The Cultural Ecology of Literature in the Age of Electronic Media

I

The twenty-first century had just drawn back its curtain of hope, and the joy of the millennium still lingered in people’s hearts, when J. Hillis Miller brought Chinese readers an ominous tidings: literature has ended. Repeating Derrida’s words—“in a particular regime of telecommunications technology (in this sense, political regimes are secondary), the whole era of so-called literature, if not all of it, will no longer exist”—he argued the point with the utmost assurance.[1] To people still intoxicated in the festive atmosphere, Miller’s startling words seemed like needless alarm, the raving of a dreamer. Yet a few years later, when a number of writers proposed establishing a “National Reading Day,”[2] we could not but feel that the crisis of literature was truly drawing near. Literary reading is no longer an attractive cultural activity; it must even rely on state power to make a compulsory stipulation, forcing people to read. Is this not precisely an ominous portent?

Whether literature is taken as a tool of enlightenment and salvation or regarded merely as leisure and amusement, it was once inseparable from human beings, something they could not do without. Literature is a dimension of human existence; an existence without literature would be a defective existence, no longer whole and perfect. Yet today, having entered the age of electronic media and fully enjoying its lavish visual feast, people suddenly discover that literature’s fair prospect is no more—that its situation has grown ever more straitened and awkward, as though treading on thin ice, as though facing an abyss. Is it, then, that Miller’s unfortunate prophecy will come true, that literature is inevitably heading toward its end? To this, many scholars in China have in turn given resolute negative responses. Tong Qingbing argues that literature will not perish, setting out from the human need to express feeling;[3] Li Yanzhu seeks the ground for literature’s long-term existence in the connection between language and the generation of aesthetic consciousness, and in the irreplaceability that literature possesses as an art of language;[4] Peng Yafei holds that the “inner-vision aesthesis” peculiar to literature creates a world of fantasy, which is “a spiritual existence that can never be perceived by the senses, and so cannot be replaced.” On this basis he says, with full confidence: “Literature is the art of language; precisely because the nature of its aesthetic activity unfolds only in psychical, mental, and inwardly reflective ways, it becomes a favourable redoubt that human reason can hold without ceasing.”[5] Yu Hong and Xiao Cuiyun, for their part, point out respectively that the “theory of the end of literature” is merely, under postmodern conditions, a “poetic expression of literature’s marginalization,” or a “rhetorical” “exaggeration,” and that it contains at the same time the “double meaning” of a “starting point,” a “new beginning.”[6] At the same time, they too cannot but admit that the coming of the age of electronic media places enormous pressure on literature and will compel it to make self-adjustment. At this point the core question seems already to have shifted: we need not, for the moment, expend our ingenuity divining whether literature will perish, but should rather explore what kind of cultural ecology the modern electronic media have reshaped for literature, and what changes they have already forced, or are about to force, literature to make.

II

For literature, the medium is by no means a dispensable, weightless vehicle; the medium “is the real world, and the media reshape at will what survives of the old world.”[7]

The first effect of the electronic media is the reorganization of the cultural order on which literature depends for survival and the reshaping of the cultural ecology.

In the age of written script, literature and other written works enjoyed a lofty standing in culture. “Literary writing is the great enterprise of governing the state, a splendid affair of immortality”; like “establishing virtue” and “establishing achievement,” it was one of the principal ways by which a person attained eternity. Written composition, as a cultural resource and cultural privilege that was hard to acquire and supremely important, could be mastered only through special training and education. It set the literate (the literati) apart from the illiterate (the common people), and, by virtue of the sacredness of the written word, conferred a lofty standing on the former. In the age of written script, a person’s cultural standing depended, to a great extent, on his command of writing. The compiling, interpreting, and transmitting of canonical texts could not do without this cultural capital, could not do without the literati. That is to say, the mastery and use of the dominant medium determined the abundance or scarcity of a person’s cultural capital, and hence his cultural standing and cultural power. Thus, when the age of oral transmission gave way to the age of written script, the shamans, who had formerly gained power through their oral expressive ability, irrevocably declined in status, while the literati and scholars rose to take their place, increasingly establishing their own authority and assuming, as it were, the role of “legislators.”[8] This in turn consolidated and strengthened the core position of literature, and of written works of every kind, in culture.

