After dinner, I accidentally opened a collection of Zhang Ailing's essays that I bought at a second-hand book stall when I was a child, and the content in the "To the Reader" in front of the text made me feel as if I had traveled back to 30 years ago. Some words, like a fish in the throat, have to be said.
"To the readers.Time is not weightless.
Since the 80s, you must have been under increasing psychological pressure, like an acceleration of a high-altitude fall. With the opening of the door, the landscape of the new era has entered your field of vision: the electronics industry is booming, the philosophy of science is rising, and the traditional disciplines are constantly derived into branch disciplines, marginal disciplines, and a series of new comprehensive disciplines......When this 'Third Wave' is raging, you will find that you do not have an ark, and that you do not have enough knowledge alone to carry a heavy mission. As a result, you are filled with a sense of crisis, and you inevitably have to be in a 'compulsive state'. The passion for change makes you so anxious, you desire, you explore, you try to enrich yourself, develop yourself, realize yourself beyond the boundaries of singularity. You don't want to be a 'one-dimensional' person. Modern man is by no means a 'one-dimensional' person. ”
The times have long since changed inexplicably. This, of course, is characteristic of this era. It abandons many of the things that preceded the Internet era, including ideas, words, ways of thinking, and so on. It is understandable that the wheels of the times always seem to be advancing. But there is one thing that I think is problematic, that is, the current leaders of the ideological trend are not as they were before human civilization, they are all guided by the human elite, and now they are led by the public, and most of the elites have been overthrown, and they have become the "stinky old nine" in the old sense. Some of these are hidden in the world, and they no longer communicate with the public in the same way as before;Some people who are willing to speak out, many of them choose to become recluses because of their problems because they are branded as "public knowledge" (specific negative discourse terms in the Internet age), or because of language jams (because there is no basis for communication and interaction: chickens and ducks talk).
The masses do not lead human civilization. Because human civilization needs height, and the masses are destined to be popular, otherwise they cannot be called "masses". Why geniuses are all crazy just shows that their thinking is very different from ordinary people. A person who is different from most people will naturally be seen as "crazy". These people are the leaders of the ideological trend in human civilization in the past. However, because of the characteristics of the Internet age, there are fewer and fewer such people. This is true all over the world.
About half a year ago, I was chatting with the editor of a domestic literary journal. During the dinner, I deliberately did a test, which was also a prank. After confirming that the other party had not read Wang Xiaobo's "Wanshou Temple", I took a chance to show him some passages from one of Wang Xiaobo's best ** books, and asked him if there was any possibility of publishing this style, he shook his head and said that the text was average, not fluent, and not readable. You know, this editor is the most influential literary journal editor in China!This prank game, I also used it in the ** of a large online platform. I chose the winner of the Mao Dun Literature Award and the former chairman of the Shandong Provincial Federation of Literary and Art Circles, Zhang Wei's famous work "September Fable". At the risk of being accused of infringement, I successively voted for two domestic first-line submission platforms, and the other party said that it was not qualified to sign a contract. Note that rejection is not a cause for infringement.
China seems to have entered an era of lack of literature. It has become a fast food to the point that even ** has become a "non-fiction story" or a "non-literary" story. It's no wonder that when you submit on Douban, you will find an option "Literature and Art**", which is nothing more than "Literature and Art**" = in the traditional sense** and something like that. But looking at the virtual world of this ancient land of China, it has only given such a fig leaf on Douban, and it is still a marginal status of non-mainstream. Mainstream platforms such as China Literature Group, Zhihu, NetEase, Tomato, etc., are only accepted"Stories meet".。This kind of style was placed before the millennium, and it was barely the threshold of legendary literature. But pay attention, the legendary literature at that time really belonged to literature, and there were no literary legendary articles, which were called "stories". Even many of the articles in the "Story Club" at that time were literary enough. But on the other hand, the so-called "**** is not as good as most of the articles in the popular publications "Story Club" and "Story King" for teenagers decades ago. Do you think this is progress in the current era, or is it a step backwards?I can't say it, and I don't dare to say it.
