From emotionalism to post-emotionalism

From emotionalism to post-emotionalism

The stubborn owner (1987) tells the absurd story of "helping others solve problems, relieve others' boredom and suffer for others" in the business of Three T Company, in which even human emotions can be replaced or fictional: Yang Zhong, a salesman, dates his girlfriend Liu Meiping instead of Dr. Wang Mingshui, and Ma Qing, another salesman, accompanies his wife instead of a man, and so on. The emergence of this alternative business seems to be a symbolic signal: the contemporary culture of China has undergone and is undergoing subtle and profound changes, so that the most secret and true feelings in people's hearts can also be replaced, fabricated or sold. It is one of the basic "common sense" of China literary and art theorists in recent twenty years that literature and art should express emotion and pursue emotional truth. Today, when emotions have become replaceable with people and places at any time, is this substitution emotion equivalent to the original emotions in the past? I have to sigh: Romantic emotionalism has given way, and it is giving way to post-emotionalism full of consumer culture (see Post-Emotional Era of My China Films and Contemporary Films, No.2, 2003). ? XML: namespace prefix = O/

Emotionalism refers to the knowledge assumption that literature and art must show people's true subjective attitude towards reality, which holds that emotion in literature and art should be true. Needless to say, realistic works aimed at truly reproducing reality, even romantic fictional works, should be able to remind people of such true feelings in reality with the help of the wings of imagination and association. Faced with the excessive politicization of literary theory during the Cultural Revolution, scholars in literary criticism started to set off an unusual emotional storm in the late 1970s. Judging from Marx's thought of "the complete liberation of all human feelings and characteristics", they trace back to Kant's subjectivity theory and push emotional or aesthetic feelings to the highest level of literary expression within the theoretical framework of the unity of sensibility and rationality. It is no longer politics (thought), but aesthetic emotion (experience), which has since become the central topic of China's contemporary literary theory. The debate about "subjectivity" and "inward turn" also highlights the central position of emotionalism from different aspects. It can be said that emotionalism is a violent rebound to pan-politicism, which provides a basic knowledge for the development and interpretation of literary and artistic creation since the "new period". His iconic works include Black Horse, River in the North, Ancient Boat and other novels. And films such as Youth Sacrifice, Late Rain, Good Woman, Corner Forgotten by Love and Wild Boat.

This kind of emotionalism has suffered a series of impacts since the middle and late 1980s. From the external influence, Latin American magic realism replaces the real emotion with fantasy emotion, and "reception aesthetics" replaces the author's emotional experience with the reader's independent understanding. Jameson's postmodern explanation on the commercialization of emotion provides an example for China people who are good at imitating the West, and the West has already broken the chain of emotionalism. This external influence is intertwined with the more fundamental internal conflict: the upsurge of "root-seeking literature" is accompanied by a strong impulse to pursue the foundation of China's classical culture and national spirit, which tends to tap the hidden literary and artistic power sources such as personal irrational instinct, the primitive witchcraft foundation of the nation and the mysterious power of marginal fantasy. This literary power source, which contains multiple complex forces, will inevitably shake the existing simple and simple emotionalism tradition violently. In literature, in addition to the "root-seeking literature" that pursues primitive fantasy and mysterious feelings, a group of "post-hazy" poets push their feelings from the elegant level to daily life (such as Yu Jian and Sha Yi); Ma Yuan, Su Tong, Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Liu Ke and other "avant-garde novel" writers use magic realism and postmodernism to rewrite alienated feelings with new "alienated language". Liu Heng, Liu Zhenyun, Fang Fang, Chi Li and other "new realistic novels" have cooled the original fiery emotions to almost zero in the abrasion of trivial matters in daily life. Obviously, the results of emotional thoughts such as "subjectivity" and "inward turn" unexpectedly forced the disintegration of unified emotionalism originally based on rationalism: primitivism, conventionalism, avant-garde and postmodernism became the basic emotional presentation modes of the above-mentioned literary thoughts respectively.

