Report of the trip to China published in Quaderni Piacentini
Almost at the same time as Antonioni (who shot the ill-fated documentary Cheng Kuo, China in 1972), another brilliant, sophisticated and independent Italian intellectual who fell outside the pack of the various ideological orchestras of the time visited China It was the second time he returned and left an extensive report published in “Quaderni Piacentini”. Here is China seen by Franco Fortini. Despite the distance between Fortini and Antonioni, the China of these two great Italian intellectuals, who have maintained absolute freedom of thought, is very similar. Perhaps Fortini drew the political conclusions that Antonioni was unable or unwilling to draw.
In September-October 1955, the first Italian cultural delegation, chaired by Piero Calamandrei and organized by the Ferruccio Parri Study Center, visited China on an "exploratory" trip to the new People's Republic of China. Eminent figures of Italian culture such as Franco Fortini, Franco Antonicelli, Carlo Bernari, Norberto Bobbio, Ernesto Treccani, Antonello Trombadori, Carlo Cassola, Cesare Musatti were part of it. From 4 November 2017 to 21 January 2018 Siena hosted an exhibition entitled "Je Voudrais Savoir" which also shows the shots of Fortini and his travel companions during the visit to China in 1955. Fortini with his wife Ruth Leiser returned to China in 1973
Still in China
1. I haven't written about my second trip to China so far because I didn't want to contribute to a controversy that I consider wrong. "China, China - you are no longer close - if you are no longer here - the good Jesus returns", I saw written on a wall in Florence. It seems to me perfectly said, the stupid dilemma. China as an alternative to a derided tradition; but, in reality, with an identical mythical function. No, in these terms - I said to myself - it is not decency to answer, to intervene.
I am told that the question is political. That one cannot avoid taking a stand in the face of facts which, as far as one can understand, mean, with the end of the Cultural Revolution, a turning point in the internal and external politics of the People's Republic of China. I am told that, for having been one of those who, before others or more energetically than others, supported the revolutionary primacy of China in the XNUMXs... Now it seems to me that a political opinion on the Chinese present can be of two sorts, founded on two different kinds of sources and purposes.
The first belongs to those who ultimately consider the concrete truth, the reality, of China as a continent, a people, a socialist country and also as a state, government, defense and production system as secondary; on the other hand, the ideological sense, the theoretical teaching that comes to us from China is primary. For them, political judgment must be made starting from what is known, not waiting to know what is not yet known. And the sources will then be, almost indifferently, those of the press hostile to China, those of the favorable press and those of Chinese information agencies and publications (official or unofficial) accessible in the West. It won't affect too much the quality or validity of those sources because what really matters is not what China is but what China looks like. What we are asked to judge is the image of China in 1968 or 1969 compared to the image of China in 1972. This first category comprises 99% of our friends and foes.
The second belongs to those who seek to base themselves on the broadest and most well-founded knowledge possible of the Chinese past and on the original sources: this is obviously the opinion of the specialists. Few, by definition, nor necessarily qualified for a political evaluation. It is they, at this moment, who are refusing the pronouncements that are insistently requested. In that category also the more serious and not pathetically «leftist» interpreters take their place. They are based above all on the papers of the specialists of those countries and those cultures that have sufficient strength for autonomous information (I mean above all the Anglo-Saxon ones).
It is clear that only the former can express the kind of political responses required by «left» political positions. When the ideological creation of the "China" entity has been accepted or suffered and given reactions and a whole series of sentiments, rationalizations and ideological crystallizations correspond to that entity, it becomes inevitable to "respond", "respond" always and whatever the nature or quality of the information.
Those who, due to their intellectual situation and political position, should fight against mythologies are often their first victims. The result is the intentional or unconscious effort to use the pathetic reactions to the myth, maintaining for the latter, positively or negatively, a position of privilege. When one makes fun of the need for protection implicit in the creation of the "leading state" or its equivalent, one forgets that the phantasm, a substitute for a reality one actually wants to escape, tends to unleash polar reactions. "China is near" is equivalent to the "Ha da veni Mustache" of the late XNUMXs. Acceptance of the myth determines a very wide range of reactions, ranging from extreme justificationism to the suffering of the betrayed lover to the taste of triumphing over the cry of "I always said so!" even when nothing was said.
2. Not only is China not "unknowable" but, in a non-superficial sense, it seems to me that the British are right who, traditionally, have a relationship with China that is no different from what they would have with a European nation, i.e. a relationship " rational”, and, with all the risks, immediate. However, this implies a degree of knowledge of the socio-economic reality and of the cultural foundations of the country being visited, if one does not want to fall into errors and simplistic judgments. Now, the average preparation of the "leftist" traveler who goes to China is made either on official Chinese texts (and among these, the writings of Mao; which have unfortunately been presented for years by the Chinese, and received by us, as doctrinal bodies and sources of wisdom rather than ethical-political messages aimed at specific ends and times) or on reports by western travelers and scholars in which political interest prevails. Historical knowledge of China (and I mean only the history of our century) is generally very poor; also, and more, the geographical one. In short, one comes to China exactly as one went to Russia in the XNUMXs: to “see socialism”. But socialism is not seen. You see power plants and farmers at work, school achievements and folk ballets, industrial exhibitions and parades, not the relationships between men. You can guess the latter; but the visit, touristic or political, does not allow you to understand family relationships, those within a school, a factory, a party organization. What kind of authority does the Party exercise over its members and over others? What does it actually mean to be considered a follower of a condemned political line? How does social control manifest itself? We know, it is difficult to answer these questions even for our immediate Italian reality.
3. A few moments.
Shanghai airport, upon arrival. The huge empty space of the hall where we are welcomed. The sense of neat, honest and discreet; respectful of self and others.
And to the incredulous gaze, after the meticulously landscaped countryside, the millions towards the work of filling the streets, the shops, the buildings, the underpasses, the railways, the docks.
Comrade W. has been speaking non-stop and translating for nine hours. He is exhausted. His throat hurts, his face glistening with sweat, his voice hoarse in the small microphone. He could ask to be replaced by comrade K., who is present. But, for some reason of hierarchy and control, that he escapes us.
W. can't and probably shouldn't now. There is a seriousness in his dedication, a tension that he has given up trying to conceal. He is the only one who can convey the tragic sense of the years behind him. Without expressing it in the slightest (not if he would ever forgive it) he is the point of contact, the connection. We are under the illusion that it was possible to talk to him during the long breaks on the train journey… Again and again, the illusion of a second degree truth.
Here I would like to apologize to W. for having embarrassed him more than once on this or that point which was intended either to be hidden or disguised from the visitor.