Printing, with its new transmission technology and its relatively low cost of reproduction, broke the monopoly of the literati to a certain degree, effectively expanded the scope of transmission, made it possible for ordinary people to come into contact with written works, and so brought about the flourishing of popular literature and popular reading matter.[9] Even so, printing did not overturn the original hierarchical relation between literati and common people. For, viewed from another side, as printing technology developed, corresponding publishing institutions and systems took shape; authors and readers were forcibly separated, and so the control of transmission became easier to implement and more effective. Since the right to speak and the right of authorship were always held in the hands of the literati, while ordinary people stood at the passive receiving end, in this new and more indirect relation of written transmission the literati, as speakers and authors, became all the more mysterious and sacred, and safeguarded their own authority. Harold Innis held that the printing medium both expanded the scope of reception and concentrated the source of information, exercising control over transmission, cultivating public dependence, and abolishing the public’s own thinking. “The new media concentrated and monopolized citizens’ knowledge and the skills of acquiring knowledge. People became ‘consumers’ of transmission, just as they are consumers of anything else; as consumers, they depend on a centralized source of supply.”[10]

In The Second Media Age, Mark Poster discusses the relation between the rise of the literati’s status and print culture from an opposite angle. He holds that Western Enlightenment thought has a lineage to print culture: the Enlightenment theory of the autonomous, rational individual drew much nourishment from the very practice of reading printed writing and was thereby powerfully consolidated. The linear arrangement of sentences, the stability of the words on the page, the orderly spacing of the black-on-white system, the spatial materiality of the publication—all enabled the reader to keep his distance from the author; these features promoted the development of the individual endowed with critical consciousness, enabling him to read and think independently, standing outside the network of political and religious factors. “Compared with the fleeting words of oral culture, print culture, through the materiality of words on the page, raised the authority of authors, intellectuals, and theorists in a way that was opposite but also complementary.”[11] Here Poster’s view is not in conflict with Innis’s; the two merely point out, from different angles, that opening a distance from the source of information increased, for the masses, a sense of mystery and a psychology of reverence, while for the literati it provided a space for independent thinking. As possessors of the power of the written medium, the literati likewise monopolized the power of knowledge and the power of thought; while challenging political and religious power so as to raise their own status, they did their utmost to use the control of transmission to maintain their authority before the masses, making themselves the elite, the spokesmen and spiritual mentors of the masses.

In the long history of transmission, the durability, stability, and sacredness of written works, and their capacity to be read repeatedly and to traverse vast reaches of time and space, made them the most effective vehicles for shaping and transmitting cultural values. On the one hand, in the process of transmission these works were selected, interpreted, and evaluated by the literati and the intellectual elite as readers; through the washing of time and the sedimentation of history, a selected portion of them became models for study, became classics. On the other hand, these works—the classics especially—exerted an enormous influence on their readers. “It gives our future experience a form or shape, provides patterns for that experience, the means to deal with it, the terms of comparison, the methods of classifying it, the standards of value, the paradigms of beauty.”[12] That is to say, in the process of transmission they continually shaped and transmitted modes of perception, aesthetic paradigms, and cultural values. Although different ages and different individuals may hold different and even mutually opposed and conflicting cultural values, these are always at once mutually contradictory and mutually influencing, jointly contained within various texts and inherited by later ages, fusing with one another in the long process of transmission and merging into a cultural tradition at once rich and unified. Because written works are sacred, exemplary, and consciously and systematically transmitted, they gradually attained dominance, becoming the mainstream within the whole cultural tradition; and the values they carried became the core cultural values. Other cultural phenomena, including folk culture, were then evaluated and defined by these core values, and thereby a cultural order and a hierarchy of knowledge were established.[13] At the same time, these core cultural values in turn guaranteed the value of the cultural capital held by the literati and the intellectual elite, and their own cultural standing—guaranteed the cultural legislative power of the literati and the intellectual elite.