From Wang Shuo's brilliant novel creation, we can see the intersection of the breakthrough point of emotionalism and the growth point of post-emotionalism. From "? XML: namespace prefix = ST1/stewardess (1984) begins with the following: the ground (1985), half flame, half sea water (1986), and I lost my love forever (65436). But it was during this period that new emotional ways grew out of the old emotional garden. Starting with the rubber man (1986), it is mainly composed of the series "Stubborn Master", "Nothing Serious" (1989), "You are not a layman" (1992) and "The Story of the Editorial Department" (19966) As shown in Stubbornness, when even the most sincere emotions between people become the daily business activities of professional companies and can be replaced at will, the authenticity or authenticity of emotions will be completely dissolved and transformed into a conscious and conscious discourse virtual, or even a business process manipulated by the business community. This kind of emotion, which is consciously replaced, invented or manipulated, is obviously a new emotion after the collapse of emotionalism, that is, post-emotion. The film of the same name, adapted from Stubborn, was released on 1988, announcing the entry of this emerging post-emotionalism into the film. Wang Shuo's TV series Desire (1990) and Story of Editorial Department (199 1) reported the spread of this new emotionalism to the core media TV. The unexpected huge sensation of the two dramas and their successful coordination with the new dominant culture and popular culture announced the fact that after mass production with a relaxed game attitude, the cultural industry of emotionalism aesthetics completed its transformation and immediately established its hegemonic position in the media kingdom.

However, the real climax of post-emotionalism appeared at the turning point of the 20th century, namely, Party A and Party B directed by Xiaogang Feng (1997) and Hero directed by Zhang Yimou (2002). The former is adapted from Wang Shuo's novel You are not a layman. It is in this Feng film that directly interprets Wang Shuo's spirit and takes contemporary urban life as the scene that the true feelings closely related to culture, history, tradition and meditation in the 1980s were replaced, diluted or transformed into post-emotions in the "Sweet Dream Day Tour". This low-cost film won the domestic box office champion with 6.5438+million yuan in one fell swoop, indicating that Feng's post-emotional aesthetics has achieved the most remarkable success in urban movies in recent years. In this regard, Zhang Yimou proved himself through Hero. Around the story of three men and two women stabbing Qin, except that the background moved to the distant Warring States period, the "sweet dream day trip" became a stabbing Qin, which was quite similar to the pattern of three men and one woman in A, B and C and its subsequent emotional gesture. Of course, more importantly, he works harder than any director in China, including Xiaogang Feng, to show and interpret the aesthetics of visual prominence, which shows his great ambition to conquer domestic and foreign audiences with China's visual flow and his post-emotionalism aesthetics. As a result, Zhang Yimou overtook Xiaogang Feng for no reason in a period of time, and became the new winner of post-emotional film aesthetics and the "sword in the world" in the post-emotional era. It can be said that Hero, with its magical box office performance of 250 million yuan, has become an undisputed eye-catching landmark, which indicates that the post-emotionalism aesthetics of China's films has been interpreted as an almost extreme despair. When we look back, we are surprised to find that we have quietly arrived in the post-emotional era.

In the post-emotional era, exploring post-emotionalism itself is facing the problem of too close observation distance, but we have to say that what we say at this time may lead to a brick and a jade. With the rise of post-emotionalism, the emotional family of contemporary China's literary theory is bound to form a new related field with the addition of new members. This emotional family uses a broad sense: all literary and artistic works should express people's emotions, whether directly or indirectly. Even post-emotionalism is, in the final analysis, a manifestation of emotion. Only its appearance caused the structural transformation and reorganization of emotional family. Specifically, this broad emotional family should have at least four members: emotionalism, non-emotionalism, implicit emotionalism and post-emotionalism. Emotionalism is the kind of discourse that literature and art must express the true feelings of the subject, and its classic forms are romanticism and realism. Non-emotionalism is the kind of discourse in which literature and art can only hint emotion through language, represented by symbolism and other works with modernist colors that advocate the effect of language suggestion. Implicit emotionalism tries to make the object express himself without emotion, forming a cold-eyed pattern, and its interpreter is new realism (such as "new realistic novels"). If there is still a subject role in non-emotionalism, but only the subject is moved into the language system, then implicit emotionalism tries to move the subject emotion out of the text statement, resulting in the so-called objective "reduction" effect without the subject (although it can't be done in fact). Post-emotionalism is based on a new aesthetic belief: literature and art can replace, fiction, transfer or sell emotions. Its representatives are postmodernism and the wave of popular culture. Of course, emotionalism advocates imagination or virtuality, but after all, it thinks that this imagination or virtuality can convey people's true feelings and the "essence" of human reality; Then emotionalism does not believe in the existence of real emotion and the "essence" of human reality, and penetrates into the artificial hypothesis essence of classical emotionalism, but simply takes emotional discourse fragments as the raw materials of daily imagination, virtuality, parody or irony, and mass produces this kind of substitute or virtual emotion. Different from non-emotionalism that tries to "escape" emotions and implicit emotionalism that tries to freeze emotions, post-emotionalism is keen on the mass production of virtual emotions. In the post-emotional era, emotions are not reduced but increased, not weakened but strengthened, but this so-called emotion has become a substitute for emotions and cannot be taken seriously.