Wuhan Airport. Defeated by the beastly climate, we descend from the cabin of little Iliuscin who has recently pierced the gross clouds of the monsoon, allowing us to glimpse the endless districts of factories and chimneys of the three cities, joined and different on the banks of one or two or five rivers or lakes, currents of the color of the earth and of the air and warm fog, and mirrors of water and vapours. In the passage from one airport hall to another it is like a patio of green grass with a few small trees. Four Chinese girls, bent on their heels, joking with a blond child, the son of a European who has been following our itinerary for two or three days, accompanied by an elderly Chinese woman. It can be seen that they have managed to communicate something to him, because the little boy - he will perhaps be six or seven years old - tries to sing a chant in the Romance language. Ten paces away, leaning against a wall, an old Chinese woman watches the scene.
She is a small woman, dressed in black or dark blue, with tight trousers, in the old fashion, around the ankles. Her hair is almost all very white, the bands of hers at least of hers that she doesn't hide a cloth knotted behind her neck. Around her neck, where she ends her coat, she wears, barely visible, a fichu; similar ones can already be seen in the figures of the dynasties prior to those of the Han. I cannot tell the expression of the eyes, which stared at the child among the four girls, or the dazzling beauty of the calm face, where old age was like the withering of a fruit which does not alter its proportions but withdraws into itself to guard the own flavor and essence. Her old woman had her hands behind her back, one knee bent, resting the toe of her black slipper on the ground. Her gaze was thoughtful. The girls now sitting in a circle on the grass and among the trees, laughing and educating the child.
On the sidewalks of Beijing the young couples with the look of scholars or teachers, their pupils sharp and very attentive behind the lenses, who meet your gaze and this is the only thing they communicate to you as they pass by: that they could communicate and that my age, my gaze, are a a sign of understanding and research and that the surrounding city, the "center" of the "center", is a guarantee that it would not be impossible to understand each other. And a few minutes later, in a bus full of young Americans, they just tell you a name ("yes, we study with Sweezy") and all is said. International of intellectuals, always resurgent and always resubmerged?
4. Masi spoke to me about this incredible flexibility of Chinese intellectuals, about this need for a part of the Chinese intellectual body to periodically arm itself against another part, that is, against itself. They say that more and more books are appearing in bookstores, old editions covered up during the Cultural Revolution. This business of books is very strange. First, you don't see anyone reading. I don't want to generalize but I must have seen yes or no two people read a book and three or four the newspaper. (The interpreters and officials said they hadn't had time to read the newspaper when asked about Vietnam; but Vietnam was generally silent). Second, since in bookshops there seem to be little more than canonical texts, one can suppose that books (especially scholastic or scientific) must have their own circuit that is relatively invisible to the visitor.
In short: what little I have been able to understand, of the interpretation that China gives of itself in the forms of visual and auditory communication, has almost always seemed to me either mediocre or incomprehensible. Propaganda posters are familiar: they are unbearable, Soviet in the worst sense of the word, devoid of spirit and inventiveness, repetitive. Only rare examples of the combination of traditional techniques and current issues are saved.
It is not difficult to understand that - and not from today - the search for a Chinese way to form (Chinese, i.e. different from the one followed, for example, by Japan or India) poses such problems that, where artistic and poetic authenticity were manifested and even if the forces of ideological and administrative coercion were not there and diminished, it would be practically impossible for a Western spectator or reader to appreciate and compare it. One gets the impression that the conflicting modes (in theatre, in the visual arts, probably in literary expression) differ by imperceptible degrees; and it is enough to visit a good antique shop to verify that in today's China as in yesterday's there is room for the good and the bad, the authentic and the false, and that it is impossible to understand which real place the universe of forms in the existence of Chinese populations.
However, there is a sector in which some comparisons are possible. Almost every night I listened for a long time to radio broadcasts, operas, concerts, music in short. The contamination between traditional instruments or methods and the "Western" and modern ones has no limits. One gets the impression that only the proportions between the different elements change. There are operas whose vocal part closely resembles that of our nineteenth-century operas (and the performers, it seemed to me, hold up very well to the comparison with the best Europeans). The orchestration benefits from everything, from Mozart to Puccini included; for example, when the Party is alluded to, as if one were speaking of Wotan, a curious Wagnerism causes the first measures of the International to echo for solo trumpet; and a great waste of Internazionale is also made in the stormy finals.
But that's not the trouble; the trouble is the massive presence and widespread consumption everywhere, from the courtyards of the Imperial Palace to the railway carriages[1], of very bad musical pulp, almost always choirs, Soviet and militaristic, identical, except for the national cadences, to those I have heard in the parks of culture singing the Muscovites and Leningraders. Having thus accepted the degradation and manipulation of music, I forgive this badly: because it presupposes resistance from technicians, that is, from a political choice, that of producing and spreading that stuff, in enormous quantities; and that stuff corrupts, as we know, not so much for the mediocre or bad quality (in all identical to that of the western equivalents) but for the type of channel used (the loudspeaker, the transistor) and for the metaphorical and symbolic function of that means of transmission.
During the visit we made to an after-school club in Shanghai, the quality of the musical teaching (instruments and choirs) given to boys and girls between the ages of eight and fourteen was anything but common (and almost unknown in our schools); and acceptable the method with which a class of children, each with their brushes, tempera and easel, copied and interpreted a model. The trouble was, precisely, in the models; there, in the instrumented or sung songs, which were the same ones as the radio, i.e. products of a very mediocre series in all similar to the Chinese landscapes reproduced on the metal of tea boxes, not songs and music of the popular tradition (as far as I could discern) or authentic new creations; and here, in the object that the boys copied, i.e. in the effigy of a female head, made by the teacher on a cardboard and completely identical to the figures on the propaganda billboards seen in the squares.
The dilemma, moreover, arises again at every step: the comrades who had visited Beijing a month before us had been accompanied to the National Assembly Building, the huge and ugly building which is on the left of those looking at the Jen An Men; and they had clearly expressed their disapproval of the pomp and pointless waste of that building, all hereditary-Stalin and national-popular. And it must be added that the Chinese know very well, when they want to, work very differently, as demonstrated by so many residential areas or the airports of Shanghai and Beijing... It is useless to deny it, in these matters as in any other, the conflict is political: one would like know which "line" corresponded to the decision (which to the Western eye seems demented) to tear down the walls of Beijing (let's imagine - but in truth it is more serious - to want to tear down the entire Aurelian circle in Rome), to such as the intense publicity given to the admirable exhibition of archaeological treasures discovered - so it is emphasized - in the years of the Cultural Revolution and which is visited daily, as well as by foreign delegations, by about twenty thousand Chinese citizens[2].
A political conflict that leads to a series of seemingly contradictory, perhaps random, decisions. A game of thrusts and counterthrusts of which the Western spectator can barely say that, up to this moment, no form (literary, figurative or musical) capable of interpreting or metaphorically expressing today's Chinese existence is accessible to him; in this sense, no country seems to have implemented the condition of the "death of art" more consistently. It is a question, it is clear, of an apparent death and of which in truth it is not so much to be saddened or surprised as to be questioned for that much arduous it contains; because, I mean, it's ridiculous to interpret it as the result of party decrees. So much so that the Chinese would not understand these statements of mine and would like to deny them with their shows, painting exhibitions, collections of poems and stories due to workers and peasants, etc.
