‘문화대혁명’의 ‘종결’을 어떻게 재사유할 것인가?

Abstract

We probably could not deny the fact that the Cultural Revolution had brought about the fatal disaster in China, but we also should not simply negate this historical ‘event’ which had touched, especially on the theoretical level, the margins of the modern state-party system. During late 1970s and early 1980s, right after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese officialdom had made an effort to describe the Cultural Revolution as a ‘10 years’ disaster.’ As a result, the Cultural Revolution was defined as a nightmare by government authorities. For them, the Cultural Revolution was totally a series of violence and anarchic situation. With researches go on, however, another kinds of perspectives has been raised. Some researchers argued that the period of the Cultural Revolution was not from 1966 to 1976, but from 1966 to 1969. According to this perspectives, the ‘10 years Cultural Revolution’ is just a product of ideological manipulation by the officialdom, and for the people who had the real resist spirit against the power, the Cultural Revolution had just continued for 3years. This kind of perspective transformation about the period of the Cultural Revolution indicate the Changes of focus on the Cultural Revolution and its end. At first, the Cultural Revolution was just defined as chaos, but with the progress of researches, the Cultural Revolution is not just regarded as a chaos any more, it came to be reconsidered as the possibilities of resist in history. Of course, this Change in viewpoint is precious and deserves to study. But we also have to ask whether this kind of viewpoint was buried under the binary paradigm, which means ‘the ruler vs. the ruled.’ In fact, as Etienne Balibar and Zizek had argued, we cannot and should not deny the failure of the Cultural Revolution, and this failure means that the Cultural Revolution was unable to construct the ‘everyday normal life.’ Although Mao and the Maoist, including the Red Rebels, had wanted to make a logic of society totally different from the previous stage, capitalism, but they could not make it. At this point, we need to pay our attention to Foucault. Foucault argued that Marxism and socialism theory lacked ‘the governmentality’, and the governmentality is something indispensible in every society and state. According to Foucalult’s view, the stability and the order of society and state cannot eliminated even in the socialism society, but the socialist was unable to invent ‘the socialistic order’ of state(or power itself). Both on the theoretical level and practical level, Mao also could not avoid the problem of governmentality in socialism state. During the period of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had showed continuous fluctuation between radicalism and developmentalism. This fact shows that Mao himself, the incarnation of revolution, could not abdicate the order of society itself, and this also means that the Cultural Revolution put itself to the extreme, then at this margins, the revolution itself could not but retreat. From the point of governmentality, we probably could get different viewpoint for the research about the origins of political order of ‘Post Socialism China.’ As already known, so called ‘Post Socialism China’ is the result of the end of the Cultural Revolution. If so, through reconsidering the meaning of the end of the Cultural Revolution, we can enunciate the allegory of the end of the Cultural Revolution and the birth of the ‘Post Socialism China.’