The age of written script and printing was an age that continually produced and reproduced the literati and the intellectual elite, the classics and tradition. Written transmission is both a spatial transmission and a temporal one. It is precisely in the historical process of transmission that unifies space and time that the classics could be nurtured, tradition could take shape, the system of cultural values and the cultural order could become relatively stable, and the literati and the elite could ensure that their cultural capital did not depreciate and so keep hold of their cultural legislative power. Even the modernist “anti-tradition,” however fierce and sharp its attitude, was always merely the struggle and challenge of later literati against their predecessors, an “internal affair” among the literati; the right to speak and the right to legislate never changed “masters,” and the “tradition of anti-tradition” it formed still maintained a relation of succession with tradition. As Bloom said, every poet is always under the shadow of the influence of his precursors, unable to escape the “anxiety of influence”; so-called originality is merely a revision and misreading of the works of predecessors. Hence “the true history of modern poetry is just the precise record of these revisionary swerves.”[14]

Therefore, when written transmission became the principal channel of cultural transmission, when written works converged into the main course of the great river of culture, and when the cultural values they carried became the core cultural values, they organized the cultural order and shaped the cultural ecology according to their own character: a relatively stable cultural ecology favourable to the survival of the literati and the intellectual elite, and favourable also to literary production.

III

The coming of the modern age of electronic media has mercilessly stripped the literati and the intellectual elite of their cultural privilege; like a great earthquake, it has reorganized the cultural order and reshaped the cultural ecology.

The nature of the modern electronic media is precisely that they belong to the masses. When, by means of modern high technology, they exclude written script and the printing medium with overwhelming superiority, effortlessly seize the cultural leadership, and become the main channel for producing and transmitting culture, the cultural standing and authority of the literati and the intellectual elite are overturned. The distinction that the command of writing formerly drew among people’s cultural identities is no longer generally valid. The cultural legislative power of the literati and the intellectual elite has also expired; in the face of the flood of images and multimedia that everyone can directly perceive and understand, even the role of “interpreter” appears superfluous. The great civilizational transformation brought by print culture once let the literati and the intellectual elite win their own distinctive right of utterance—a hopeful beginning, a new chapter of history; but the transformation brought by the electronic media is the reverse. The cultural power monopolized by the literati and the intellectual elite has been lost; a “fin-de-siècle” mood pervades intellectual circles, and theories of “ending” of every kind come thick and fast. For the literati and the intellectual elite, political power and economic power were often visible but beyond reach, whereas in the cultural domain they had always regarded themselves as “legislators”; yet now, on this ancestral domain of culture, they can no longer issue commands. Their great power has slipped away, and they cannot but, awkwardly and forlornly, hesitate at the margins, harbouring a secret resentment. Hence it is not a change in political or economic standing, but a change in cultural standing—the loss of a hereditary cultural identity—that has thrown the literati and the elite off balance and made them unable to hold back their cries of cultural crisis.

Unlike written transmission, which is at once spatial and temporal, a union of the two, modern electronic transmission is spatialized transmission. It “combines vast distance with the instantaneity of time,”[15] tearing apart the linkage of time and space at modern high speed, casting off the encumbrance of history, compressing time into the present, and expanding toward an infinitely extended space. The modern electronic media take the pursuit of the present as their own task; they continually seek the newest information, covering existing information with new information and discarding outdated information. Although the computer network can store almost all historical documents, the “information explosion” corresponding to the high-speed transmission of the modern electronic media leaves people already unable to cope with present information, running themselves ragged; apart from the very few researchers who consult documents for special purposes, ordinary people simply cannot attend to them. If bourgeois enlightenment, with its linear view of development, changed people’s conception of time, inverting the valuing of the past and the slighting of the present into a valuing of the present and the future and a slighting of the past, then the modern electronic media have, to a certain degree, shattered the linear conception of time, making it impossible for people to return to the past, to return to history. The mood of nostalgia is the psychical compensation for this phenomenon.[16]

