Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, an important chapter in Rey Chows 1987 Women and Chinese Modernity, ends up contorted by its own symptomatically critical contradictions. While the text performs an important critical operation upon the primary oppositions (West vs East, tradition vs modernity, etc) through which history and the aesthetic are instituted, it repeatedly falls back into a reliance on these same oppositions in order to assert the primacy of the cultural. Finally the chapter ends by returning to the narrative of modern Chinese history as a *cultural encounter*, typified by catchwords such as Western technology. Thus effaced is the modern and hence global technology of subjectification, which operates precisely through the establishment of a field of binary oppositions. In this way, Rey Chow shows herself at this point in her career to have aligned herself with the essentially nostalgic position of deconstructionist criticism, whose critical postures inevitably lead to the endless prolongation of the very field of oppositions that had produced the deconstructive moment in the first place. This nostalgia accounts for the reason why Rey Chows article begins by observing that the ubiquitous references to the new in the early 20th century China were merely an ideological imperative that successfully rationalized Chinas contact with the West. While the references to the new surely *were also* this, they certainly could never be exhausted by the form of ideological construction. Isnt it the case that the ideological construction of the new never coincides with emergence? Otherwise how would liberation ever be possible? Ironically, this is exactly the point that Chows reading of the Butterfly literature makes. Yet this fundamental insight never produces an opening in the *institutional* narrative. As a result, the article returns at its end to the oppositional field of East/West binarism, and the only choice that Chow leaves us with is a kind of parodic repetition (which is the effect that she attributes to Butterfly literature). In the end, those butterflies exist only in the gut of the critic, too nervously nostalgic (or is it giddy?) to embrace the new, let along displace the categories of civilizational and national culture.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 10:51:12 +0000
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