Factory Humanisms: Technical Aesthetics,Sino-Soviet Encounters,and the Fashioning of the Postsocialist Factory in Reform-Era China

Postrevolutionary Humanism

The emergence in the 1980s of a pervasive language of Marxist humanism marked the consolidation of the official ideology of the reform period, one in which the figure of the human proved easily assimilable to the specific temporality and depoliticizing dynamics of the postsocialist modernization project. If, as Zhu Dongli (1998: 91–92) has closely observed, the effectivity of the human as a trope of ideological discourse signified and functioned differently across the variegated fields of philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theory in the 1980s, then so too can it be said that the aesthetic figure of the Marxist human—as expressed through the pervasive tropes of labor as an aesthetic process, orientated toward the externalization of man’s species-being through praxis—had its own special effectivity insofar as it provided the ideological grammar for much of the reform project that followed.

Yet for all that was radically novel about the humanist discourse of the 1980s, it marked, in fact, a particular temporal structure of historical repetition in the way that it re-traversed an earlier set of debates around aesthetics that had arisen in the 1950s. Those debates, having been conducted under the shadow of contemporaneous discussions in the Soviet Union, witnessed the emergence in Chinese intellectual life of explicit references to the conceptual vocabulary of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, above all the concepts of the “humanization of nature” and labor as the fundamental capacity of human species-being. Within the terrain of that early round of discussions, the textual citation of the 1844 Manuscripts was associated above all with the figures of Li Zehou and Zhu Guangqian 朱光潜.

Li’s invocations of the language of Marxist humanism in the 1950s and 1960s were closely related to his insistence that beauty as such does not lie in the unmediated and untransformed characteristics of the natural world (as in the case of the noted Marxist theoretician Cai Yi 蔡仪), nor is it primarily a dimension of human consciousness (as argued in the initial interventions of Zhu Guangqian). For Li, rather, he understood beauty to be at once social and objective—social, because it is not a natural property but rather emerges through the collective historical processes of human beings, but objective, because it exceeds the perceptions and sensations of individual observers. The key trope that Li deployed in this regard was to pose beauty as the product of the “humanization of nature” through collective labor over history, whereby the external world comes to be endowed with the property of beauty as it is transformed through human labor. His deployment of this vocabulary was itself highly indebted to the work of Viktor Vanslov, whose influential article “Does Beauty Exist Objectively?,” originally published in Philosophical Problems (Voprosy filosofii) in 1955, introduced the language of the “humanization of nature.” Translated into Chinese in the periodical Study Translations 学习译丛 (Wansiluofuo, 1955), Vanslov’s article came to condition Li Zehou’s own entry into the aesthetics debate in his 1956 article “On Aesthetic Sensation, Beauty, and Art” (Li, 1956). ² Li’s early engagement with this theoretical vocabulary intersected with the contemporaneous interventions of Zhu Guangqian, insofar as both theorists imagined the proper object of aesthetics to extend beyond the delimited artwork as well as any strictly reflectionist relationship between that cognition and the external world, in favor of human labor itself as a quasi-aesthetic activity, posed through a humanist vocabulary of labor as the externalization 对象化 of species-being in the material world (Li, 1956).

The incipient humanism of Li and Zhu was suspended by the cessation of the aesthetics debate in China in the early 1960s, as well as the decline of sustained engagement with Soviet discourses around aesthetics, in connection with the projection of humanism as an object of anti-revisionist critique. If, in the earlier moment of the 1950s and 1960s, the figure of the human as producing according to the “humanization of nature” remained a largely esoteric or minority position within the framework of the Chinese aesthetics debate, one basically limited to Li Zehou and Zhu Guangqian, then, in the early 1980s, Marxist humanism assumed a hegemonic position in Chinese intellectual life, and nowhere more so than in the realm of aesthetics. Yet this hegemony was by no means automatic, it relied instead on the capacity of individual theorists to marshal their command of Marxist references in order to stabilize Marxist humanism and individual texts—above all the 1844 Manuscripts—as the hegemonic ideology of the new period.

Li Zehou occupied a crucial role in this process, in part on the basis of his subterranean philosophical projects during the Cultural Revolution, which appeared in the late 1970s in the form of his major work A Critique of Critical Philosophy (Li, 1979). This work marked Li’s attempt to rewrite Marxist categories in Kantian terms; the final chapter was published in the first issue of the Shanghai-based journal Aesthetics 美学 in 1979 under the title “Kant’s Aesthetic Ideas” 康德的美学思想. This journal was of considerable influence in introducing Chinese readers to the language of humanist Marxism from the late 1970s onwards, not least because it was the publication venue for Zhu Guangqian’s new translation of the 1844 Manuscripts themselves. Li’s text on Kant was significant for the fact that its final section reintroduced Chinese readers to Marx’s formulation in the 1844 Manuscripts of the “laws of beauty,” whereby the specificity of human labor is said to rest in the fact that human production has an aesthetic dimension that distinguishes it from the merely instinctive activities of animals.

So too in his article “The Object and Scope of Aesthetics” (Li, 1981), also published in Aesthetics, did Li restate his commitment to the category of praxis as the basis of Marxist aesthetics and to the possibility of speaking of a properly Marxist aesthetics on the basis of Marx’s own early texts:

It has generally been believed that Marx did not leave behind a systematic theory on art and aesthetics, and yet as for his perspective concerning the “humanization of nature” and formulation that “man produces in accordance with the laws of beauty,” do these not comprise the basis of a Marxist theory of aesthetics? In my opinion, they are vastly more important than the total sum of Plekhanov’s works on art. Because, within these concise but deep philosophical discussions as they relate to aesthetics, there emerges a new, era-defining answer to the question of what beauty actually is, which is to say an answer from a theory of praxis (historical materialism). ³ (Li, 1981: 14)

The theoretical and ideological relevance of this statement lies not only in the fact that it re-traversed the keywords and theoretical tropes that had defined Li’s earlier engagements with Marx’s humanist texts, but did so in terms that displaced Plekhanov as one of those theoretical sources that had informed other Maoist aesthetic positions during the long course of the socialist period.

Yet just as Li’s initial exposure to Marxist humanism in the 1950s arose as a result of his encounters with Soviet aesthetic discussions, so too did the expanded, hegemonic position of Marxist humanism in the post-Maoist period derive from the resumption of explicit aesthetic engagements with the Soviet Union, where Marx’s humanist vocabulary had authorized developments in aesthetics and other philosophical spheres over the 1960s and 1970s. Chinese theorists therefore turned to the Soviet theoretical edifice in order to project the 1844 Manuscripts as the decisive textual resource for the interpretation of Marxist philosophy as such. In the same issue of Aesthetics as that in which Li published “The Object and Scope of Aesthetics,” therefore, Ling Jiyao published his article “A Discussion Concerning the Essence of Beauty in the Soviet Aesthetic Field” (Ling, 1981), which covered the basic theoretical parameters of Soviet aesthetics both as they had conditioned the Chinese aesthetics debate in the 1950s and as they had developed up to the 1980s, including an extended discussion of the “social faction” whose privileging of the humanization of nature through praxis had constituted the immediate context for Li’s positions decades prior.