Yet the visitor continues to have the impression of an interdict placed on a whole part of the way of being, of living, of men; and wonders if by chance or, better, for one of those admonishing and grandiose Lentens that history does not ignore, that part of the way of being and of living of men to which four centuries of bourgeois civilization have given the name of art and poetry does not exists and does not manifest itself instead but in different ways and forms. I mean, not in what we traditionally call artistic or literary forms. On the other hand, even in remote historical China the culture of wisdom had known these radical metonymies, where one part of man stands for another. I keep hanging on the wall of my room, a gift from a Chinese farmer, a small hemispherical cup, made with the peel of a fruit and which a piece of string tied to the waist. It's an alms cup, probably. The gift probably has a symbolic meaning. A Californian intellectual would understand this better than I do.
Another matter, but perhaps not too different, due to the (at least apparent) absence of valuable contributions in the field of philosophical, economic and historical reflection. When you read a page of Mao - I am thinking of the recently published 1966 letter - it is impossible not to perceive an extraordinary fullness and circularity of discourse, a sort of supreme intellectual and moral ease; however, one does not live on Mao alone and the Chinese are the first to know about it, indeed the first to know about it is the old president, and want it. It must be said that. probably, forms and ways of theorizing and elaborating experience either take the form of official documents (internal or external to the party) or remain in oral form. Hence the impressive juxtaposition - to which Masi drew my attention - of a superficial, even laughable, aspect that certain Chinese documents have, certain of their discussions, and of an absolutely "serious", capital, decisive aspect. We have forgotten that what rises up will be lowered and that which lowers will be raised… They keep handing us an encrypted answer and we keep asking for the amount, forgetting that «the door is open for us». We want to know the "truth" about the Cultural Revolution (what would we answer - an acquaintance told me - if the Chinese asked us for the "truth" about the French Revolution?) without spending, without spending...
5. It is a famous road, on the north-south axis of the city, which for having been the entrance to most of the nation over the centuries has remained a street of commerce and crowds, bustle, small theaters, traffic. The bus stops somewhere, among the people, and people stop, as usual, to look at us. They beckon us to enter a shop. Of fabrics, I think; or children's clothes, they tell us. There are many people. Everyone watches or buys. In the room there is a wooden ladder that seems to lead to the warehouse or cellars. We go down and a very long illuminated corridor begins a few meters underground. We walk quickly on the beaten earth floor, under the concrete vaults, among the voices of small loudspeakers. The plastered walls at best leak, in some places, moisture. The corridor will be perhaps three meters wide and three meters high. In the construction I see the cement semicircles that are piled up in almost all the streets and squares of Beijing and Shanghai, in a very large quantity. At intervals, side corridors open up at right angles, as far as the eye can see. Some are unfinished, the attack front visible in the friable yellow earth; others closed by wooden planks.
We have been walking for at least ten minutes, every now and then we are told to speed up our pace. You can see rooms with toilets, doors with the sign of the Red Cross, pipes, water intakes. On the head, the chatter or fanfares of the loud speakers. Our guide tells us, from time to time, to change direction, at right angles, to the right or to the left. You succeed in a fairly large room, well lit, with horseshoe-shaped tables and teacups. From a staircase leading to street level come voices. A soldier speaks to us, then a girl pulls back a curtain and shows a plan of the neighborhood. The soldier must be an officer of medium or high rank; I saw him again a few days later at the Beijing airport together with senior officers waiting to leave for a meeting in Changsha.
The girl exhibits with precision, indicating on the plan the route of the main and secondary galleries. They have a development of several kilometres, in a rather limited space, because they are like a system of tributaries. Almost every courtyard has an entrance, other entrances are, like the one we have seen, from the shops; it is a question of welcoming, we are told, a very populated area, not only by the inhabitants of the houses but by those who come and go for purchases or pleasure, fifty, eighty thousand people. In short, these galleries are not shelters. They can be but that's not their main purpose. They are passageways, channels of evacuation. People must disperse into the countryside if need be. In the city, they say, those who can continue the fight will have to stay.
In about ten minutes, forty or fifty thousand people in this neighborhood can disappear four or six meters below ground level. «The tunnels only four meters away», they say, «are vulnerable». In the event of an atomic attack, how would the air be filtered? The answers are evasive. They don't tell us but it is clear that the neighborhood is connected to others, to the whole city; the galleries are under the houses, each house has its own entrance, each community has contributed to the work. "They did voluntary work, after the day's work." Only in this way were they able to complete this immense work. But accomplishing is not the right word. Such a job never gets done. China loves to build symbols of itself.
6. Sinologists are often boring; not because of the natural pedagogical attitude of those who know or know more towards those who know less, but because they tend to accept the Chinese code as far as it belongs to hydcological-political terminology and not to carry out the constant translation work without which nothing is understood anymore. When the preliminary, sacrosanct and necessary discourse on diversity, on the inevitability of a patient decoding of the Chinese discourse has been carried out to the end, the moment comes when it is necessary to oppose our code, our Western terms. In the war of languages that is taking place almost everywhere, it seems to me necessary to clarify to the Chinese the existence of a translation, the fact that we must and want to translate. Because it could happen that the Chinese believe their linguistic code has been accepted by Western interlocutors when that acceptance is only apparent, out of courtesy or servility. It is true that in political language it is absurd to claim univocality; it is true that misunderstanding is the soul of politics; it is true that one of the capital tests of strength of a policy is the imposition of its own linguistic code; but the Chinese know too well that they cannot go beyond a given limit, otherwise the communication will end.
7. Some examples of "disturbed" communication. First. A. tells me: «I know that groups of Red Guards or activists go to the countryside to carry out propaganda work among the peasants; and, among other things, they spread and recommend the use of the bra, otherwise ignored by the Chinese. It is evidently an episode of the introduction of an element of custom and respectability of bourgeois origin which, etc.». But then we learn that it is exactly the opposite: Chinese peasant women, indeed the Chinese in general, have been tightly binding their breasts, for centuries and centuries, in relation to specific sexual and, ultimately, social taboos, to the point of feigning the 'absence of breasts. Spreading the bra is therefore spreading a promotion of femininity as such. And why not then the free breasts of young Americans? Because young American girls with loose busts generally don't work in paddy fields or in construction like their Chinese peers.
Second. The traveler to China has certainly experienced some clichés of the contemporary costume of that country; the scruple with which he searches for and brings back to the distracted what he may have forgotten (there is a whole collection of anecdotes on the subject); the meticulous meticulousness of the accounts; the constant concern for the health of the host. This list could go on. But the second meaning of these elements of the ritual tends to escape. The commercial correctness of the Chinese is now proverbial; and it is not without reminding the historian of the religious dissenters in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the origin of many credit powers. But it is easy to realize that this system of behaviour-signs is also, or above all, a complex of fulfillments of a code - that of the interlocutor: foreign, western, capitalist, etc. — From which his own is keen to distinguish itself in the very act in which he seems to accept it.
