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213 A Postscript on the Grain of Sand The long-dominant structure of the Chinese lifeworld saw little daylight between what is real (natural) and what is artificial or man-made. That which is real, that which is relevant, that which holds value, is man-made. The glare is seen between imperfection and perfection of workmanship in creating an authentic world. The purpose of work is not to change the world, but to live in it, to improve on “nature” by re-creating it in such a way that the illusoriness of the artifice, the workmanship of turning organic nature into social nature, itself becomes the great mystery, which is not to be explained away so much as appreciated. Whatever is real or has value is man-made. This is not uniquely Chinese. What is perhaps uniquely Chinese is the novel ways in which Chinese succeeded in manifesting this material spirit. This is different from the Cartesian lifeworld of the West, which shows less and less regard for the authentic—or experiences it as nostalgia, the cost of living in a modern world—because it separates material and spirit essences in a constant struggle over how the two are related or which essence is preferable, powerful, and real. Modernity has increasingly favored that which equates a substantive, reductive nature to notions of the real (Newtonian-Darwinian nature); and this spurs continuous countermoves and challenges from the hoi polloi (with their genealogy of “intelligent designs”) to the intellectuals (with their “postmodern turn”). The “postmodern turn” is in effect a return to the premodern minus its rituals and mysteries, “a desert of the real.” It is “artifice” with neither art nor nature, since all three are conflated in a code or a matrix of signifiers, of simulacra, the ultimate alienation, from which there is no exit, only endless acts of “resistance” in the spirit that says since I cannot change the world, I will keep the world from changing me; but there is no “me” as in the older modern or premodern formations. The postmodern 214 postscript “me” is a product brand, or, seeking a more “authentic” brand, a tattoo, but now detached from its ritual and mystery, it lacks the aura of authenticity. No matter, for the brand or tattoo locates “me” in the matrix. Thus what Max Weber termed the “iron cage of bureaucracy” has morphed into a total global matrix. From a Marxian perspective these ways of experiencing and knowing the world—mystification, reification, and simulation—are shaped in modes of production/reproduction. Mystification is tied to a ritual mode of production /reproduction, which is concerned with the authenticity of the artifice, a preoccupation of social economies. Through historical processes of industrialbased rationalization, mystification is sublated as reification and tied to an ideological mode of producing/reproducing state-based capitalisms. With the mutation of state-based capitalisms into international corporate-based global capital, reification is simulated through semiosis. To the extent we want to view this in the totality of historical dialectics, we would have to say that thus far capitalist civilization has moved the human spirit toward an alienation of historic profundity. Our task is to understand how our notions of value are shaped by these modes of production/reproduction. ...

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