Of considerably greater influence still was the Chinese translation in 1981 of Leonid Pazitnov’s The Origins of a Revolutionary Transformation in Philosophy (U istokov revolyutsionnogo perevorota v filosofii, 1960). Pazitnov’s text had a double significance from the perspective of Chinese theoreticians of the 1980s. In the first place, and across the text as a whole, it intervened in the theoretical construction of Marx’s own intellectual development in such a way as to establish the 1844 Manuscripts as the key moment of transition for Marx as an individual and Marxism as a system of thought, whereby Marx was said to have definitely broken with the Hegelian and Feuerbachian categories on which he had relied up to that point, above all by formulating concepts of alienation and historical development in terms of praxis, as distinct from the merely contemplative character of Hegelian and neo-Hegelian thought.

In the second and ultimately more important place, however, Pazitnov established Marxism as an ontology of labor, in which labor constituted the basis for a developmentalist concept of the human, whereby labor as the accumulation of social praxis engenders a progressive enhancement of human capacities at the level of sensory experience. ⁴ An argument along these lines makes up the larger part of Pazitnov’s final chapter, in which he moves through a series of repeated statements concerning the distinction between human and animal forms of production, and the development of human senses on the basis of social production:

In the active possession of that which is contained in the object, and in the process of man’s “essential powers,” the human sense organs undergo a process of development. The natural sense organs with which the human is equipped at birth have no fundamental difference from the sense organs of an animal. They are not equipped to grasp the specific, social character contained within the object. Yet, despite this being the case, so too can humans apprehend elements that the animal simply cannot apprehend. (Lieni Baritenuofu, 1981: 153)

In this frame of reference, therefore, the characteristic of the human was that labor engenders a process and possibility of development at the level of aesthetic experience, which comprises the crucial distinction between the human and the animal.

The influence of Pazitnov’s text, as an emblem of the central role of humanism as it had developed in Soviet Marxist aesthetics and philosophy from the late 1950s onwards, becomes visible from its frequent citation in Chinese discussions during this period. Among the major participants in the theoretical discussions of this period, both Zhu Guangqian in his “The Aesthetic Questions of Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’” (Zhu, 1983) and Ma Qi in his “The Aesthetic Questions of Marx’s ‘1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’” (Ma, 1983) directly cited Pazitnov as the basis for their emphasis on the 1844 Manuscripts as the decisive point of transition for Marx’s thinking on philosophy and aesthetics. These articles had particular visibility by virtue of being included in the 1983 compilation Discussion Collection on the Aesthetic Ideas of Marx’s “Manuscripts” (Cheng, 1983), which collected the most sophisticated interventions from the preceding years.

Yet even more so did the expectation of a process of aesthetic or sensory development as part of Pazitnov’s thought also intersect with the pervasive Chinese discourse at this stage concerning the demand for aesthetic education, which was also theorized in explicitly humanist terms. Just as with the formulation of a humanist aesthetics, so too did Aesthetics play a central role in this process, above all through a series of articles devoted to the subject, concentrated in the journal’s third issue, published in 1981: Zhou Yang’s “A Lecture Concerning Work in Aesthetics Research” (Zhou, 1981), Hong Yiran’s “On Aesthetic Education” (Hong, 1981), and Zhao Songguang’s “On the Function of Aesthetic Education” (Zhao, 1981). The formulation of aesthetic education as it passed through these and other texts was noteworthy for the way that it joined the figure of the Marxist humanist laborer to the existing terminology, inherited from the Mao period, of the “new human.” This conflation of two distinct theoretical vocabularies—those of Marxist humanism and the “new human”—was not an equal process, but marked the ways in which the figure of the “new human” was refunctioned according to a new theoretical logic in which aesthetic education would produce a subject of humanist labor compatible with the modernizing demands of the reform era. In these terms, aesthetic education and the humanist discourse more generally assumed a specific temporality at the level of the subject, in which the figure of the “human” as such marked a potential condition of advancement and perfection, for which aesthetic education provided the guarantee.

The most intellectually sophisticated version of this orientation was that of, once again, Li Zehou, who in the 1980s came to reemphasize the themes of aesthetic education and the developmentalist temporality of the human that had already been part of his work in the 1950s and 1960s. ⁵ In his 1962 article “Three Propositions on Aesthetics” (Li, 2002 [1962]), for example, summarizing the developments in the aesthetics debate up to the early 1960s, Li developed his conception of “humanization” by positing a progressive cultivation over time of the human subject itself: “At the same time as practice engages in the humanization of the natural world, so too does it humanize the natural state of the subject—their five sensory organs cease to be merely organs for the satisfaction of merely biological needs, and instead become tools for the exercise of social praxis” (Li, 2002 [1962]: 108).

Yet so too, at the end of the 1980s, in his “Four Lectures on Aesthetics” (Li, 2003 [1989]), under the theme of “establishing new sensations,” did Li point toward the cultivation of the human senses as “a humanization of internal nature,” equivalent to Marx’s formulation that “the five senses of the human are the product of world history,” formed through “social practice” (Li, 2003 [1989]: 468). In his most revealing passage, Li further argued this point as follows:

The varied structures, laws, and forms of the existing world are increasingly made known on a deeper and wider basis, being first of all preserved, strengthened, and accumulated in the praxis of labor, and this naturally has a direct effect on sentiments, apprehensions, feelings, and emotions, all that comprises the affective existence and sensory experience of the human. Through this process the human comes to be distinguished from the animal. The eyes of the human are unlike those of eagles. The eyes of eagles can see further than those of humans, eagles can fly in the sky, and see small things on the ground with the utmost clarity, and so in purely physiological terms, they are far superior to humans. Moreover, with regard to humans themselves, the eyes of modern humans 现代人 are unlike those of savages 野蛮人, the latter having sharp eyes that they use in hunting animals, which modern humans cannot match, such that there appears to be a physiological regression. Yet the other side of this is that there is a radical advance [in the senses] insofar as birds and savages cannot appreciate advanced works of art. (Li, 2003 [1989]: 468–69)

The recurrence across these different historical moments in Li’s writing of a developmentalist or pedagogical trajectory based on the aesthetic education of the senses discloses important dimensions of the discourse of Marxist humanism in Chinese intellectual history, which would ultimately emerge in the 1980s when humanism became functional to the reform period precisely through its temporal characteristics. This final quote from the late 1980s is distinguished in particular by an underlying racial logic in which the distinction between the human and the animal with respect to labor, already a stable trope of Marxist humanism throughout the decade, was mapped onto a language of modernity and civilization with respect to the capacity for artistic appreciation and the development of the senses beyond any merely physiological set of capacities. Yet this recurrence of a developmentalist logic from the 1950s through to the 1980s marked not a straightforward repetition of humanist tropes that remained stable over time but rather assumed at each moment a distinct theoretical and political content. It did so in the 1980s through those new, distinct forms of Soviet aesthetics that constituted the crucial site of difference within the structure of repetition that linked the 1950s to the 1980s.