When the modern electronic media, as a spatialized existence, replace the dominant position of written script and the printing medium, a cultural rupture cannot but occur. The spatialized character of modern electronic transmission abolishes the temporal conditions on which the classics and the cultural tradition depend for their generation; while its keen capture of new information, its efficient production of new information, and its focusing and magnifying of that information, covering a vast audience over a wide area in an instant at high speed, are exactly fitted to manufacture sensation and novelty continually and to renew fashion continually. Here there is only the present, only fashion; there is no history, no tradition, no classics. Any existence that has just passed is pushed into oblivion, its connection with the present severed. The “Red Classics” now once more in vogue are, in a sense, merely a passing new fashion: they have been “disenchanted,” the solemn mask of the “classic” stripped away, the substantive connotation a “classic” ought to have lost, turned into fashionable cultural consumer goods. The traditions that carry cultural values and the classics that serve as models for study are losing their cultural-generative vitality; no longer, as in the past, do they wear a stern, dignified countenance and exercise an important normative role. Under the novelty and fashion stirred up by the modern electronic media, they have been laid aside, or made over, or even subjected to mockery and deconstruction. When Yi Zhongtian lectures on the Records of the Three Kingdoms and Wang Liqun on the Records of the Grand Historian, for instance, their subjective wish is to transmit traditional culture; but once they go on television and face the masses, they must make adjustments. First, they must “talk about characters, tell stories, give details,” resurrecting the dead as “live seafood”; second, in their mode of expression they must be not only popular but fashionable, even inserting some “nonsensical” talk and not refraining from a bit of “spoofing.” Moreover, they themselves are Chinese-literature scholars lecturing on history—“a rooster laying eggs.”[17] If a step further were taken and a “beauty” were made to lecture, satisfying people’s visual pleasure and subconscious desire, so much the better. That is to say, history has been literarized, popularized, massified, made fashionable, and made consumable. “Lecturing on history” has evolved into “modern new storytelling,” becoming a folk ritual of mass cultural consumption; whatever the specific content and form of the telling, it must cater to the tastes and preferences of the masses, cater to fashion, and can no longer hold doggedly to the standpoint of the literati and the intellectual elite—its original intent of transmitting traditional culture has been all but distorted by consumer fashion. Even literature that still exists in the form of printed script, being in the shadow of the hegemony of the electronic media, cannot but rely on the electronic media for its survival, and has thereby changed its mode of transmission, its mode of reception, and even its mode of production. The electronic media have forcibly intervened in the transmission and reception of literature, bringing the fate of literary works under their own control, favouring or disparaging works according to their own power and taste, hyping up bestsellers through packaging and adaptation and reproduction, and fashioning reading trends. The literati’s reviews and the imparting of knowledge in university lecture halls have already faded in their actual influence on literature; compared with the high-pressure momentum of the electronic media, they may even be ignored. The literati and the intellectual elite, the classics, and tradition have been submerged by the masses, popular culture, and fashion; it is no longer the former but the latter that powerfully shape the new cultural countenance, cultural order, and cultural ecology. The cultural values established through the ages by the literati and the intellectual elite, and the aristocratic character of those values, have been dissolved by the masses who usurped cultural power, and exchanged for the exchange-value upheld by the market.

If, on the one hand, the age of print culture once promoted the commodification of literature and written works through reproduction technology—which the literati and the intellectual elite could opportunely use to escape political and religious power—while on the other hand they strove to resist economic power, championing cultural independence and literary autonomy; then the modern electronic media, with their highly developed technology, have broken through, across the board, the relative independence of the literary field and the cultural field, breached the walls between the domains of literature, culture, politics, and economy, “de-differentiated” them, and imposed economic rules and commodity exchange-value upon literature and culture. Under the joint assault of the modern electronic media and the commodity economy, the autonomy of literary value and the independence of cultural value can no longer protect themselves, and the literati and the intellectual elite have been routed. The influence of the modern electronic media has made “today’s culture more symbolic, more diversified, and more changeable. Values, beliefs, and ways of life are far from confined to particular times and spaces. People create, interpret, and use a vast quantity of signs, and the technologies that produce signs, so as to design multiple cultural styles and identities.”[18]

The modern electronic media have injected enormous energy into breaking the closure of the cultural domain, levelling the cultural hierarchy, abolishing cultural privilege, sweeping away the aristocratic character of culture, and promoting cultural popularization and democratization; they have also opened broad prospects for a new type of cultural and literary production. But at this moment of the transfer of cultural power, the conversion of cultural values, the reorganization of the cultural order, and the reshaping of the cultural ecology—what, then, is literature to do?

IV

The modern electronic media have produced a major influence on human existence itself. Human beings create culture and the media; conversely, culture and the media shape human beings.