Post-emotion can be understood as an alternative, virtual or constructive emotion. "A, B, C" tells the story of four freelancers, Yao Yuan (Ge You), Zhou Beiyan (Liu Bei), Qian Kang (Xiaogang Feng) and Liang Zi (He Bing), who started a new career of "dreaming of a one-day trip" with the stubborn Three T Company to help consumers live a life in which their dreams come true. This in itself means that emotion is different from the previous "true feelings", but an emotional substitute, a virtual emotion that can be manipulated, virtualized and traded by merchants, that is, post-emotion. When it was put into trial operation, it immediately attracted whimsical customers: Grandpa Banel, who sells melons, wanted to be General Barton (Ying Da) one day; The chef (played by Li Qi) was born in a peaceful time and always dreamed of becoming a righteous man who would rather die than surrender. He felt the taste of being arrested, tortured and dying bravely in one day. This made three men and one woman busy as a bee: they just took off the uniforms of the American wounded and put on the Qing uniforms; Sometimes it is a general who is ready to fight, and sometimes it becomes a guardian who pleases and tells; During the day, I turned on the radio in the back seat of the jeep and bumped on the tank dirt road. At night, I drove old Jim's car into the house to arrest people. Because of lack of experience, there are many jokes and loopholes. This kind of "sweet dream one-day tour" business is gradually on the right track: first, help the lovelorn regain their self-confidence through "love dream", then educate the male chauvinist customers through "suffering dream", and then make fun of some groups in society by using the dream that the rich want to dream of suffering and the stars want to be "ordinary people". The "emotions" reflected in the above events all have obvious post-emotional components, and then in the process of helping customers realize their dreams, these four people gradually re-invested in happiness and fun and found their own "true feelings". In the end, in order to help the homeless couple with cancer realize a "reunion dream", they actually donated their new house to get married. In this way, the audience can witness how emotions first appear and then regenerate into emotions. In this post-emotional era, if the film ends at the beginning, the audience is unwilling to accept it because they no longer believe in this "deceptive" artificial assumption; It is in the context of post-emotional ridicule or parody that the emotion of "lingering" after classical emotionalism parody is easily recognized by the audience. This shows that the post-emotion is not an emotion without emotion, but an emotion regenerated after digestion and repackaged for viewing; At the same time, post-emotion is not without emotion, but emotional fragments regenerated in virtual emotion. Xiaogang Feng is an expert in carefully creating the post-emotion of contemporary citizens. He is a more effective, powerful and influential interpreter of post-emotion than Wang Shuo, the pioneer of film industry. ? XML: namespace prefix = O/

Post-emotion, as a virtual emotional form, has its proper expression at present. In the media, TV, which can open up a large number of leisure and entertainment programs (such as Happy Camp, Happy Dictionary and Lucky 52), is undoubtedly its core media. Internet, which can chat in two directions and play games in virtual space, has become an aggressive frontier media. In terms of language, some literary works copy urban popular emotions in batches in fluent language, and advertisements and popular songs constantly replace or create traditional emotional languages such as poetic language or romantic language. Here, classic emotions are copied and transformed into consumption objects. In terms of artistic image, it is easy for the public to be dazzled by the type image without individuality and the class image without original works that can be copied indefinitely. From the viewpoint, it seems that the public has already bid farewell to the affectionate "gaze" used in the emotional era in the past, and instead kept "flashing" a fast-moving visual clip.

The keywords "post-emotionalism" and "post-emotionalism" that have been used all the time come from the Poster Motion Society in Mestrovic (1997). In his view, "contemporary western sociology is entering a new stage of development, in which synthetic and imaginary emotions become the basis for being generally operated by self, others and the whole cultural industry." He believes that western society has entered a "post-emotional society". An obvious sign of this "post-emotional society" is that the whole society has led to "a new form of bondage, which is moving towards exquisite emotions in the present era." In other words, all aspects of people's lives are generally manipulated by the cultural industry. "Not only the cognitive content is manipulated by people, but also the emotion is manipulated by the cultural industry, and it is transformed into post-emotion." (Mestrovic: Post-emotional Society, London: Sage Publishing Company, 1997, 8 pages). In the post-emotional society, post-emotionalism has become a basic principle of people's life. "Post-emotionalism is a kind of emotional manipulation, which refers to the ethics that emotions are manipulated by the ego and others and become soft, mechanical and mass-produced but depressed." (Mestrovic: Post-emotional Society, London: Sage Publishing Company, 1997, 44 pages). The word "quick adaptation ethics" is very interesting, which highlights the ethical situation of daily life in post-emotional society. What it pursues is no longer the "ethics" of the emotional era such as beauty, aesthetics, authenticity and purity, but emphasizes the happiness and comfort of daily life, even if it is a virtual and packaged emotion, as long as it is fast and comfortable. The ethics of rapid adaptation is a remarkable symbol of post-emotional society.