Making Labor Beautiful

The “difference” that distinguishes 1980s aesthetic discourse with respect to the figure of the Marxist human from the early discussions of the 1950s lies not only in the hegemonic position of humanism in the later period, or in the role of texts such as Pazitnov’s in engendering that hegemony, but rather in the ways that the 1980s also provided Chinese theoreticians with access to those newer currents of Soviet aesthetic thought that had emerged over the 1960s and 1970s. This was true above all of the discourses that came to circulate in China in the 1980s under the name of “technical aesthetics,” translated from the corresponding term in Soviet aesthetic discourse. The origins of the term and discursive field of technical aesthetics in the Soviet Union, as Chinese writers well understood, lay specifically in the development of product design from the 1960s onwards, in the context of the historical transition away from the spartan demands of the Stalinist period toward the validation of consumerism and embrace of a language of socialist modernity in the context of the thaw. ⁶

In this respect, technical aesthetics provided the conduit by which Soviet (and later Chinese) theoreticians joined the global movement toward product design. Key to this process was the formation in the Soviet Union of the All-Union Institute of Technical Aesthetics in 1962, which organized the journal Technical Aesthetics (Tekhnicheskaya estetika). Yet in China, to no less an extent than in the Soviet Union, the term technical aesthetics enjoyed a close, often confusing semantic relationship with the related terms “production aesthetics,” “industrial aesthetics,” and “labor aesthetics,” which maintained a closer orientation toward the aesthetic dimensions of the production process itself, that is, the aesthetic capacities of labor in line with the language of the 1844 Manuscripts.

The emergence of technical aesthetics in China can be traced to two key figures who would continue to shape this current of aesthetic thought over the remainder of the 1980s: Tu Wusheng 涂武生 and Liu Ning 刘宁. Of these, Tu Wusheng also occupies a key position in the intellectual history of modern Chinese aesthetics, albeit overshadowed by more prominent theoretical figures such as Li Zehou. ⁷ His importance derives, above all, from his position as a point of mediation between aesthetic developments in China and the Soviet Union. Tu’s 1980 article “An Introduction to Certain Questions in Soviet Aesthetics Research” (Tu, 1980), published in Aesthetics Forum 美学论丛, marked the first extended discussion of technical aesthetics in the Chinese scene of the reform period. In the article, Tu introduces a series of interrelated terms—labor aesthetics, production aesthetics, and technical aesthetics—within the framework of what he takes to be the central trend in the development of Soviet aesthetics over the period of the 1970s, namely, the emergence of new questions and fields concerning the object of aesthetic study, which marked a counterpoint to the hitherto contained delimitation of aesthetics to questions specifically pertaining to artwork.

In his fuller discussion concerning the expansion of what might properly be seen to fall within the frame of aesthetics, Tu summarizes Soviet developments to the effect that “having entered the 1970s, and judging from published treatises on aesthetics, increasing numbers of theorists have come to believe that aesthetic questions cannot be limited to art alone and that aesthetics cannot be seen as equivalent to the philosophy of art or the conceptual study of art, [and] it is no longer possible to investigate the questions of artistic aesthetics on a partial, isolated basis.” Instead, as “aesthetics is increasingly closely linked with the reality of building communism, it is necessary to research the new aesthetic questions of the sphere of material production in the context of the scientific and technological revolution, [and] it is necessary to assume the task of cultivating the comprehensively developed new human [to be] engaged in the construction of communism” (Tu, 1980: 226). Among the authors that Tu quotes in the development of this point is Anatoly Egorov, whose Problems of Aesthetics (Voprosy estetiki, 1977) provided, from Tu’s perspective, an elucidation of the expansion of those domains in which aesthetic concerns present themselves. Egorov was quoted by Tu as follows:

In our society, while aesthetics can and should research art, at the same time it should also investigate the questions that present themselves in all the states of socially useful labor on the part of Soviet human beings. This is indispensable. Under socialist conditions, and especially during the period of the transition from socialism to communism, there is a fundamental change in the character of productive labor. In all fields, labor is free, and is also in the process of becoming more creative. (Tu, 1980: 227–28)

The generalized expansion of the scope of aesthetics as emphasized by Tu provides, in turn, the basis for the extended, final section of his article, specifically entitled “Concerning Technical Aesthetics and Other Questions” 关于技术美学等问题. He delineates the historical moments that engendered the rise of technical aesthetics as a discrete discipline in the Soviet Union, namely, the 1968 resolution “Concerning Improving the Results of the Use of Technical Aesthetics in the National Economy,” which related specifically to the design dimensions of consumer goods. Yet Tu’s overwhelming point of emphasis in the discussion that follows—given, as with the rest of his article, in the form of a recapitulation of major Soviet aestheticians on the basis of their individual works—is on the expansion of the object of aesthetics into daily life.

The crucial concluding pages of Tu’s article emphasize the different ways that Soviet writers have understood the entanglements of “technical aesthetics” with respect to related, overlapping fields of aesthetic science that also investigate the role of aesthetics in the industrial sphere, as marked by the terms “production aesthetics” and “labor aesthetics.” The authors that he cites in quick succession—Lydia Novikova, Mikhail Fedotovich Ovsiannikov, and Egorov—are cited as differing in their precise understandings of technical aesthetics, labor aesthetics, production aesthetics, and the category of “design.” Tu paraphrases Novikova’s 1974 text Labor and Art (Iskusstvo i trud) (later to be translated into Chinese under the title Labor Aesthetics 劳动美学 [Nuoweikewa, 1988]) and Ovsiannikov’s Aesthetics (Estetika, 1973) to the effect that technical aesthetics deals primarily with the aesthetic development of consumer goods, whereas the aesthetic dimensions of the production process as such, at the point of labor, might be better understood in terms of the distinct fields of knowledge of labor aesthetics and production aesthetics. That is, labor aesthetics and production aesthetics are formally distinct from the field of technical aesthetics insofar as they are concerned directly with the role of aesthetics at the point of production.

Ovsiannikov is quoted as asserting that the task of production aesthetics is to “research the rules of artistic creation and their aesthetic regularities in order to widely apply aesthetics to the technical fields of production and life” (Tu, 1980: 235). In contradistinction, Egorov is understood to resist the formulations of technical aesthetics and production aesthetics, arguing instead that the aesthetic dimensions of industrial labor should be understood as the central concerns of Marxist aesthetic theory as such. This is theorized under the heading “Labor Aesthetics,” whose concern, in Tu’s quotation, lies in

aesthetics and the labor conditions of socialist society, the aesthetic methods of the labor process; labor as a form of aesthetic experience, the sources of aesthetic taste and the development of aesthetic capacity; the relations between aesthetics and ethics in labor, the aesthetic stimulation aroused by material incentives to labor; the aesthetic culture of labor, conditions of production and the work environment together with the productive power of labor (the relations between aesthetics, economics and labor organization, and so on; people’s aesthetic grasp of nature and “man-made” materials; estimations of increasing aesthetic needs in the production of industrial goods; the economic efficiency of artistic design; labor activity and aesthetics education). (Tu, 1980: 236)

The upshot of Tu’s article was to introduce readers to the prospect of an aesthetic transformation of the production process as part of a larger expansion of the scope of aesthetics into the sectors of everyday life. His article may well be seen as forming a pair together with that of Liu Ning’s “Certain Questions in the Debates in Soviet Aesthetics over the 1950s and 1960s” (Liu, 1983), which, in considerably greater detail than Tu’s article, traversed the debates between the “social” and “natural” theories of beauty that had also structured the Chinese debates of the same period. Yet, like Tu, Liu was also eager to locate the site of difference in the form of those currents of Soviet thought that had arisen in the interim between the immediate post-Stalinist context of the 1950s and the present of the 1980s. He stressed, like Tu, that there had emerged a radical expansion in the scope of those sectors of life that fall within the aesthetic:

Since the 1960s, Soviet aesthetics has exhibited a trend toward expanding the field of the objects of aesthetics. Nedošvin’s definition of the object of aesthetics has been criticized as “excessively narrow.” L. Il’ičev in his report “The Scientific Basis for Leading Social Development” stated that the “science of aesthetics should not disregard human labor, human everyday life, and other related aesthetic questions. While the question of the object of aesthetics has long been posed, it has often been resolved in too narrow, too abstract a fashion, in a manner divorced from praxis. (Liu, 1983: 163)

There follows a series of quotes from Egorov himself, drawn from the identical passages that had already figured in Tu’s account.