McLuhan, Poster, and Stevenson alike point out the role of the printing medium in promoting the development of the human spirit and reason, and the construction of human subjectivity. The written word, in its determinate material form, clearly marks itself as another existence at once connected with and distinct from the real world, creating a gap between the real world and the written sign; and it is precisely in the process of exploring reality and knowing the world through the written sign that a person generates his own spiritual dimension. It may be said that the development of the human spirit depends on the distance between the written sign and reality, and that the freedom of the human spirit is nurtured in this space of indeterminacy. The distance between author and reader created by printed script, the linear arrangement of words, and especially the author’s effort to express his thought precisely by weighing every word and the reader’s effort to understand and evaluate objectively—these tempered human reason and nurtured the person’s independent critical spirit. At the same time, writing more effectively strengthened the distinction between subject and object, between I and other, and so further developed subjectivity and individuality. “The transition from a predominantly oral culture to a written/oral culture, which requires a reserve of knowledge in written form, this process fostered the rise of a more critical orientation, because the subjects were freed from the bondage centred on the oral transmission of knowledge. On the side of writing, the objectification of culture also created the conditions for various kinds of criticism, because the reader could more easily perceive logical inconsistencies and contradictions.”[19]

Unlike printed script, which effectively creates and strengthens all manner of gaps, the “pictorial turn” brought by the modern electronic media is closing all manner of gaps. The modern electronic media possess an enormous capacity for reproducing and transmitting images; the “images” and “simulacra” they continually mass-produce cover over reality, become confused with the fragments of reality, and so abolish the distinction between reality and the image-sign—the distance between the image-sign and reality is banished, and the real sinks away. Baudrillard has expounded in depth the semiotic features of “the age of the image and simulation.” He divides the simulation of signs into three stages: first, the “classical” period, with counterfeit as the dominant mode; second, the industrial period, with production as the dominant mode; third, the present stage, with simulation as the dominant mode.[20] In this last stage, because the “simulacrum” is repeatedly reproduced, the relation between “copy” and “source” is inverted and blurred; and so a real-model without origin or actuality—the “hyperreal”—arises. “It is no longer a question of counterfeit, nor of reproduction, nor of imitation, but of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; it is a matter of the operation of deterring every real process by repetition... The hyperreal is henceforth sheltered neither by the imaginary nor by any distinction between the real and the imaginary; it leaves room only for the recurrence of models and the generation of the simulated difference.”[21] The simulative quality of the image-sign and its rampant proliferation cause the boundary between sign and reality to “implode”; the illusory world of images becomes the real world. When the distance between sign and reality vanishes, when a person is submerged in a world half-true and half-illusory, all thought and even imagination become superfluous, and the person’s spiritual dimension shrinks. The world itself is aestheticized—an “aesthetic” immersion without poetry, without sublimation, a pure play of signs. This brings on “the euphoria of simulation, which strives to abolish cause and effect, beginning and end, replacing all this with reduplication.”[22]

On the basis of Derrida’s analysis of “the post card,” Mark Poster further explores the features of electronic writing. He holds that in electronic writing the sign or trace, like the pixels on a screen, breaks off in an instant; at the same time the situation of writing is changing—the spacing on the page has become an audio-visual spacing in the world, and the electronicization of the sign in turn calls into question the materiality of writing. Because the sign is no longer rooted in space, its temporality becomes more complex. Computer writing can be transmitted around the globe in an instant, placing itself in a non-linear time, and this shakes its relation to the writing subject. “Because computer writing disperses the subject in non-linear space-time, because of its immateriality and its subversion of stable identity, computer writing has built a factory for the subjectivity of the postmodern age, manufactured a machine for constructing the non-identical subject, composed an inscription for an other (an other) of Western culture and entered it into its most precious manifesto. One may call it a kind of monster.”[23]

Whether television or the computer network, the modern electronic media jointly alter the relations between subject and object, reality and fiction, outer and inner, true and false; they rewrite the rational subject constructed by print culture, decentering, dispersing, and pluralizing the self, and making sensibility and desire all the more unrestrained and dominant over the human spirit.