At present, the social situation in China is not the same as that in the western society, and it remains to be seen whether it will enter a "post-emotional society". However, it is an indisputable fact that post-emotionalism and post-emotionalism have been formed in China's literature and culture, thus presenting a post-emotional cultural phenomenon. Guided by the novel and the movie The Stubborn Man, with "A and B" and "Hero" as typical symbols, post-emotionalism has become the new overlord of China's aesthetic fashion with its strong box office momentum and social influence, and created a new aesthetic fashion with "quick adaptation ethics" as its core. This is not only a post-emotional literature and art, but also a broader post-emotional culture. The term "post-emotional culture" covers a little less than the "post-emotional society" that sociologists are willing to adopt. It mainly refers to a new lifestyle or a new lifestyle trend marked by emotional phenomena in the future, which is closely related to the construction of symbolic ideographic systems such as literature, movies, television, advertisements and music. At the beginning, the virtual life landscapes such as "Three T Company", "Sweet Dream One-Day Tour" and "Human Guide" created by literary and artistic works such as "Stubborn Master", "You are not a layman", "The Story of Editorial Department" and "A, B, C and D" have already become the actual components of China's social life process and cultural fashion. And if you don't follow the crowd into the cinema to enjoy the visual feast of Zhang Yimou's Hero, you may consciously fall behind this surging tide of fashion life. Post-emotional culture is destined to become a fashionable lifestyle of people. It can be said that the post-emotional culture with post-emotionalism as the core has surged into a mighty mainstream in popular culture (such as popular poetry, bestsellers, pop songs, movies, television, online literature, etc.). ), and at the same time, even in the elegant cultural field of advocating personality creation and formal experiment, it has exposed its own traces. Of course, post-emotionalism cannot unify the current literary and art circles, but it forms a fragmented pattern with emotionalism, non-emotionalism and implicit emotionalism. We have to be in a cultural situation where multiple emotions will be the mainstream in the future.

In the current situation of multiple emotions, it involves many aspects to examine the challenges of post-emotionalism and post-emotional culture to literary theory in the new century, and this is only a preliminary question. 1. As far as the essence of literary emotion is concerned, the traditional authentic emotion has to face new problems such as substitute emotion, virtual emotion, emotional manipulation, emotional peddling, etc. The related topics include sociology, economics, politics, anthropology, psychology, industry, business and so on. 2. As far as emotional expression in literature and art is concerned, it seems that literary and art workers can imitate, copy and produce "emotions" in batches according to the entertainment needs of the urban masses, without pursuing the truth of emotional expression. Can this situation be compared with the past? The conflict and reconciliation between them may become one of the exciting points of literary theory in the new century. 3. In the relationship between emotion and media, with TV and Internet as the core media and frontier media respectively, emotion is easily manipulated by the mass media industry and the corresponding social situation, and mutates into a substitute or virtual product of traditional emotion, that is, post-emotion. 4. On the emotional and linguistic issues, the emotions expressed by the language characterized by fluency and fun, especially the superficial sensory satisfaction. On the issue of emotion and truth, emotion no longer needs to point to the supreme objective truth as in the past, but only needs to satisfy the public's desire for pleasure. 6. On the issue of love and goodness, what is love is not necessarily good, but can be manifested in evil forms, such as mass production of entertainment programs or products such as terror, violence or murder for the public to enjoy. At the same time, emotion may not have any practical beneficial influence on the construction and adjustment of people's homophonic ethics. 7. Accordingly, on the issue of emotion and beauty, it is often that the aesthetic object only appeals to the immediate sensory comfort and touches people; Moreover, this touching thing doesn't have to be beautiful, and it doesn't have to be aesthetic. It can be "ugly". Of course, this ugliness is no longer the aesthetic ugliness of "turning ugliness into beauty" established by classical aesthetics, but the real ugliness of life itself. Today's cultural industry departments believe that the public can get an emotional pleasure by watching the ugliness displayed safely or vividly, but what the real beauty should be, there is no need to actively and critically think about such post-emotional topics, and it should provide a new space for the progress of literary theory in the new century.