Unlike Tu, Liu Ning did not reserve a separate section of his article for technical aesthetics in particular, but investigated these problems in the final section, appropriately entitled “Concerning Aesthetic Education” 关于美育问题. He suggested that the development of the new human through the capacities of aesthetic education was said, like the expansion of the scope of aesthetics, to have emerged as a specific feature of aesthetic discourse in the 1960s, such that “since the 1960s, the Soviet aesthetic sphere has increasingly emphasized the function of aesthetic education in the cultivation of an all-round, harmonious, and developed individuality, and in the full development of the creative abilities of the human being” (Liu, 1983: 199). The varied discussions over the appropriate methods for this education, Liu argues, have included the question of the imminent possibilities of the production process itself, which comprise the concern of labor aesthetics:

Apart from the questions of the education of aesthetic ideals and aesthetic taste, and that of artistic education, the Soviet aesthetic sphere has increasingly emphasized the question of aesthetic education in the course of productive labor, as there are many aesthetic theorists who have argued that labor under communist conditions undergoes a fundamental change, whereby it comes to possess an aesthetic character, and these aesthetic elements are able in turn to spur and increase the productivity of labor. Thus, labor is an important method for cultivating an all-round and harmonious individuality, and so too is it an important constituent component and channel of aesthetic education. (Liu, 1983: 204)

The extended quotations and paraphrases that follow include, again, Egorov’s understanding of the changed aesthetic content of communist labor. So too, in this extract, does Liu paraphrase Egorov’s discussion on the theme of the distinction between “artistic culture” and “aesthetic culture,” according to which, in Liu’s summary, “artistic culture is a constituent part of aesthetic culture but it is not the totality, as varied kinds of creative activity can all, to varying degrees, follow the ‘laws of beauty,’ the laws of aesthetic activity” (Liu, 1983: 206). In these terms, therefore, the elucidation of the Soviet conceptual vocabulary of “aesthetic culture” in tandem with the visions of production aesthetics provided the justification for a generalized process of aesthetic education. ⁸

The incipient themes introduced in summary form by both Tu and Liu coalesced in 1982 in the first full-length text to deal specifically with the aesthetic dimensions of the production process as they emerged from Soviet aesthetic theory, namely Liu Ning’s translation of Ovsiannikov’s text Aesthetics (Aofuxiangnikefu, 1982), which derived from a Soviet teaching manual on aesthetic theory. Both the opening chapter and the crucial second chapter—appearing under the names “Communist Construction and the Aesthetic Education of the Soviet People” 共产主义建设与苏联人民的美育 and “Production Aesthetics” 生产美学—gave Chinese readers direct access to contemporary Soviet ideas on the aestheticization of production. Ovsiannikov presented his concerns within the framework of the transformation of the contents of labor under socialist conditions, whereby “in socialist society, the content, character, and significance and function of labor within the life of the people undergo a fundamental change,” in which “aesthetics enters the field of labor, making the amalgamation of labor and beauty a pressing question” (Aofuxiangnikefu, 1982: 3). The significance of production aesthetics, then, is as a new field of learning, one whose contents Ovsiannikov listed in detail:

In the first place, production aesthetics researches the mutual relations between labor and aesthetics, and spurs on the development of aesthetic sensations amid labor. Second, given that all forms of labor are undertaken in a definite material environment in relations of mutual influence with human beings, production aesthetics will put forward proposals for creating the most ideal labor conditions in concert with other new fields of learning. Finally, it will scientifically formulate the aesthetic design of industrial goods with respect to both manufacturing and daily use, and seek to produce goods that are perfect in aesthetic terms. (Aofuxiangnikefu, 1982: 18)

The import of this field of knowledge, Ovsiannikov noted, was the transformation of the production process as the basis for an imminent process of aesthetic education. Given the extended durations of time human beings spend in the course of labor, he argued, “aesthetic education in the production process has a significance of the utmost importance. An environment of labor that is totally in accord with aesthetic requirements is one of the conditions for cultivating tastes of appreciation toward beautiful and refined things, as well as developing aesthetic capacity and training a lofty conduct” (Aofuxiangnikefu, 1982: 23).

The early translation in 1982 of this text was accompanied, in 1986, by the proliferation of a further range of texts which, without exception, recapitulated Tu Wusheng’s 1981 introduction to the major Soviet theoreticians of the aestheticization of labor. Thus, the translation in 1986 of Anatoly Egorov’s Problems of Aesthetics (Yegeluofu, 1986), partly by none other than Liu Ning himself, offered Chinese readers a further theoretical development of the conceptual vocabulary of the relations between labor and aesthetics, including an attempted disentanglement of the varied terms of technical aesthetics, production aesthetics, and labor aesthetics. Moreover, this text also provided the quotations that had proven so key for Tu’s and Liu’s earlier introductions of the conceptual vocabulary of technical and labor aesthetics. Egorov’s preference for the term labor aesthetics was predicated on a commitment to the subjectivity of the laborer as distinct from the merely external dimensions of the physical tools deployed in the course of labor. The basic concern of labor aesthetics, then, was said to lie in the “beauty of the immediate labor process itself” (Yegeluofu, 1986: 80). Yet so too did Egorov stress that

the beauty of machines and factory workshops should not be seen as the aim in itself. Rather, this is merely a kind of method by which one can most fully express and develop the aesthetic capacity of human beings amid labor, as well as raising labor productivity and the enjoyment of labor (here, aesthetics is integrated with economics and ethics). So too is the beauty of machines, the factory, and the environment of people’s lives and labor an important, powerful method of spurring individual development. (Yegeluofu, 1986: 80–81)

Egorov also positioned himself against any strict identification of the human subject or the concerns of labor aesthetics with the role of the consumer, such that “labor aesthetics does not only regard the human as a passive consumer who knows the enjoyment of aesthetically rich objects and products created by others, but is instead an active agent who conducts creation in accordance with the ‘laws of beauty’ and satisfies their own pressing needs in the course of labor” (Yegeluofu, 1986: 81). On this basis, Egorov, as Tu had already noted prior to the translation of Egorov’s text into Chinese, postulated that the descriptive terms “technical aesthetics” and “production aesthetics” were fundamentally inadequate. The total import of labor aesthetics, then, for Egorov, lay in the total aestheticization of social life itself:

Aesthetic questions, including those related to production, have never before occupied such an important position in our lives. Never before have there been such expansive conditions to aestheticize the environment in which we conduct life and labor, so that each may become more joyous. As labor becomes pleasure, so too will all things connected with labor—from the factory buildings, the tools and machines, all the way down to the clothing of workers—all come to make people experience joy. When labor becomes a kind of creative activity in which all have the courage to think and do, then this kind of creative activity will not only produce beautiful products, but will itself in fundamental terms, be beautiful. (Yegeluofu, 1986: 108)

The translation of this decisive text was accompanied in the same year by the translation (Baoliefu, 1986) of Yuri Borev’s Aesthetics (Estetika, 1981) under the aegis of the Aesthetics Translations Series 美学译文丛书 edited by Li Zehou. These were followed in turn by the eventual publication in 1988 of a translation of Lydia Novikova’s Labor and Art under the Chinese title Labor Aesthetics (Nuoweikewa, 1988), effectively ensuring that all the major book-length texts concerning production aesthetics published under Soviet developed socialism were available to Chinese aestheticians. In the interstices of these texts, therefore, there arose a number of Chinese-led publications dealing specifically with these questions. They did so, however, on the basis of the generalized category of technical aesthetics, which therefore came to subsume all manner of concerns stretching across product design to the aesthetic dimensions of the labor process.