At this point we seem once more to have retraced the path of Derrida and Miller. They argue mainly from the banishment of human subjectivity, reason, and the human spirit in the age of telecommunications that literature is no longer needed by human beings and is heading toward its end. Seen in this light, the “responses” of Peng Yafei and other scholars still lack pointedness. They take the human need for spirit as a theoretical presupposition in arguing that literature will not end, while evading the question whether this spiritual need has changed in the age of telecommunications, whether it will shrink under the squeezing and reshaping of the electronic media; in fact they have not formed a genuine debate with Miller. It must be admitted that Miller’s theoretical reflection is meticulous. Indeed, in the age of electronic media, “the development of technological media changes some of the ways social interaction works, producing new contexts of action and interaction, and new stages for self-presentation and the perception of others.”[24] The electronic media will necessarily change the human mode of existence, of association, of perception, and of creation, and will reshape the human being—this is already becoming a fact, and is unavoidable. Miller’s error lies precisely in his falling into the trap of Western logocentrism, his addiction to theoretical deduction, his forgetting that reality is complex and many-sided. Just as the ages of writing and printing did not put an end to oral transmission but coexisted with the written and the oral, so too with the age of electronic media. Although the electronic media will, with high technology, seize the position of overlord, for human beings the written and the oral remain indispensable and can by no means be cancelled. The age of electronic media will still be an age in which electronic media, the written, and the oral coexist, jointly taking part in the shaping of human beings and their minds. Therefore, although the coming of the age of electronic media will reshape the human being, it does not necessarily banish human subjectivity, reason, and the human spirit—and this provides a ground for the long-term existence of literature. The theoretical value of Miller’s view lies in reminding us to be vigilant about the changes the electronic media bring, to face this change squarely, to ponder it, and to propose strategies for responding to it. From this we can also see that the writers’ proposal to establish a “National Reading Day,” as a warning, does indeed have its reasonableness. At present, what is truly worrying is the excessive use of multimedia in school education: when children’s former reading turns into screen-watching, into audio-visual multimedia, into light and pleasant games, and a habit is thereby formed of being weary of reading and weary of thinking—then the death knell of literature will truly toll, and the end of humanity will also draw near; at the very moment when the twenty-first century has just arrived, we may once more face the spectacle of a fin-de-siècle.

V

The modern electronic media have brought major changes to the cultural ecology and to human beings themselves, and these changes will inevitably compel literature to adjust and to change.

As the cultural legislative power of the literati and the intellectual elite is deposed, literary writing has established the law of the masses and a folk stance.

The printing medium once promoted the development of urban popular literature through its efficient speed of reproduction and transmission; yet it did not shake the cultural standing of the literati and the elite. One of the strategies of the literati and the intellectual elite was precisely to maintain their own cultural identity by distinguishing “high” from “popular,” conferring affirmative value on the former and disparaging the latter. The modern electronic media have changed the structure of cultural power; the masses have usurped the power of cultural decision, and the result is that the original criteria of distinction are necessarily abolished, the gulf between high and popular is filled in, and mass taste becomes the dominant factor determining literary writing. Literature no longer has a special zone or a privilege; its aristocratic character will be swept clean by the common people, and a folk-carnival spectacle of clamouring many voices will take shape. Corresponding to the loss of the literati’s and the elite’s power, the literary classics they had marked out will also lose their exemplary role; the tradition of the literati will gradually disintegrate, and the system of cultural values established by the literati and the elite is collapsing. Literary writing, having lost its norms, appears all the freer, more arbitrary, more diffuse and shallow; it even crosses the boundaries of the traditional literary genres, entering advertising, text messages, and everyday life, spreading without limit. This is an age of literary “democracy,” and also an age in which literature continually expands until it loses its autonomy and its distinctiveness.