Since the emergence of free-form poetry in the 90s, poetry has completely turned prose (which is considered good) and even the text of the tofu block of the running account into a row of words, and it has automatically become the so-called "poetry". What was once a rhyming modern poetry almost no longer exists. Ancient style poetry seems to be popular because of the current popularity of ancient style, but as everyone knows, most people write ancient poems and don't even understand the most basic plain rhyme, so much so that on the advertising page of a national poetry contest (I saw it a month ago, sorry to forget which one) clearly requires contestants to write poems in strict accordance with the plain rhyme, otherwise it will not be accepted.
I can't help but think of the post-millennium world of calligraphy and contemporary art. I remember in 2015 when I was at the Pompidou Museum in Paris, I participated in the first day of the Sino-French Year Art Exhibition, and I looked at the clumsy calligraphy hanging on the wall, and the performance artists around me who were showing braised beef for everyone to eat, and I felt ashamed. Now the so-called inkjet calligraphers and painters, I have deep doubts about them, can they draw the most basic sketches, write the most neat couplets
Impetus, impatience, restlessness, and disorderly scramble have become more and more pronounced after entering the millennium decade. I used to attribute this to the Internet syndrome of a particular era. I don't mean to point fingers at these, they belong to this time and part of this country. It's as if a lot of people blame the scar literature of the eighties, saying that they are moaning without disease;Accusing the intellectuals of the 80s of literature, saying that the intellectuals were little Jolbuya, hurting the people in the vast number of queued areas;Accusing the vernacular literature of the 90s, saying that they will only smear China and only show China's ugliness and evil to foreign countries. In fact, if we evaluate history from the standpoint and values of the present, instead of going back to the center of history to look at the people and events at that time, basically history is wrong in the eyes of modern people. In my opinion, this is hooliganism. In the same way, I am reluctant to say that the rights and wrongs of the Chinese art world and even society ten years after the millennium are the characteristics given by the times. However, I would like to look back at the 80s and 90s, because people were generally better at that time than they are now.
The 80s was an era of ignorance everywhere, everything was happy, everyone had just come out of the disaster of ten years, they had just entered the new stage of the market, and they were eager and even hungry to contact everything and knowledge that could be accessedIn the nineties, after accumulating a certain amount of basic knowledge, people began to selectively ingest, began to think and reflect, and of course, there were also unique and modern creations and creations that belonged to our own China. As stated in Eileen Chang's little book "To the Reader", everyone has a sense of urgency, a fear of being abandoned by the times at any time, a mission, and a person who is defined as a "one-dimensional" person—a person who, in Marcuse's words, loses the ability to deny, criticize, and transcend.
In the early days of the Internet era, China's virtual world was able to explode and expand with greater acceleration because of the integration of the power accumulated after the first decade. The era of blogs and communities was the most glorious era of the entire Chinese virtual world, such as Yahoo Blog, Sina Blog, Tianya Community, Under the Banyan Tree, Verycd, Xici Hutong and so on. On those, the bursting exchange of various sparks of thought is always reminiscent.
After entering the tenth year of the new century, everything began to change, but not too much. In the twentieth year, everything began to change, completely changed. I can hardly see decent literature, endless whitewater online texts are overwhelming, the collision of ideas does not exist, and free communication is gone. We are always worried about whether we have violated the law, and we are afraid that if we support a certain idea of Western origin is correct, we will be branded as a servile and flattering person, or even a traitor who collaborates with the enemy. Over the years, the positions of those who were once the best thinkers, such as "Yanhuang Chunqiu", "Phoenix Weekly", "Southern Weekly", "Southern ***", etc., have basically all been replaced by editors-in-chief, and those editors-in-chief who were once active and sharp-sharp, have basically been in a bad situation later, and they have all been named "stinky old nine", such as Wu Si and Xiaoshu. But if we think about it on the other hand, if these people are really right when they are denied in batches, is it a refutation that all the decades since the reform and opening up have been wrong, and only now is right?
We now have an argument that because our economy has risen, everything is right for us. But this is the consistent mindset of US imperialism, and it is one of the mindsets that we have despised the US imperialists the most in the past few decades, that is, the "cultural-centric theory".