As part of this process, provincial-level organizations were formed to organize research into topics of technical aesthetics. Key among these was the Anhui Provincial Technical Aesthetics Research Council 安徽省技术美学研究会, which, having been formed in May 1983, assisted the publication in the same year of the first (and apparently only) issue of the journal Technical Aesthetics 技术美学. In September 1984, a special discussion forum on the subject of technical aesthetics was held in Beijing. These developments marked the stabilization of technical aesthetics as part of Chinese aesthetic discourse.

Quixotically, in the first issue of Technical Aesthetics, Tu Wusheng published articles under two separate names. The first, entitled “The Emergence and Rise of Technical Aesthetics” (Tu Wusheng, 1983), was concerned with design as it pertained to the production of consumer goods. It traversed a trajectory of development from John Ruskin and William Morris through Bauhaus and up to developments in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, with the emphasis on the refinement of consumer goods as a global development in the postwar era. The second, entitled “Technical Aesthetics and the Construction of Material and Spiritual Civilization” (Tu Tu, 1983), published under the pseudonym Tu Tu, however, sought to envisage an integrated conception of technical aesthetics as a discipline that “specifically researches the productive labor of the human and the questions of beauty in all technical fields related to it. As this discipline was initially applied to industrial production, it has also been referred to as industrial aesthetics, production aesthetics, or labor aesthetics” (Tu Tu, 1983: 19).

In this frame, then, the application of technical aesthetics was stretched well beyond any narrow conception of the product to encompass what might, in other contexts, have been treated as distinct, discrete disciplines of aesthetics. Tu recognized the variegated content of technical aesthetics, and argued that, insofar as questions of product design fell within its scope, they did so as a result of the elaboration of new consumer needs that could not be restricted to the purely functional dimensions of products, such that “after mankind entered into civilized society, at the same time as humans possessed material needs, so too did there emerge intense spiritual needs. With the development and progress of society, these two sets of needs became increasingly interlinked with each other” (Tu Tu, 1983: 20). To the demand for products combining beauty and function, however, Tu added a more extended emphasis on the production process itself, formulated with specific reference to the vocabulary of the 1844 Manuscripts that had informed the consolidation of labor humanism in the period immediately prior:

Moreover, from the perspective of the process of labor activity in itself, there is also the question of how to conduct this activity “in accordance with the laws of beauty.” The difference between human labor and the instinctive life activity of animals lies in the fact that human labor is a conscious, planned, aimful activity with a social character. [I]t is a unique, conscious, intelligent activity. In the course of productive labor, the human must conduct active creation in accordance with the laws and rules of beauty. (Tu Tu, 1983: 20–21)

The aestheticization of the conditions of labor ultimately resolved, for Tu, into the spatial dimensions of labor, namely, the factory environment itself. To this end, he suggested that the beautification of the factory at the point of production would engender the conditions for an imminent aesthetic education: “Yet more important is that when people work and labor for long periods of time in an environment that has undergone aestheticization, not only is this of benefit for their bodily health, so too will they undergo a subliminal process of aesthetic education and modification, one that will greatly increase their cultivation and spiritual level. Thus, technical aesthetics also relates to the questions of aesthetic education and the aestheticization of society as a whole” (Tu Tu, 1983: 24). The effect, Tu writes, will be to expand the process of aesthetic education beyond the delimited artwork that once comprised the primary object of aesthetics itself: “At the same time as we emphasize the function of art and literature in the process of aesthetics, so too should sufficient recognition be given of the aesthetic education that arises in the course of productive labor, work and study, daily life, and every dimension of society” (Tu Tu, 1983: 24).

The year 1986 witnessed the first full-length Chinese books on technical aesthetics, namely, Tu Wusheng’s The Flower of Modern Science: Technical Aesthetics (Tu, 1986) and The Light of Science and Technology (Ling and Zhang, 1986), co-authored by Ling Jiyao and Zhang Xianglun. This year also witnessed the first (and, again, seemingly only) issue of the Tianjin-based journal Technical Aesthetics and Industrial Design 技术美学与工业设计丛刊, which, to a yet greater extent than the 1983 Anhui-based journal Technical Aesthetics, drew from international influences and histories of product design, as well as Soviet texts dealing with the aesthetic dimensions of the production space. ⁹

Much of the significance of this issue, however, lies in the way it marked the growing legitimacy of technical aesthetics within the Chinese theoretical field, in that it carried an article from no less than Li Zehou, in the form of an interview. ¹⁰ In answering the question of how technical aesthetics should orientate itself, Li’s response marks not only his personal attentiveness to 1980s aesthetic trends, but also the moves toward the operationalization of technical aesthetics that had gathered pace in the 1980s, above all in the form of an envisaged redistribution of authority and expertise at the site of production, whereby engineering technicians and industrial designers would cooperate in the improvement of industrial design. With respect to the production process itself, Li envisaged the application of technical aesthetics as follows:

How the design of certain machines can raise their efficiency entails the question of their applicability to human psychology and physiology, just as the design of factories and the environment poses questions of engineering psychology and labor psychology. These kinds of questions are precisely related to questions of aesthetics. Moreover, with respect to the organization and socialization of production, so too is there the question of how to deploy the laws of beauty (such as cadence and rhythm). (Li, 1986a: 10)

Li’s envisaging of the tasks of technical aesthetics here is characterized by the emergent doubleness of the figure of the human, as both the philosophical subject of a Marxist aesthetic discourse but also as the object of knowledge under the guise of the human sciences (in this case, psychology). It also discloses, moreover, how the developmental figure of the human, so central to Li’s interventions across his writings, was also folded into the spatial dimensions of the production space—namely, the design of factories and the production environment, to which Li alludes—in ways that will become clear in the following section.