With the rupture of traditional cultural values, what takes their place is not a truly “folk” set of values but a commodity-exchange set of values dominated by consumer ideology. The folk stance, too, is not an “original creation” remote from commodity exchange and breathing the rustic air of the countryside, but an urban folk fashion permeated with the flavour of the commodity. The critical consciousness of the literati and the elite is collapsing; their defence of “literariness” has lost its ground; and the “consumerization,” “entertainmentization,” and “fast-foodization” of literature, riding the moment of the new media’s rampancy, have brewed into a current of the age. In fact it is not the masses who manipulate the electronic media and govern the direction of literature, but consumer ideology that uses the media to manipulate and shape the masses and govern the direction of literature, continually fashioning and packaging, manufacturing sensation, manufacturing novelty, manufacturing bestsellers, and stirring up wave upon wave of literary fashion. The civilizational fragmentation and the blurring and redefinition of personal cultural identity brought about by the change of cultural ecology and the conversion of cultural values have given people of every sort the chance to try their hand and win fame at a stroke, making it possible at last for the long-buried “Cinderella” dream in people’s hearts to become reality.[25] And so, with dragons and fish jumbled together, the good and the bad mixed, in order to stand out against the background of the information explosion and to attract eyeballs, people do not shrink even from extreme means—adding erotic seasoning, exposing privacy, posting nude photos; the more flamboyant, the less rule-abiding, the more favour one wins, and the non-literary “literary heterodoxy” has ceased to be a surprise.[26] This is what the literati and the elite call “cultural disorder,” and it is precisely the source of the sense of literary crisis and the crisis of the humanistic spirit.

The erosion of human subjectivity, reason, and the human spirit by the modern electronic media leads to the swelling of sensuous desire; privatized writing and desire-driven narrative thereupon rise with the tide, while humanistic ideals, the rational spirit, and critical consciousness retreat by the day. The poetry of literature and the conceived realm (yijing) of literature arise from the human yearning and pursuit of the metaphysical world; when the electronic media “disenchant” the metaphysical world and cancel this yearning and pursuit, the human spirit suffers a deluge, the poetry and the conceived realm of literature wither with it, and a person can only play idly at word-games in the desert of meaning, passing his days harbouring a desire easily wearied yet hard to sate. Herein lurks the stratagem of the electronic media: the electronic media corrode human reason and the human spirit and incite sensuous desire; once literature too becomes addicted merely to expressing sensuous desire and loses its spiritual dimension, it loses the irreplaceable ground of its own existence, cannot compete with the images at which the electronic media excel, and is easily supplanted.

Nick Stevenson points out that in the age of electronic media the distance between subject and object has already imploded: “The ultimate result is that the subject occupies such a world: the informational flow of culture has swallowed up individual space. Our most secret matters are made public through media technology as though in a ritual. There no longer exists any subject involving taboo: everything is exposed, and everything is discussed, however trivial these matters may be. The implosion of everyday life within the media is described by Baudrillard as a form of pornography. Modern culture can be precisely described as an obscene culture, in which the world has become direct and transparent, because it lacks secrecy.”[27] This is in fact only one aspect of reality. The other aspect is this: human linguistic and written activity once more creates the distance between subject and object and rebuilds human reason. Therefore, in the modern age of electronic media—because electronic media, the written, and the oral coexist, and various sign-activities interweave—human practice becomes more complex and various, and it is precisely in this complex and various dialectical movement that the person readjusts the distance between subject and object, reshapes reason and sensibility, and reorganizes public space and private space. That is to say, in the age of electronic media, while the person’s secrets are continually penetrated and illuminated, new spaces of secrecy are continually produced, and the human mind, in this very process, becomes ever more profound and capacious. This is precisely what provides literature with a new space in which to exercise its potential, letting literature display new colours; literature ought to take part in the reshaping of the human mind and the rebuilding of reason. For literature, the problem does not lie in writing’s having entered every domain and excavated every matter, including human desire and personal privacy—to inquire into the hidden is precisely the proper office of literary writing. The crux of the unwholesome tendency at present is this: all of it is artificially and excessively flaunted in order to attract eyeballs and earn money—that is, desire and privacy are openly auctioned off and made consumable—and this leads to a crisis of social ethics, a crisis of the humanistic spirit, and a crisis of the existence of literature and of humanity.

The modern electronic media have provided human beings with a new mode of existence, provided literary writing with a new and broad space and new opportunities, and opened up new modes and potentials of literary writing; but at the same time a profound crisis lies hidden within. Faced with the rupture of cultural tradition, the displacement of cultural power, the conversion of cultural values, and the major alteration of the cultural ecology, how to rebuild a cultural ecology favourable both to literature and to human beings themselves is the urgent task set before us.