I mean that the concern to ensure the "service" is quite evident; which is equivalent to distinguishing oneself, not uniting. This comes to the Chinese, of course, from the material impossibility of distinguishing companion (foreigner) from curious, benevolent guest from enemy. But, in conclusion? Once again it must be concluded that our search for a second and true meaning is, and rightly so, frustrated. China's lesson is this: precisely because everything means itself and other than itself; precisely because everything is a sign; for this very reason, from moment to moment, from moment to moment, the semiological pacts between transmitters and receivers stop and dissolve. To the question of what they meant with this behavior, this gesture, this word, the Chinese could answer - precisely because he belongs to a symbolic civilization that does not exclude a robust dose of pragmatism at all - that he meant, like the French poet, what he said, "literally and in every sense".
8. When nearly twenty years have gone by repeating that the Marxist tradition has ignored or underestimated a whole part of human life, what can be called interpersonal passions; and when one knows which voices and minds, more founded and authorized than one's own, have discourse on that same theme; reading — as happens to me in a text by Fachinelli in the latest issue of «Erba voglio» — that theme revived and reshuffled regarding China, the death of Lin Piao and in the analysis of an unofficial communiqué on this matter, leads me to immediately ask: why now? Because this "reading", this unveiling of the language of unofficial communiqués, because this semiological exercise is destined to find so much consensus, to be liberating (in the sense of relief) among those many, militants or not on the "left", who bothered you about China, in short and not from today?
«The historical impossibility of established Marxism to represent in its own terms what the young Marx called 'man's passion'… the nocturnal remains of man's life». This is the classic objection to Marxism and to this day unrefuted. But what sense can its repetition have if it does not take place beyond the statement? What if you don't experience it? Who believes not reformable. incorrigible, at this point, Marxism (as I write, I consider it incorrigible and unreformable. At least as it was transmitted to us by its most authorized tutors), ceases to blame "Marxism" and directs its energies to account for the "man's passion" and "nocturnal remains": there is no amalgamation of Marxism, Chinese politics and the problem of "nocturnal remains"; one chooses one's pretexts differently.
But all this is not enough to get rid of the arguments I have just mentioned. I have no doubt that Lin Piao's disappearance was communicated to the world (as far as his compatriots are concerned, I suspend judgement) in a downright indecent way. In a way that offends friends of China's cause but more so comrades fighting China's own enemies. In this sense, I have nothing to add to what he said in August of this year. me present, Aldo Natoli to the Chinese comrades and of which a transcript very close to the truth can be read in the first of Gianni Corbi's correspondence. the director of the Espresso, published by that weekly. O. at the most, that the reply of the Chinese comrades, refusing to express the slightest understanding for the diplomatic "perplexities" raised by Natoli, while indirectly testifying of a proud political struggle underway today in China under the appearances of concord and unanimity, he reminded those who had forgotten the difference and the distance between a political conversation between representatives or delegates of communist parties who mutually recognize each other as such and one between delegates, after all, "tourists" and unilateral spokespersons for information needs or propaganda of the Communist Party of China.
Of course, practicing with tools used by Barthes or Eco to interpret an informative-political writing issued by the Chinese embassy in Algiers, as the aforementioned psychoanalyst does, is equivalent to practicing Italian literary criticism on a poem by Tu Fu translated into English. But to say this, I repeat, is insufficient: the political question calls for a political response.
Already. A political response. That's the point. It is not only the way given events are communicated to us that is to be contested or rejected: it is the events. Only a mind hopelessly committed to semiology can believe that the verbal form says more than a sequence of events. At the most, it will say something else, that's all[3]. What we reject in the Lin Piao affair is, of course, its character as a matter, the timing of its communication, the use of the notion of conspiracy, in short, its political code. But it is its political significance that needs to be discussed, not just the metalanguage of the communiqués. In this sense, that the objections to the magical-didactic speeches with which the Chinese comrades spoke to us about Lin Piao were formulated in the diplomatic language, from a cousin party, used by Natoli in our Shanghai dialogue. For me today it's perfectly fine what, then, they seemed excessively diplomatic to me. The political criticism of the manners at the time of the Lin Piao affair must be separated from the criticism of the language of his communication; this second and revealing one is also necessary; but we are dealing with two languages and two codes. And if we want to criticize the Lin Piao affair, we need to make a historical-political judgement, the validity of which will also be proportional to the degree of information (and therefore according to Mao's word, of "investigation") that we will have. And this judgment may also be very harsh but it will reveal, in its very pronunciation, the "point", the political "platform" of the judge; thing that Fachinelli's writing does not do, coherent, after all, with his own vision of a psychoanalyst necessarily founded on the implicit and not on the explicit and proposing to his reader a key not different from the one he, as a reader interpreter, grants to himself same.
A criticism of language that does not really know that it is only language or that unifies signs and meaning, discourse and object of discourse, leads to these consequences; falls under the same ax criticism he wields, it is all a "boiling of livid passions", it is "a tangle of anger, resentment, envy, attack, disappointment", to use the expressions used here to define the black legend of Lin Piao.
9. There are very brief moments, in the morning, before the delegation starts its day, in which it can happen that they meet one of the interpreters while crossing a hotel hall. At that moment he carries, like a child awakened from sleep, a trace of his private reality. He is not yet the interpreter he will be in a few minutes, the strange apparently fraternal ghost who accompanies us and judges us.
10. The relationship between identity and difference: the second time, as we know, is the real time. And now for me China is real, it has its own measurable reality. She is part of the world.
11. Stubbornly, the mother-scene of the communication on Lin Piao continues, in the memory, to reappear in the modest meeting room of the tube and profile factory and not in what was truly its theatre, the meeting room of the large factory of machine tools in Shanghai. Only now, writing about it, do I seem to be able to see it again: the large armchairs upholstered in floral cretonne, the hum of the blue-green fans and, in front of me, Kao with her round and, I would almost say, hasty face, above the long body of slim girl. Then, in the armchairs, the other Chinese comrades, who have raised their trousers at the knees due to the heat and look like boys on a school trip, with their socks tucked into their sandals and fans in their hands.
12. Whichever country one goes to, the distance between the order of political evaluation and immediate experience is necessary, inevitable. In China that distance is maximum: because the ideological and political evaluation is lacerating, for the "left" Westerner, it is a crucial test; and because immediate experience is encrypted by the heterogeneity of pasts, by the impossibility of reducing China to any other known term.
Hence the paradoxical attitudes of the visitors. Now defensive, aimed at recovering all the possible points of identity and similarity: a hotel is a hotel, a beer is a beer, the girls are - after all - girls and in the factories the workers are like ours. Now perplexed: the diversity and ambiguity of each communication highlighted, indeed exasperated…
13. The Chinese observe, intimately I don't know if amused or dismayed, this rhythmic demand for "truth" and "authenticity" by Westerners. As often happens, the conservative pupil sees more clearly than the progressive one: Giorgio Manganelli, in the «Giorno», said a very serious truth about today's China, when he celebrated in the behavior of those people a civilized sense of the show opposite to ours romantic need to be "yourself" and "authenticity".