In close tandem with these developments, the journal Art and Literature Research 文艺研究, which played a critical role in introducing new ideas about culture throughout the 1980s, published, in its sixth issue of 1986, a series of articles devoted specifically to the question of technical aesthetics, namely, Zhang Fan’s “The Object and Function of Technical Aesthetics” (Zhang, 1986), Li Zehou’s “Talking about Technical Aesthetics” (Li, 1986b), and Xu Hengchun’s “Opening Up the Kingdom of Beauty in the Real World” (Xu, 1986). These three writers had each, to varying degrees, been part of discussions earlier in the decade around Marx’s humanist texts, with Xu, for example, being the translator of both Friedrich Schiller and Georg Lukács. Zhang Fan’s article “Object and Function” was, within this set of interventions, particularly noteworthy for its insistence that the category of technical aesthetics should range across the design facets of consumption goods as well as the aesthetic dimensions of the labor process. He recognized the diversity of understandings over the proper scope of technical aesthetics, noting that

there are different views among scholars as to the actual point of departure for industrial design, with some taking as their sole point of departure the quest for victory and profit in market competition between commodities, such that industrial design is reduced to the artistic design of the consumption goods of daily life, whereas there are others who expand from the sphere of consumption to the sphere of production, arguing that industrial design also encompasses the means of production, such as instruments, machines, the transportation apparatus as well as the beautification of the conditions of labor and the environment. (Zhang, 1986: 9)

Zhang insists on the need for an integrated understanding that will reflect the different practices of the human under conditions of developed socialism:

Humans are not only consumers, they are, in the first place, producers. The aesthetic activity of human beings does not only take place in the sphere of consumption and life, it is, in the first place, and most fundamentally, in the sphere of the production of material resources of life. According to Marx’s perspective, consumption and production are indivisible from one another, such that one cannot talk about either in the absence of the other. (Zhang, 1986: 9)

Reprising this key point, Zhang goes on to insist that “under all conditions, human beings are engaged in the mutual functions of production and consumption; they live amid the mutual interchange of these activities, the era of mechanization being no exception.” This being so, “Industrial design is not only the form of aesthetic activity of the sphere of life and consumption, so too is it the form of aesthetic activity of the sphere of production” (Zhang, 1986: 10). As a consequence, “Technical aesthetics assumes an active function in aestheticizing the conditions of labor, organizing civilized production, and raising the productivity of labor” (Zhang, 1986: 12–13).

Zhang’s integrated conception of the tasks and functions of technical aesthetics resolves itself, at the end of his article, into a recourse to the familiar vocabulary of the humanization of nature and aesthetic education. The imminent experience of material production is said to take priority over the capacities of the work of art as the site for the fashioning of the new socialist laborer. In Zhang’s vocabulary, therefore, “The feelings, ideas, and sentiments of human beings, including aesthetic sentiments, are ultimately developed and formed in the sphere of material production, [and] thus, the process of aesthetic education that takes place amid the sphere of material life is the basis of aesthetic education as such” (Zhang, 1986: 15). To this extent, Zhang asserts, in a remarkable reconfiguration of Soviet-inflected vocabulary concerning the functions of the work of art, that the industrial designer assumes the role of “an engineer of the soul in aesthetic education” (Zhang, 1986: 15).

The shared concern across the major articles of Tu and Zhang for a generalized process of aesthetic education that will extend to the site of production marked the extension and elaboration of those ideas that had already been introduced under the authority of Egorov and others. These currents also received a decisive echo from Li Zehou. In his 1987 article “Aesthetic Education and Technical Aesthetics” (Li, 1987), with which this article began, Li explicitly linked the conceptual vocabulary of his Marxist humanism from the beginning of the decade to technical aesthetics:

The present problem is the amalgamation of modern life and production (large-scale industry). The reason that I hold problems such as technical aesthetics and the beauty of urban environments in such regard, and why I believe that literary aesthetics and philosophical aesthetics are of great importance, is, in one respect, because they are concerned with the great question of the material and spiritual life of the people, but so too is it related to my own fundamental views on aesthetics. In the 1950s Chinese aesthetics began to discuss the problem of beauty and there were different positions as to the question of the essence of beauty. I emphasized that the essence of beauty is the unity of human praxis and the rule-bound content of objective nature, which is to say the humanization of nature. This is my summation of the essence of beauty. (Li, 1987: 4–5)

Li went on to posit that “humans grasp the rules of objective nature through labor praxis, through production. The foremost form of activity within praxis is the practice of labor.” Labor, then “is technique, [and] therefore the beauty of technique is directly related to the essence of beauty. [I]t is the core and foundation of social beauty, far greater than natural beauty or artistic beauty” (Li, 1987: 5). Li’s language in this late 1980s text is remarkable for the way it directly stages the structure of repetition within a difference surrounding the figure of the human as a trope of 1950s philosophical discourse and the emergence of Soviet technical aesthetics in the 1980s, whereby he explicitly extends the formulation of labor praxis as the basis of beauty into the province of labor aesthetics. The authorizing category of the human would, at precisely this juncture, also pass into the reconstruction of factory space, and in doing so would also expand its scope from being the philosophical subject of Marxist humanism to being the object of knowledge on the part of the resurgent human sciences.

Coloring the Factory

The operationalization of Soviet-authored concepts of production aesthetics and the beautification of labor came to rest on the quotidian question of the spatial dimensions of the postrevolutionary factory. The most persistent practical discussions around the crafting of a postsocialist factory space arose as part of the discourses of industrial architecture, specifically in the two theoretical journals, The Architect 建筑师 and Industrial Architecture 工业建筑. The proposals that theorists advanced for the reconfiguration of the factory in the interests of a humanist imaginary of labor were wide-ranging, each inviting consideration on their own terms: the introduction, for example, of pleasing music on the shopfloor, the “greenification” 绿化 of factories via the integration of industrial buildings with green spaces, and the inventive use of color in the different spaces of the enterprise.

The specific content of these measures, together with the theoretical discourse to which they owned their theoretical justification, can in fact be traced directly to Ovsiannikov’s recommendations for how the aesthetic significance of the factory would be transformed under socialism. In his text Aesthetics, which, as explored above, was among the earliest Soviet aesthetic treatises translated into Chinese in the 1980s, under the heading “The Beauty of the Conditions of Labor” 劳动条件的美, Ovsiannikov directly introduced color as part of the aesthetic dimensions of the production space:

In the creation of a regular environment of labor, color and illumination have a special position because they can stimulate or stabilize people’s nervous systems and psychological states, and in doing so increase or raise their work productivity. In order for labor to become happier and richer in productivity, it is necessary to eliminate any drab atmosphere at the site of production that is liable to make people lose spirit, and instead to make it so that the site of production has sufficient light and appropriate colors. (Aofuxiangnikefu, 1982: 26)

He went on to suggest that the walls, floorboards, ceiling, tools, and machines of the factory should be painted so as to generate a sufficient “visual contrast” 视力对比 to maintain a positive psychological and physiological state of the workforce. The ameliorative possibilities of color across the different surfaces and spaces of the factory marked, Ovsiannikov argued, the coalescing of aesthetics and the human sciences, and so “this is why when it comes to designers and artists creating a new kind of machine, they must consult physiologists and psychologists, and keep in mind the ‘element of color’” (Aofuxiangnikefu, 1982: 28). In addition to the effective use of color and illumination, Ovsiannikov further emphasized the effective use of music as an accompaniment to work, as well as the greenification of factories via the insertion of green spaces into their spatial structure (Aofuxiangnikefu, 1982: 33–35). These measures, for Ovsiannikov, together marked the conditions for an imminent process of aesthetic education that was conditioned by the spatial environment of labor itself. They were repeated, to a lesser extent, in other Soviet-authored texts on technical aesthetics that circulated in China. In Egorov’s Aesthetic Problems, he similarly quoted a plan for the “civilization of machine manufacturing enterprises,” which proposed the “use of different shades of green, because green is least liable to make the eyes experience fatigue” (Yegeluofu, 1986: 102).

