's carnival generation
, "Journey to the West", which appeared in the face of a commercial film, seems to have become a treasure trove for people to continuously discover the raw materials of discourse. Postmodernism, poststructuralism and cultural studies can all get a share. On the BBS headed by Tsinghua University, when the science and engineering boys enthusiastically expressed their admiration for it, they probably never imagined that this simple personal preference would later develop into a huge "big talk movement", which also became a It seems that if you don't like "Journey to the West", you don't deserve to enter a certain discourse circle.
People have already achieved a lot of research results on "Dahua Aesthetics" and "Dahua Rhetoric", and they have insightful insights, so I won't go into details here. "Journey to the West" is widely loved by people, especially young people, because it embodies people's deviant ideals. They are imprisoned by all kinds of visible and invisible things for a long time and find a fresh breath that can carry their own rebellious attitude. In fact, with middle school students Little Swallows, who like to do whatever they want, are not fundamentally different, nor are they superior or inferior.
In today's consumer society, everything has been commodified, including the cultural product "Journey to the West". The inner meaning of the choice of consumer goods can create a new identity for the consumer, a different, mobile identity, a new self.
People who like "Dahua" gather together, which can make an interesting interpretation. With the generation of the same feeling, in a temporary emotional community, a new "aesthetic paradigm" was born due to the mass coming together, and thus a movement beyond individualism emerged, where people experienced intense carnivals, Experience empathy and emotional immersion.
In addition to the game, there is also a kind of nostalgia and a touch of sentimentality in it. As a result, people sometimes can't even tell whether they like "Dahua" or indulge in the attitude that they like "Dahua".
A postmodern theorist said, "No one is a teenager anymore, because everyone is a teenager." In our day, many adults behave like children with permission. The Supreme Treasure can squat on the ground and bark obediently, and the audience can also dance and dance because they like "Westward Journey to the West".
Such a whimsical film, which transforms reality into images, shatters time into a series of eternal moments, unfolds a full-scale parody and ** of a solemn grand narrative, and itself has experienced the "discourse". carnival". As Lyotard, the philosopher of the red country, said, in the process of language evolution, the greatest joy is in the turning and infinite creation of phrases, words, and meanings... using what has been accepted by the public Language or metaphor (extension) to defeat the opponent.
The cultural connotation of the film is incompatible with mainstream culture and aesthetics. Dominants and authorities are probably less likely to agree with it, they see it as a destructive factor that is not conducive to maintaining the established order, while the commoners value this liberating force and hope that through its expansion, some form of Freedom - even the freedom to doubt or the freedom to vent.
Deconstructing and reinterpreting "Journey to the West" allows us to face the hustle and bustle of postmodern culture, but over-interpretation will inevitably lead to the same mechanism as the analysis of Lu Xun's works in middle school Chinese textbooks. To regard "Journey to the West" as the initiator of all post-modern cultural phenomena is too bluff to make it overwhelmed.
Carnival crumbs
We can accuse Zhou Xingxing of "Wahaha" tea drinks, BBK repeaters and audio series advertisements as commercial garbage, but in fact we can't be too demanding. Zhou Xingxing just happened to be engaged in the "promising career" of an entertainer, and he invested in and starred in a relatively promising movie such as "Journey to the West". We named him as a hero of one culture, rebuilding another. The savior of a culture, the pressure on him is too much.
"Journey to the West" only came into being when postmodern culture was secretly sprouting and growing wildly, and it happened to be a hit with many people's wishes. It was also because the rapid copying of pirated copies made it possible for people to observe it countless times, regardless of time, place, and way. At the beginning, the fifth-generation director Zhang Jianya's films "The Story of San Mao's Army" and "Mr. Wang's Lust" were both clever and witty satirical parodies, but they lacked a bit of "big talk"-style romantic love. It is a pity that the distant shadow of the lonely sail is exhausted, and the Yangtze River is flowing freely outside the threshold.
The line between highbrow and popular culture has all but disappeared, everything that is so called sublime has been dissolved. Heavy metal rock and Bach's preludes can be complicit, and Duchamp's artwork called "The Fountain" is just a urinal... The text questions itself, the relationship between itself and the audience, wandering and flickering in a postmodern way .