14. [At three o'clock in the morning, local time, when the three hundred or so, dazed, stunned, emerge from the belly of the Jumbo to immerse themselves in the warm consommé of the air, between the slimy lips of the Bahrain airport, most of us ignore where the fuck are these unreal Bahrainis, who says they are in the Red Sea and who in the Indian Ocean. We go up in droves, staggering under the blow of the fetid heat, towards an air-conditioned room where you can drink a nescafe, look at a map, be searched by two Arab guards... We've been running away from the sun since yesterday evening but it's faster than us, the palm trees in a row, with humble foliage, pass the sheds of the aluminum mines of the Bahrain, the shark waters of the Persian Gulf. The traveler is moved by the sight of the violet desert, he is ashamed of being so advanced in years, with his old-fashioned curiosities, he wishes he could sleep like his New Zealand neighbor, who does not like geography].
15. The Japanese for hotels and cities. Many, very active. Two categories: the "American" ones, young, efficient, long hair, fast air, something between the paparazzi, the journalist, the architect, English-speaking, experts in lenses, plane tickets, anti-fertilizers, mass publishing; and the “American” ones too, but in the style of fifty years ago, businessmen with ties and waistcoats, very unhappy travellers, little Mikados wearing glasses, sweaty, squalid. The Chinese watch them as little as possible. It must be very strange to be a Chinese in Japan, a Japanese in China. Analogies with our complicated intra-European relationships do not seem appropriate.
16. Is it possible to speak of rudeness for the Chinese we have known? Among them, they will certainly have their own evaluation code. I could only detect some forcing, some stridency in irony ("You'll see it next time you come to China" an official tells me with a grin at my complaints about not visiting I don't know which museum), some intentional awkwardness against "intellectuals", some - and this is frequent - "operaistic" demagoguery. But what are these negative traits compared to the quality of everyone's way of being, moving, speaking; that very difficult sense of physical space which is psychic space, an entirely transnatural education for coexistence? Only in London, but now less and less, in the rush hour, that sense of private-in-the-public that one sees, in China, traveling the third class of the Shanghai Express, where travelers live and sleep. A lesson in coexistence, in fact.
17. «Listen, does any soldier in your country get his uniform fixed, by a tailor or by his mother? We use it. Have you seen, for example, the uniform of the People's Army young comrade who is a lecturer in Chinghua Polytechnic University? It is clear that it has been retouched by some skilful hand».
"You always observe the little things," the interpreter replies, more annoyed than sad. He is not a very young man, serious, prepared, very intelligent. Once I tried to explain to him the reasons for a certain Italian way of making fun of even the most serious things, he said to me, in a reproachful tone: "There are things you can't joke about".
I think I understood that this refusal to play verbal jokes with the foreigner - in a people that must be very rich in verbal games, at least if I think of the little I know of its literature - must be connected with distrust, with that inextricable link of superiority-inferiority towards the western that I think should be a dominant of the Chinese, confirmed by the historical testimonies, by the observations that I have had to read.
18. With all this, the cries of the interpreters at the Hong Kong border remain difficult to explain. To say that the Orientals have "tears in their pockets" does not seem to me an explanation. We need to know better the reasons that associate a high degree of emotion with a given condition. It may also be that crying has a ritual character and is therefore authentic and at the same time convenient. Hand. It is more probable (it was the same seventeen years ago) that the emotional thrust originated at the same time from the awareness of remaining, they, in the place of a tremendous vital adventure, where they, as conscious minorities, can be, at every bend in the river historical, overwhelmed; hard and at the same time exalting in the sacrifice. This does not contradict the theme of separation, of "never again" which is recurrent in centuries and centuries of Chinese poetry (cf. Demieville, Anthologie de la poésie chinoise classique, Gallimard, 1962, p. 26, «the obsessive theme of changing residence»).
19. Around noon, in one of the internal courtyards of the imperial palace, I am waiting with C. for the girl interpreter to return from the telephone post where she went to call a taxi to take us back to the hotel. There is hardly anyone left, the courtyards are deserted, clear under the sun and the crystal clear blue. The yellow ceramics sparkle, the old pink and purple walls with blue shadows, the grass grown among the marbles that pave the paths between the pavilions, the painted wooden roofs, the pomegranates, the pines.
I am happy with these minutes of waiting in the midst of the silence of the architecture, under the midday sky. I wonder if I will write what I have seen now. I am thinking of those who will say to themselves "literature" while reading and will want to know what I think of Lin Piao.
20. You go back to Italy and your comrades ask you: So, Lin Piao? Is it true that the cultural revolution is buried? How's it going in China?
This type of question is the indication of an error. About China and about us. Sick of ideology, abstractions, myths and emblems; and all the more the more we have entered or are just emerging from a defeat or a political retreat, after having for some years (I am thinking of the younger ones) despised existential or empirical realities, the "investigations" recommended by Mao and modesty, favor of disputes on the class placement of students and on the "alternative culture", and we meet with a society, the Chinese one, which has a much greater ideological quotient than did the Soviet Union twenty years ago. With the difference that the formulation and use of slogans in the countries of Eastern Europe was the result of a visible oppression, of the constraint of a creative thought (which had produced not only the great literature of the century before Lenin, but the very rich ideological life of the twenties) while in China - see Schurmann - even if the presence of a conformity or conformism is evident, above all towards foreigners (and of worrying ideological and cultural forms, of which I will speak), the taste for the formulation and classification, therefore of the ideological inlay, the use (like a "domino" game) of modular elements of political language, is part of a profound cultural and linguistic structure, certainly innovated by Mao and the revolution but received from the past and essential, irreplaceable to make an all too contradictory and multilateral country ideologically homogeneous, to bring forward the double instance of conservation (as an overall cultural, historical unit, the enormous block of civilizations) and of transformation, i.e. of the relationship with the West according to an unprecedented path , neither Japanese nor Indian. When a Chinese cadre says «Liu Shaochi, ultra-left, leading body, serve the people, bourgeoisie, re-education» and so on, he is saying something very different from what we say, not because China is “other” or “untranslatable” but because the value that these terms have, as pieces of a composition, is established by a sense of values, of relationships, which is not ours even if it is increasingly resembling it[4].
The Chinese comrades are very keen on the correctness of ideological terminology; but, stripped of all the living elements that link it to reality there, that terminology appears wooden to us. If we then add that not a few Europeans bring to China their political frustrations, their need for hope and authority and one of the most indispensable and at the same time dangerous gifts of Marxism, that is the disposition to conceptualize, think of what is happening in China: a conversation with the leaders of a Commune or a visit to an elementary school are transformed into pure theology. All in all, the Chinese don't care because this is a way of imposing their code of discourse; ours, back in Italy, either rejoice faithfully or are silent.