To the same effect, Liu Ning, in his 1983 introductory article, also quoted the aesthetician G. A. Obraztsov to the effect that “in addition to illumination, the external colors of walls, machines, and the machine array all condition the physiology and psychology of humans. Everyone knows that under conditions in which the air and temperature of different workshops remain the same, different colors can engender completely opposite conditions in the labor process” (Liu, 1983: 204).

The relevance of Ovsiannikov (among others) with respect to the operationalization of Soviet late-socialist aesthetics in the Chinese context may be seen from the extent to which his recommendations for the transformation of the socialist factory passed wholesale into Chinese discussions over the ensuing period, including those concerned with the most technical dimensions of factory design. That this was so may be seen not least of all in the proliferation of recommendations for the greenification of factories, in which tropes of environmental protection began to make their appearance for the first time in the 1980s. The proposals for the greenification of factories were also distinguished by some of the most extensive theorization concerning the relationship between the reconstruction of labor along humanist lines and the reorganization of factory space itself.

Writing in “Factory Greenification and Architectural Environment” in 1983, Lin Shumei (1983) envisaged the greenification of these factories as follows:

In certain overseas factories, following the increase in the level of science and environmental protection technology, there have emerged certain “field” or “garden” factories, and so has there been holistic research into the physiology, psychology, labor postures, and physical energy expenditure of workers in conjunction with productivity and other such dimensions, raising the problem of the environment to a very high position. Gardeners, designers, and color engineers have entered into factory design, working together to create a beautiful factory environment. (Lin, 1983: 21)

In this connection, Lin posed the issue of the fundamental task of the factory, to be conceived of in terms irreducible to strictly economic formulations of production: “In the first place, the factory cannot be seen as a simple amalgamation of humans and machines, or as a site of production in which labor is expended in exchange for goods” (Lin, 1983: 21).

Yet more significant is that Lin’s article presented a detailed theorization of the reorganization of the factory space that could be engendered through greenification and the other operational elements of technical aesthetics, as conceived from the position of the phenomenological experience of the worker:

As the human moves through the architectural space, so too does the environment undergo spatial and temporal changes in accordance with the movement and the pauses of the human, this being what we call “four-dimensional” space. The discrimination of the human toward space, moreover, is conducted according to a three-dimensional coordinate system, and so, within the parameters of visual space, it is necessary that the architectural space possess a clear orientation. ¹¹ (Lin, 1983: 22)

The effectivity of the humanization of factories through the uses of greenification, then, Lin posited, lay in the way these measures could orientate the worker in factory space, especially at the level of visual perspective as the precondition for bodily movement. The concentration of visual and scenic elements around a point, for example, would “focus the line of sight of people, and constitute a motive force by means of association and concepts of mechanics, thereby eliciting people’s circulatory intent and drawing them toward a goal” (Lin, 1983: 22). In the same terms as the capacity of these aesthetic devices to elicit movement and distinguish spaces within the factory from each other, so too, Lin said, could they extend and link spaces, above all in the integration of the factory space with the surrounding natural environment, which Lin posed as a basis on which to reduce the effects of fatigue from extended labor (Lin, 1983: 23).

If, through greenification, Chinese attempts to operationalize labor aesthetics in the 1980s mark a direct allegiance to recommendations derived from Ovsiannikov, then so too at a methodological and conceptual level did the persistent allegiance to Ovsiannikov’s recommendations also mark the extent to which the Marxist figure of the human as the subject of creative labor at the site of production also come to occupy a shared discursive space and even merge with the figure of the “human” as an object of reinvented psychological sciences. The figure of the human, then, emerged as the point of intersection and shared theoretical reference for a range of fields of knowledge production in the early reform period, all of which were ultimately functional to the postsocialist modernization project.

The reintroduction of the psychological sciences at this juncture displayed a persistent interest in the problem of “color” as a basis on which to imagine a human possessed of sensory capacities that were both universal at the level of physiology and also open to education under the guise of aesthetics. Here, too, the theoretical authority of the Soviet Union made itself felt in granting a vocabulary of psychological science that intersected with technical aesthetics in its orientation toward the subject of industrial production. Thus the text Industrial Psychology (Promyshlennaya psikhologiya) by Vladimir Grigorevich Loos, first published in the Soviet Union in 1974 and thereafter translated into Chinese in 1985 (Laosi, 1985), theorized the psychological properties of color in industrial settings as follows:

Workers should be able to experience the beneficial influence of color throughout the factory. Regardless of where workers might be in the enterprise, everywhere should give them this kind of effect. In the first place, the placement of color in the workshop has exceptional importance. The matching of the colors of the walls, apparatus, work platforms, propaganda bulletins, uniforms, corridors, and floorboards can equip the workshop with a beautiful color environment and atmosphere. (Laosi, 1985: 178)

In the same terms, he suggested that the use of color could also transform and orientate the spatial dimensions of architectural spaces, above all the factory: “From the perspective of visuality, the use of color can allow a room to appear larger or smaller in scope, such that color can provide people with an impression of ‘protrusion’ or ‘contraction’” (Laosi, 1985: 176).

To this extent, reading across Chinese and Soviet sources and the differentiated aesthetic possibilities of greenification and the use of color, there emerges a common concern with how the psychological adjustment of the subject of labor can also engender a new spatial experience and imaginary of the factory, humanizing the factory space itself. These theoretical references concerning color, originating as part of a refounded discourse of the psychological sciences, came, in turn, to inform the further articulation of labor aesthetics in Chinese visions of the factory, whereby the strategic use of color in the factory was granted almost utopian capacities in its ability to transform the psychological state of laborers and invest labor with a humanist significance.

Wang Yuanqin’s article “Factory Design and Technical Aesthetics: Briefly Discussing the Rational Principles of Color Expression in the Factory” (Wang, 1987) in the journal Industrial Architecture made an explicit appeal to technical aesthetics as that field of knowledge concerned with the “function of the aesthetic element in the different stages of the production process,” including “the appropriate aestheticization of the machine array and instruments of labor, with the creation of the production environment of the workshop, the plant and the whole factory environment, and the full development of the different aesthetic elements of the production process in their active influence on the producers” (Wang, 1987: 1). To this end, Wang insisted, “Different colors can produce different reactions under specific conditions, so that the correct application of the laws of color will not only reduce human visual fatigue, increase their capacity and speed of visual discrimination, and guarantee the safety of production and operation, so too will it have the effect of aestheticizing the production environment” (Wang, 1987: 2).

In the same issue of Industrial Architecture in which Wang’s article appeared, there appeared three further striking articles that engaged specifically with the use of color as part of the aestheticization of production space: “The Interior Environment of Industrial Buildings” 工业建筑物内部环境, “Color Design in Industrial Building” 工业建筑的色彩设计, and “Concerning Color in the Rooms of Industrial Buildings” 论工业建筑室内的色彩. ¹² Across these publications, there emerged a discernible trend toward the combination of tropes from the Marxist humanist language of creative labor that had proven of such key significance at the beginning of the decade and the increasingly hegemonic language of industrial psychology.