The domestic Yaoshi Ziyue band rapped: "In this era, are there still great things? Are there still great people? Are there still great feelings? If you have, then you are your wrist, and we are your trustee. My son." In
this mediocre age of TV commercials, fashion magazines, and flooded newspapers, people rely less on their own judgment and trust the media with less discernment than ever before, echoing what others say. The humanistic value orientation is abandoned, and the principle of pleasure assimilates the principle of reality, thus hollowing out the critical content in the humanistic spirit. "The most popular needs include, following advertisements to relax, entertain, act and consume, to love or hate what other people love or hate," Marcuse said in "The One-Dimensional Man."
How many people are not blindly superstitious about "Journey to the West"? Aren't you amplifying your emotions infinitely? People are easily lost in the noise of beings.
After that, there were countless big stories on the Internet, countless flashes of Guan Gongzhan Qin Qiong, Pan Jinlian's Mood for Love, etc., which will bring people the most vivid reading pleasure and even partially change their reading habits, but in these images, fragments and In the scene, it is impossible for you to discover the important order or the basis of value judgment. They are endlessly copied and imitated, and it is difficult to condense into a dominant ideology, nor to give insight.
The popular aesthetic of these cultural products, without making any "absolutely fair judgment" on their quality, is inherently pluralistic and conditional, because it first considers that the meaning of a cultural object varies from person to person. It is based on an affirmation of continuity between cultural forms and everyday life, a deep-rooted desire to participate, and emotional engagement. The most important thing is acknowledging pleasure, and acknowledging that pleasure is a personal thing.
"Journey to the West" gives people a sense of pleasure. Pleasure also belongs to the category of physical writing and reading. It is irrational and contributes to the disorder of discourse. For Habermas, abandoning reason and sanity means turning to despair and conservatism, and it absolutely takes courage to hold on to reason in our time. In our society, the result of irrationality is unimaginable.
"Journey to the West" is overturning the tide of discourse violence. After putting on the trousers policy and making the great orthodox narrative collapse, what should we do...
The ecstasy of communication
We encounter postmodern fragments in more and more cultural products, Meng Jinghui's drama can be "Pirate Faust", Feng Xiaogang's The movie "Big Shot" even satirized in the Great Hall of the People. Li Liuyi's play "The Story of a Puppet" was integrated into the traditional Kunqu Opera in the Spring and White Snow, but the fairy sister in it was called "Zixia". Even Huang Jianxin, who has always been serious and serious, suddenly parodied "Running Rolla" and quoted folk jokes to create a platter-style "Who Said I Don't Care". In movies and in the sketches of the Spring Festival Gala, online jokes are rampant, and jokes in short messages on mobile phones are flooded... Countless Pieces of rags are continually reconstructed and stitched together, replacing "grands recits" with "petits recits."
Our grammatical norms are constantly being refreshed and destroyed, and the new forces are changing and becoming unrestrained. As Wittgenstein said, we can think of language as an ancient capital; it is full of criss-crossing streets and squares, where new buildings and old buildings are intertwined; houses built or supplemented in different periods stand scattered around; Surrounded by the straight streets and uniform houses of the new urban plan. City of Languages "How many houses and roads must a town be called a town?" The nascent language was programmed into the layout of the original language, forming the outskirts of the old town, such as "chemical notation and calculus notation".
But it would seem far-fetched to attribute all of these new houses to the direct influence of Big Talk. We cannot ignore the rapid replication and accumulation of postmodern cultural artifacts, and the mission of the Internet is to fuel the flames. The speed, intensity and breadth of media communication constitute what Baudrillard calls "the ecstasy of communication". The media decides a certain orientation according to its own will and its own interests, and the bombardment of a long story will promote or destroy a certain cultural product.
Baudrillard and Jameson emphasize the immediacy, strong sensibility, overload feeling, non-direction, confusion or glue-like fusion of signs and images, mixing of codes, and chainlessness of postmodernism's "depthless" consumer culture. a floating or floating signifier.
This is an era of slackness and bleakness. There is a lack of aesthetic criteria, "beauty" has become a commodity, and people will evaluate the value of the work by the profit generated by the work. "Culture" itself becomes a product, and the market becomes a substitute for itself, a consumption of the process of absolute commodification. In magazines, on television, and on the streets, the weekly richness of cultural products, ideas, and images fit at some stage with Jameson's claim that "culture now takes center stage." Pushing culture to the center of social life, even if it is a fragmented, reproducing culture,
is black life, critical, and somewhat destructive. It doubts the performance of all narratives, emphasizes uncertainty and discontinuity, and has a strong determinism—both the narrative of traditional texts and the order formed by discourse.