21. Revolutionary committees, we are told, are administrative bodies. They told us in the communes and in the factories, at the university, everywhere. Others, visitors who arrived after us, were told of a real absorption of the revolutionary committees into party ones. But we too were told without hesitation that often the men of the revolutionary committee were, at least in part, the same as those of the party committee. My impression, on this point, was that the revolutionary committees have become a sort of intermediate and defense body, a sort of "captain of the people". I am persuaded that if they are not yet abolished it is because they cover a part of the functions that had belonged to the union, overwhelmed by the cultural revolution.
Almost no one places the emphasis on voluntary participation in socialist construction any more; even if any explicit reference to material incentives is obviously excluded.
The tendency is to call everything that emerges from the Cultural Revolution ultra-nister. The traces of a certain iconoclasm are materially erased; mentally, those of certain episodes. At the Beijing Polytechnic the morning's conversation was almost entirely occupied by an optimistic reconstruction of the immediate past; today we know, from Hinton's book, how hard and bloody and partly senseless fights took place, just four years ago, between those buildings. Along the inner walls of the Imperial Palace we can glimpse large sequences of characters covered by a coat of paint. In an ancient monastery in Nanjing a whole series of panels bearing ancient inscriptions had once been painted, and an enormous character had been painted on each of them; now another coat of gray paint has been superimposed on it.
In the Summer Garden almost all the decorative panels bearing human images had been covered in white paint and are now re-emerging. Numerous museums are undergoing "restoration" to make the images of no longer welcome executives disappear. In the Mao museum in Shaoshan, for halls and halls, the Chairman (as he himself would have once said to Malraux) is «alone with the masses». But even too much: just one wall is dedicated to the Long March, with a map and some photographs. From that trophy of superstitions one emerges baffled as, in his time, from the Musk Lenin of Moscow; and dejected, let the Chinese comrades know it.
But it is useless to continue with these notations, the Western press is full of them. Like it or not, if I compare my impressions of this August with those of my wife Ruth who spent a month in China in November 1970 - with the delegation documenting their trip in a large folder of "East Wind" - I sometimes wonder if we are talking about the same country, the same cities. I can thus assess, I think, the depth of the upheaval brought about by the Cultural Revolution and that of the present readjustment. But I think it makes little sense to talk about it in terms of "right" and "left". I repeat it again: using the Chinese political variations as simulacra for the political discourse we carry out in Italy is useless or only useful for doctrinaires, for those who embellish and adore their profession of faith every day.
I know I say something outrageous for them: today, in my opinion, only a liberal interpretation, in the American sense and which therefore, at least in part, disregards the ideological premises of Marxism, Leninism and Mao's thought. it can introduce our New Left comrades to an undistorted reading of the Chinese experience. If it is impossible - as has been repeated a thousand times - to understand anything about the Chinese outside the knowledge of the general ideological framework in which they move, on the other hand excessive closeness (or the effort towards a closeness) hinders understanding rather than helping it. The historical experience of Chinese cadres allows them to distinguish, I will not say always[5], but often, between a political reflection based on real data and one based only on ideological schemes. And it is clear then that they lend or appear to lend a more attentive ear to what is said to them by economic operators or diplomats of the capitalist world than to the speeches of their comrades, especially if the former provide data to be processed and the latter not infrequently elaborate with little or no data points.
To acquire credibility in the eyes of the Chinese comrades, one has only to count "on one's own strength", as they never tire of repeating. On pain of catastrophe, they are forced to practice an art and a science of detecting reality which we seem to lack, very uncertain about how to "do research". Its detection, I mean, of the contradictions, antagonistic or "within the people", the understanding of tendencies, needs, forces, in short, the political analysis of the class struggle, is, for them, the very condition of power ; if they encounter any obscurity in those investigations, it is mainly due to the shadow that the communist power itself casts on the surrounding reality, from having to be both judge and party. Instead, we are dealing with an opacity of reality that is mainly induced by capitalist power; and our mistakes, however tragic they may be, are not immediately discounted in terms of power and only exceptionally in terms of physical destruction.
The errors of the Italian Left and New Left, for example, are for the most part unloaded on the working, peasant and petty bourgeois masses and thus become relatively invisible. Our mistakes are confused with the historical monotony. Getting out of this perspective, feeling fully responsible, risking the fate of others in one's own, this distinguishes the true politician from the ideologue; this happens to us too rarely; this includes the Chinese; and this explains their prudence, their polite refusal to speak to us as equals. How can we fail to agree with them, when I who speak first would refuse a non-ideological responsibility and, in China, would have liked nothing better than a conversation of opinion, non-binding and without actual consequences, with a fellow man of mine?
22. The "Sette Maggio" school that we visited seemed to me an institution close to being liquidated. I can't give the reasons. Those "schools" were set up in an emergency situation. I compare the description my wife gave me, on her visit in November 1970. The school had been created a little over eighteen months ago, in a moor. The heroic period had been the initial one, with the construction of lodgings, tilling the fields, living from the work of one's hands: and this, in general, for cadres over thirty years of age.
I think that among us there is an instinctive underestimation of this kind of experience. Instinctive and dangerous. It is clear that the use of the spade and the hardships of military life do not change people's brains and do not create socialism; on the other hand, when the Chinese speak of manual work as a school of reality, I have the impression that out of a sort of cultural modesty they are doing themselves a bit of a disservice. In the sense that they are inclined to say that the pedagogical value of manual work consists in making people understand what kind of peasant or working-class toil is, what the reflections of that work in the judgment criteria, in mental schemes, etc., but they are inclined instead not to notice an aspect that is certainly equally important and more linked to the traditional past, the one that established a long discipline of the body and a relationship with space and with dimensions that is less than in our case attributable to the "practical-inert" of which Sartre tells us spoke.
The "Sette Maggio'" School, to be the closest to Beijing, must be visited continuously by delegations of visitors; how difficult it is, however, to grasp the cliché, the element of repetition! Once again, absolute commitment to copying triumphs in this civilization. There is the point of honor of the professional who, after the umpteenth performance, knows how to give the same naturalness to his beat, the same intensity to the orchestral "staccato". Where the identity of mask and face becomes the moral premise of an authenticity superior to ours, of introspective, bourgeois, romantic descent; as, in our West, the formalists of the arts and letters had understood (misunderstood and possibly killed by a century of "revolutionaries").
The conversation dragged on longer than necessary in the gray and hot afternoon. Seated at the long wooden tables, the comrades listened to the discussion, apparently calm but in reality full of overtones, feints and tension, between the Chinese and Natoli who with cold determination had expressed his amazement at the unchanged place that in China it was done to comrade Stalin, adding quite a few references to the history of the CPC to sweetly conclude that Stalin himself should have been considered the father of Soviet revisionism. Meanwhile I saw beyond the windows, in the courtyard of gray beaten earth, pass and repass, waiting, men and women with drapes and red paper flowers, for the little show that had been announced to us and which was supposed to take place on the raised tables at the back. in the refectory, similar to those of our country club; and I was sorry that they had to wait so long for our, all in all quite vain, ideological clarifications.
