Abstract
The Art of Useless traces the emergence of middle-class consumer culture in China through analyses of films and other cultural products. The author Calvin Hui contends that the representation of fashion and consumer culture in popular media has contributed to the construction and interpellation of middle-class subjects, situating this process in the context of China’s transformation from revolutionary politics to economic restructuring and global integration. Opening with a discussion of the definitional dilemma of ‘middle-class culture’ in China, the book carefully reviews three major ways of naming such a culture. Particularly interesting, Hui proposes that the new petty bourgeoisie as a class fraction is dependent on the state and capital, transmitting cultural symbols, that is, turning elite culture into widely available popular culture and further spreading middle-class culture. From this perspective, examining cultural products such as films and novels can help to discern the rise of middle-class culture and how these products are symptomatic of the broader social transformation in China.
Chapter 1 demonstrates that artistic and cultural critiques of modern fashion and consumer culture have exposed the problematics of China’s globalization endeavour, juxtaposing the aspirational middle-class fashion imagination and the exploitative nature of mass production and invasive competitiveness driven by the market economy and global capitalism. Focusing on a fashion exhibit titled Useless and a documentary film of the same name that both appeared in 2007, the chapter establishes a foundation for the book as a whole that links middle-class subjects and fashion consumption in a commodity chain of production, consumption, and waste.
Chapters 2 to 4 explore the representations of fashion and consumption in popular cultural productions in three historical periods, offering compelling arguments about the complex relationships between culture, social actors, the state, and capital. In Chapter 2, Hui analyses the film Never Forget (千万不要忘记, dir. Tieli Xie, 1964), which depicts the working-class desire for a fashionable alternative to socialist clothing, to reveal the ambivalent position of fashion and consumption in the Maoist era. For him, this ambivalence is symptomatic of a contradiction in socialist modernity where the revolutionary politics of class struggle was in tension with individuals’ desire for leisure and fashion as the material conditions improved. Thus, during periods when the ideological grip relaxed, expressions of individual desire in Chinese films became more ambivalent.
The market reform era then brought about a rapid reversal and even debunking of the socialist politics of fashion and consumption. Chapter 3 documents the staging of fashion consciousness and consumption widely in films, fashion shows, magazines, and TV series. This process has been highly suggestive for the middle-class consumer culture, which hails gendered and ethnicized subjects in expressions of love, romance, and fashion tastes. Accordingly, fashion and consumption became tightly linked with the state’s withdrawal from class struggle and embrace of economic modernization.
Chapter 4 describes the situation in the new millennium as China further integrates into the international market. Examining a set of visual media representing white-collar work, fashion, and romantic love, Hui describes the teaching, learning, and acquisition of middle-class subjectivities through the consumption of popular cultural products. Chinese middle-class culture has anticipated the emergence of a new social actor – the petty bourgeoise – as, again, a class fraction that the state and capital, in turn, have shaped and overdetermined.
The last two chapters add a more complex and nuanced reading of China’s social transformation manoeuvred by the state and capital through the discussion of fashion labour and waste. The aspirational and glamorous middle-class imaginations are largely undergirded by alienated migrant labour (Chapter 5) and the accumulation of disposable objects (Chapter 6). The examination of documentaries on these topics acutely emphasizes the role of gendered, ethnicized, and disciplinary labour in buttressing China’s integration into world capitalism and that the desire for fashion commodities, as collective yearning, reveals both the productive and the cruel sides of consumption. Moreover, Hui’s psychoanalysis of a film about waste resulting from excessive production and consumption unfolds a utopian lifeworld in which rubbish marks a departure from the capitalist consumer mentality in globalizing China.
Rich in theoretical engagement, The Art of Useless vividly demonstrates the correspondence of the changes in national culture and social actors with the ideological and economic interests of the state and capital in post-socialist China. The book offers original insights into the interactions between culture and subject formation, the aspiration and cruelty of consumption, and the temporal-spatial (re)organization of national culture and local, national, and transnational capitalism. It will be of interest to researchers and students involved in cultural studies, fashion studies, Chinese cinema, media studies, cultural criticism, and critical analyses of media and gender.