmodernism among Chinese scholars and critics and the blind following of Western art by Chinese artists. Ironically, a book published by a Chinese scholar in 1995 with exactly the same title—Anti-Aesthetic—can be seen as an example of the superficial understanding of the Western theory of postmodernism.2 There is, in fact, a citation of Hal Foster’s preface to The Anti-Aesthetic in a note on page 55 of this book, one of the very few citations of Foster’s book I am aware of in a Chinese publication. This suggests that the uses of the anti-aesthetic, as a concept or theory closely related to October and Anglo-American postmodernism, have never been clear in mainland...