My wife had spoken to me with particular enthusiasm about that modest show of songs and dances, performed by - I was about to say, by the internees - by the "volunteer" cadres of the "Sette Maggio" in re-education. I had believed that enthusiasm. But now I was skeptical. It seemed to me impossible that - after the political transformations that were witnessed to us every day - the show did not have a sinister background. People of my age know, firsthand or by hearsay, the mystifications, now tragic now ridiculous, of "guided visits" to prison and "re-education" camps. Like the school children arranged along the itinerary of the illustrious guest, from the airport to the hotel, waving flags; like the cheering workers in Vnukovo; or the dancers, here, if the sister of the Shah of Persia is received by Chou Enlai… The discomfort and almost the shame, this I expected; not of the same kind as that which, at some point, I had experienced in front of children's ballets, in that inevitably mechanical way, with the obscure intention of seducing a particular kind of benevolence which seems to me always connected with the use of children at the end of the show - but more serious, as for the rigid imposition of a courtesy formula.
Instead, when two or three lamps went on and the cymbals and drums began to thunder and a dozen girls and men got on the tables, under the usual smile of the President - everything changed, the truth appeared indisputable, absolute; I speak the truth of repetition, in the sense that I specified earlier. I wish I could tell you what they were, what they were like, those girls, who seemed then to have left behind their broom, ladle, or pitchfork; some are cute, some are ugly; dressed in their work clothes, their strappy slippers, their tresses dry and parted or fat and hanging. And how the poor paper flowers sang or waved; how they laughed or smiled. And the men, in shirtsleeves, without any concern for the scene and without any excessive modesty; in chorus or two solos on stage, with the accordion, with just a bold attitude and clenched fists for pride, as prescribed by the posters and calendar images.
23. On the morning of departure, the avenue of the Long March was empty to the horizon and the sky was clear. The sun could be seen rising in the east. Its first rays touched the Tien An Men's gilding, dragon-red beams and marble parapets. Against the outer wall the shadows of the sentries could be made out, small from the distance.
The calm of the moment before the day can be an image of strength and hope.
Before returning we had other days of travel. But that morning was the real departure. For many years I thought I'd never see those buildings again. When you're old you say: «my eyes saw».
The morning is high, the distances are those of the basin of San Marco.
The comrades watched how the silk of the flags fluttered in the breeze. In their eyes now run new neighborhoods and trees of young plants along the canals.
24. These notes are messy and contradictory. Controversial notes rather than interpretations. “But then, if China is neither this nor the other, if this baffles or disappoints and the other is open to criticism or incomprehensible, what do you love so much about that people and their revolution? Why do you keep glorifying her? What will this China be like if you think it's the only place you know in the world where you can begin to call yourself, without too much shame, men?».
"No answer, dear friends," is my reply. “Should I explain to you the very exact and delicate relationship which, in my view, exists between the formulas of the Chinese communist policy and the hydraulic system of the Hunan countryside? The play of physical and intellectual refraction that passes between the spaces of that nation and the way in which human beings seem to move in it? Of course not. Not only because presumption is rarely a virtue and, speaking of China, it is always abused; but above all because these things do not interest you. Why try to explain to you that it doesn't even cross my mind to identify myself with that culture and with those forms of interpretation of the world? That I know well to illuminate those landscapes and those faces with the ancient theatrical effects of Greek-Christian metaphysics, so foreign to them? That when they speak of the celestial powers rushed to help the old man who moved the mountains, they know they are using only figurative language while I would be less sure of it? That I don't have any "love" for China but that it - or what I believed to understand from it - is a necessary term, not only for me, to better understand what history and nature we are made of here?
Our dissent is, it seems to me, and as they say, further upstream. It would be helpful to clarify this; if it weren't so late, we weren't all so nervous and annoyed or ill-disposed».
25. "But, really, would you go and live there?" was the intentionally silly question of an intelligent left-wing intellectual.
I managed to prevent myself from the only true answer; that would have sounded false, especially to my interlocutors, so certain of their own vitality. Living in China? Of course not; a useless effort, a torment of misunderstandings and misunderstandings. But I think of the importance of entrusting with reasonable confidence the survival of all that one loved the most; even if whoever we hope will have to protect him will do so believing that he is promoting something other than what we are committing him: no other part of men I could elect closer than that which we call Chinese, today intent on digging its shelters under the earth and defending and increasing above the earth factories and companions. So that we can go there, in this sense of bequest, to die - in the persuasion that we have pity and respect for the journey accomplished by living, goods that we have destroyed; and also in the hope of finding oneself in this way and truly on one side and no longer, as here among us, on two sides at the same time - this, at least for me, I believe is possible.
26. Hatred of China has different qualities.
Let us not forget that for many years, at least up to the XNUMXs, we associated China with the Third World; that is, to a category that has turned out to be increasingly equivocal. The "Marxists" digested badly the idea that a country so "backward" in terms of production indexes, so "peasant" and, why not, "feudal", claimed to be considered differently from India, Egypt or the Congo in the name of a level of "civilization", imprecise and unverifiable. Ignorance of Chinese history - not that of the Empire but precisely that of the first thirty and forty years of our century - authorized many comrades to see, at most, with disdain, in the Chinese people the reservoir of a future proletariat. These things were written, in black and white, and also believed, by comrades who, coherently, on the other hand, would later end up returning or joining that PCI which had always distinguished itself in keeping silent, for years, about China or to gather the reasons for the contempt disguised as "Marxism" that the Soviets poured on the Eastern barbarians.
The Marx-Trotskyist, with his nice little schemes in his head, raged at Mao's prose; these Chinese who spoke in terms of ethics and set up blast furnaces in the courtyards, go! And the Marx-Trozhkist met with the neo-Luxemburgist and the Jacobin heir to shake their heads together and deplore the fact that the "working class" in that country was so weak. Little did they know they were repeating arguments that Mao's opponents in China had been repeating for thirty years. As for the anarcho-existential, situationist, immediatist, crypto-Christian youth — they liked Ho Chi Min more than Mao, and Guevara more than Ho Chi Min. The fat grandfather's wisdom did not excite them. To the extent that the Cultural Revolution or part of it coincided with some themes of the international youth rebellion, to that extent they believed they loved China and understood it, ready to run away merrily as soon as they thought they were disappointed. .
And I didn't want to talk about something more destructive and cowardly which also often enters into the composition of that hatred; the tenacious Eurocentric superstition, the contempt, the arrogance and the spite of those who, from the top of a Marxism understood as philosophia perennis… and, basically, the philosophy of history scheme according to which, as Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob , the rustle of the sequence that led from feudal society to bourgeois society and from this to socialism was so comforting.