Most instructive in this regard is the writing of Liu Yongde 刘永德, who emerged as one of the most important writers on the operationalization of factory aesthetics. His extended article “The Application of Environmental Psychology to Industrial Architecture Design” (Liu, 1987) marks, at the level of title and content, the most explicit confluence of aesthetics and psychology in the interests of envisaging the postsocialist factory. Liu appealed to a humanist-derived vocabulary to underscore the need to “humanize” factory environments according to technical aesthetics: “Through creative, productive activity, the human constantly undergoes a transformation from being ‘a thing in itself’ into a ‘thing for itself,’ and only in so doing can their labor become ‘free, conscious activity.’” Thus, “in the design of the factory environment, the creation of the material environment should inspire workers to act as the masters in the spiritual realm” (Liu, 1987: 16). He listed the characteristics of the un-aestheticized factory as follows: “Monotonous stimulation is a form of punishment in disguise. A monotonous sonic environment, monotonous color, and monotonous sources of light, dull and repetitive motions of labor, environmental scenery lacking in interest, activity content that lacks any rhythm of labor and rest, all of these comprise a monotonous form of stimulation, and can easily engender excessive fatigue” (Liu, 1987: 16).

The transformation of worker psychology through the power of aesthetics reached its final conclusion with the publication at the end of the decade of the compendium The Architectural Space and Environmental Design of the Modern Factory (Liu, 1989), of which Liu was the author. This volume is conspicuous as an amalgamation of the themes of greenification and the beneficial use of color that had proven so central to Chinese usages of Soviet technical aesthetics, with entire chapters devoted to the themes of greenification and the use of color in the enterprise. So too at a methodological and epistemological level does this volume disclose the way that the invocation of the Marxist-humanist philosophical subject could shift quite easily into the human as the empirical object of the human sciences. In the crucial opening chapter, therefore, Liu predictably quotes humanist language, joined to a developmentalist vision of socialism:

In the present, we inhabit an era characterized by a high level of scientific and technological development, a growing abundance of material goods, and soaring increases in wisdom and culture. Whether it be with respect to the social environment or the material standard of living, mankind already possesses sufficient capacity and conditions for the transformation of our own environment of subsistence, and has also entered into the stratum of needs concerning beauty and aesthetic education. (Liu, 1989: 10)

Thus the high socialist factory would come to assume a multivalent significance, centered around the human as the subject of creative labor:

The productive environment of the factory is the site of labor in which workers produce material wealth and offer contributions to spur on social material civilization and spiritual civilization. In the socialist system where there is no exploitation, the productive labor of workers should be a form of free, creative activity, they should undertake labor as a meaningful mission, and be attracted by the content, means, methods, and results of labor, such that “he enjoys labor as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers.” (Liu, 1989: 12)

The adoption in these contexts of a resolutely humanist language is, however, quickly displaced by a modulation of the category of the human in which it is taken over by the vocabulary and methods of those human sciences that had also legitimated earlier references to the concrete dimensions behind the beautification of the factory. Liu writes in relation to the changed conceptions behind the role of the human in production and the tasks of industrial design:

The “human” is not an abstract term, but rather has specific physiological and psychological features, is possessed of feelings, a will, aims, ideals, and so do the members of society who are able to throw themselves into praxis for the sake of realizing anticipated goals. Humans conduct temporal and spatial movement within a definite social environment and environment of subsistence, and so too do they engage in meaningful activities. They cannot, in these terms, be replaced by any machine. In the factory, the activation of people’s enthusiasm for labor and their technical level and the level of production efficiency are not only determined by the [innate] quality of their thinking and service, so too are they greatly conditioned by the quality of the production environment, conditions of production, and the extent to which this environment satisfies human needs. (Liu, 1989: 15)

The envisaging of both the human and the spatial environment of the factory in wholly psychological terms marks the extent to which the humanist discourse of the 1980s as it emerged in connection with the factory under the aegis of Soviet technical aesthetics contained the conditions for its own total depoliticization and subordination to the reform-era modernization project. The intellectual sources that lay behind this modulation as given in Liu’s texts surpassed the legitimating resources of Soviet industrial psychology and instead drew on the contemporaneous fad for behavioral psychology, specifically the American psychologist Abraham Maslow:

The American humanist psychologist Maslow believes that the needs and desires of the human are organized hierarchically into five levels, and that their law of development is a gradual transition from the lower to the higher. This is to say that after the basic needs that people have for clothing, food, residence, movement, and health have been assured, there emerge needs for security, and then social needs for mutual respect, love, and interaction, and then on to the psychology of gaining mental education, aesthetic education, maintaining reputation and position, each emerging one after the other. (Liu, 1989: 16)

The postulation, via Maslow, of human needs that are governed according to a set of psychological laws and organized into a hierarchical sequence, and which necessitate the aestheticization of the factory so that higher level needs for aesthetic education might be met, provides here an ironic gesture toward the figure of the “laws of beauty” that had informed theoretical accounts of Marxist humanism. If that figure, operating as it did as the basis for a distinction between the human and the animal, as well as the developmental trajectory of human sense perception, contained its imminent possibilities for recuperation according to the demands of the reform process, then the end of the decade marked a transition toward immutable psychological “laws” that provided an empirical knowledge of the human from the perspective of the factory site and the aestheticization of productive labor. The “human” had become—and was, to a considerable extent, always—the privileged ideological sign of the postsocialist modernization project that inaugurated China’s sharp shift away from revolutionary politics.

Conclusion: The Necessity of Critique

The modulation in the content of the “human” from a subject given by the terms of Marxist humanist philosophy to the object of knowledge through the discourses of the newly emergent human sciences stages at an epistemological level the ease with which Marxist humanism in the 1980s could, under the aegis of new discourses of Soviet aesthetics, be made functional with the reform process itself. To this extent, humanism rested on and enabled the wholesale rejection of the radically different theoretical logic that informed the problems of labor, aesthetics, and the factory in the preceding high Maoist period, that is, precisely the period that intervened between the two humanist philosophical moments of the 1950s and 1980s.

The theoretical logic of that earlier period can be summarized to the effect that communist labor, as understood during the high Maoist years, was defined not according to an aesthetic logic of humanist plenitude in which labor would be conducted in accordance with the “laws of beauty,” but rather in terms of the need to supersede the imminently capitalist social forms that continued to operate under socialism, consisting of commodity production, wage labor, and the value form. It is, then, not at all a contradiction to observe that the humanist aestheticization of labor in the 1980s coincided in historical as well as in political terms with the resurgent hegemony of precisely those capitalist logics that the revolutionary period had sought, unsuccessfully, to abolish. With the collapse in the 1990s of the Soviet intellectual space that had legitimated the humanist, aesthetic concerns of the preceding decade, so too would the Chinese model of accumulation shift in the direction of the privatization and pulverization of the early postsocialist factory.

The political logic of humanism over the first decade of the reform era lay, then, in removing the factory from the scene of politics (i.e., class struggle) and relocating it within a depoliticized logic of aesthetics. All of this and more necessitate a wariness against the seductive logic of humanism, across its multiple moments of emergence, from the 1950s to the 1980s. The coincidence between humanism and the ultimate retreat of revolutionary politics in the 1980s marks the political and theoretical necessity of invoking, with Dai Jinhua, the primacy of politics in the Maoist conception of socialism—namely, class politics—as that which is fundamentally irreducible to any figure of the human (Kindler, 2022a, 2022b).