But postmodernism can only be broken and not established, and it lacks a clear construction goal. Are we going to keep destroying aimlessly? How to pick up the debris on the ground? The postmodern dilemma is a crisis—a crisis of our truths, values, and beliefs of all kinds. This crisis stems from the origin of reflection itself, its inevitability and power.
The development of history and culture is sometimes a kind of reincarnation, and people's increasingly strong nostalgic complex can be used as an explanation. Our culture can only be a wilderness of chaos if it is not rebuilt by more persistent and powerful forces. But what is this power? Economy and culture go hand in hand and will gradually become clearer.
But there are also people who say, "Come on a little bit of this and a little bit of that, this is the way to create new things. The migration of people gives our world great possibilities."
The undercurrent of enjoyment
People pay unprecedented attention to the self and the enjoyment of the body. , The rate of love and dislike of popular culture is increasing. Books, movies, stars, and pop music are easily abandoned in an instant. People push cups at the table to call them brothers, but they can forget each other's names in a blink of an eye. Topics discussed...
Lyotard is quoted by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity, that the ephemeral nature of the contract is the hallmark of postmodern society. "Night Long Dreams" has probably been fully experienced by people.
And the subject also manifests itself in language. How should we think about subjectivity and the body as a union of will and desire? Sex is the dominant power discourse in the West. Perhaps, as Foucault said, sex represents the reality of the body and the self.
Madonna is almost a thing of the past, "body writing" and all kinds of "baby" have become a topic of concern, and pornography in photography and film is enduring and advancing with the times. The machines of the commodity society are filled with too many excessive sexual images. Those who are unwilling to re-examine the traditional rules of art rely on the so-called "correct rules" of communication and people's morbid desire for reality to seek artistic careers under the recognition and appreciation of the public. success.
The exchange, reconstruction and reproduction of various information have become the main way of life and production in the post-industrial society. The powerful copying ability like a pirated machine has prompted the society to move towards an operation mode of continuous production and continuous consumption, and the consumer society has emerged as the times require. The identity of the producer and the consumer is the same. Copying is empty parody. Society is forming a form of comfort, congratulations, cross-referencing, and repetition.
The images, signs, and symbolic commodities of consumer culture embody dreams, desires, and fanciful fantasies; it alludes to romantic innocence and emotional fulfillment when narcissistically satisfying the self rather than others. This kind of consumer culture seems to be to expand such behavior to be accepted and properly performed.
People follow hedonism, pursue immediate pleasure, cultivate a lifestyle of self-expression, develop narcissistic and selfish personality types, change from advocating their own virtues to advocating their own personality, to cultivate "personal charisma" and "attraction" .
But in emotional life and cultural life, in the short-lived contract of love and sex, people are a little helpless, wandering in different places of body and mind, like wooden boards floating in the sea, without a sense of security and belonging. They want a healthier, more trustworthy state where the sense of self and community is less separate and divided.
One sees more value in past modernism than in today's postmodern cultural expressions. ** The pleasure of past values is followed by hopelessness, fatigue and emptiness. There is more depth and stronger moral ethics in previous modernist literature. In any era, as a group to function in an orderly manner, we need moral ethics. It is a pity that in our literature, films and other works of art these days, the prosocial moral content is all toned down or relegated to the background or even hidden. A society needs these things, and a weary mind needs these things—even though it may appear contemptuous.
As a theoretician called Gregor McLennan called, "The world is still ravaged by oppression, ignorance, and malnutrition . The bubble-like interaction of the two has mortgaged the seriousness."
"Westward Journey" allows us to see the pluralism, centerlessness, absurdity, reproduction, parody, anti-essence, anti-authority, and non-narrative belonging to postmodern culture We can despise all authoritarian metalanguages in an attempt to eradicate "words of violence. Pants" in the social and cultural realm, but whether our wishful thinking is still alive and well A new wave of discourse violence will be formed. Put on the pants policy? Is the naming of the "Dahua Movement" just an illusion in people's minds about the postmodern name?
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