No, at the bottom of hatred or resentment towards China lies something grave and serious which was not, in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, in the ambivalent feelings of Westerners towards the Soviet Union. What has made China a symbol and a trauma, a sign of contradiction and a specter, which one dismisses with sneers or gladly forgets - it is precisely the fact that it is associated with the great semi-secular event of the Soviet revolution and with his long, twenty-year agony.
I leave to the specialists the clarification in terms of class of this historical reverberation phenomenon. They will probably tell us that the Italian (European) petty bourgeois area, with all its extensions and infiltrations and reciprocal in the proletarian area is, by definition, the most sensitive to these "psychological" translations. Let's grant it. On the other hand, it is clear that we are no longer dealing with the reality-China but with the ghost-China; that ghost that often accompanies the traveler to the point of replacing reality-China, the one that flows beyond the windows of the train and bus. Yes, I needed to say that, just as there are people who spend their lives talking about life, so many comrades have spent China talking about China…
The fear of hope and the love of despair.
It is not a question of the same feeling nor are they found in the same person. Not necessarily. But let's talk about it, because "China" unleashes both.
How often have we read, among our own or close to our own, in recent years, against the "ignoble" hope, this miserable beggar, this Christian virtue! All of Nietzsche's indignation aided the heroic and furious despisers of hope with arguments. That they wanted to see only the aspect of mystification and consolation of hope. Now China was precisely this: it was not the preaching of hope, it did not announce a few more months to the fascists and the bourgeoisie, but it was the realization of something daily and concrete that was hope for us. That hope presented itself as a duty and as a temptation.
The deluded, which we were, by the great historical delusion, were all too apt to fear deception, enthusiasm, the loss of critical control. We didn't want — we still don't want — to ask ourselves what we really should ask of history. For having always kept understood the superhuman or inhuman hopes of the Revolution as the End of Prehistory and a radical mutation of the human condition, understood and as if covered by political realism but not criticized, but not really overcome, hope ended up assuming the face of that sentiment and that volition that could have linked "realism" and its goal, tactics and strategy, the present and the future. This is why it made us, makes us, fear.
And the love of despair, in how many of us have not seen, entertained, brooded, as a hidden source of apparent strength, from which to derive waters of private purification! While the fearful of hope wear political "realism" to reject the temptation of having to be, the lovers of despair show, on the contrary, hardness of faith and dutiful contained enthusiasm to hide from others that the future is barren. Both do not want to risk it.
And in fact, in the best ones - I am thinking of Adorno - the battle had been to face the fall of Soviet "hope" without falling into atony. The tension remained but transferred in such terms as to become, in fact, meta-historical. China was omitted, or placed in parentheses, considered the exception, the anomaly, the calf with two heads, above all because from it, I mean, from the most profound teaching of Mao (whatever his recurring accents may be 'inevitability of communism) came, unequivocally, an affirmation which had even been present in Marx but which had in fact been dropped by the revolutionary history of the first half of our century: namely that socialism is not written in heaven or, to be more precise, that the contradictions cannot be suppressed, but only replaced, that nothing is acquired once and for all, that the historical phases cannot be followed like the Egyptian dynasties, that nothing is certain and everything can be lost for an entire historical cycle or , if you like, that man cannot get out of his condition of man. (And if this is not "Marxism", so much the worse for "Marxism").
All of this - repugnant to the age-old banality of the left because it resembles too much Christian ideology - was accompanied in China by fierce attacks on "humanism", understood as the affirmation of a permanent "human nature"; but the Chinese were unable to disguise the immense theoretical importance that the idea of a revolution should have had for us as such but no longer in the order of guaranteed "progress", no longer as a permanent recovery of all the past and of the lost and instead as a choice of the essential.
The perspective that China opened up to us at the beginning of the XNUMXs, with the break with the Soviets, and which has not changed through the Cultural Revolution and the current phase, is not that of the «socialist-revolution-in-authenticity- e-fidelity», guaranteed by the risks of Stalinist involutions, by capitalist influences, by the reconstitution, from within, of bourgeois power; it is not the banner of the miserable fideistic hope of those who want to believe in a guide, in an avenger. It is the proposal of a risk that is played from day to day, from individual to individual, on the "own strength" of each individual and which, precisely for this reason, coincides with freedom and with ethical risk; in order to produce the revolution, to fight for socialism and to be-in-authenticity, are - or rather: they return to being - the same thing.
This was confusedly felt by a new generation in the second half of the XNUMXs. But "relying on one's strengths" rather than on one's weaknesses was too serious a precept. Who wrote that "the truth takes away our hope and leaves us with certainty"? Chinese truth does it: it takes away our inferior hope, the hope of dreams and reveries; and also the lower despair, the one that is always on the verge of cynicism. A completely different order of virtues is asked of us, such as form, modesty, smiling inflexibility; and I now realize that these are almost alla lattera the same words with which I concluded the book on my first trip to China seventeen years ago. It proposes a verifiable ought to be or, if you want to call it that, a controllable hope, in the short term and - at the same time - an historical arc or circle in which to place all of our biological "defeat", as Hegel already knew and therefore a superior non-hope but certainty. Sensitive, empirical, real, everyday; but, precisely because it visibly lacks a tragic dimension, a terse image of the earthly condition and without illusions; like any other place on earth of course but like no other of our times known to me, capable of proposing at the same time intimacy, courtesy, the irony of limits and the unlimited spaces of even ferocious, even apparently superhuman tasks.
Da Piacenza notebooks, year XII, n 48-49 , January 1973, pp.119-139
Note
[1] Even in factories. But that at the Iron and Steel Complex in Beijing, the casting is accompanied by the notes of The East is Red, I find it correct as a ceremonial element and, I don't know if for the Chinese, but certainly for the foreign visitor, rightly emotional.
[2] Perhaps to one and the same trend. When one reads, in the chronicles of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the symbolic meanings that the political groups attributed to the ideological choices relating to the so-called Peking Opera, on the one hand the political conflicts of France of the century come to mind. XVII mediated by theater companies but, for another, the Soviet ones in the late XNUMXs. In any case, this game of masks costs a price that is no longer tolerable, in the theater and in the streets.
[3] And I must point out that, speaking in this way, I reverse the position that was mine twenty years ago, in polemic, then, with the language of the communist press. Then ("He who does not explain is responsible" in Ten winters, Milan. 1957; soon to be reprinted), I wrote that one had to place oneself at the level of the most modest reader of the party's newspaper and, in the indecipherability of the propaganda, rely, so to speak, on a sort of stylistic of leftist texts. That criticism of "scripture" is necessary, no doubt; even if it risks becoming an exercise in linguistic sociology. But the error of my position was the error of believing in the possibility of isolating verbal communication and of allowing experience and therefore the moment of political judgment to intervene only after the sociological-linguistic disassembly of the message. Truly literary error that assumed a suspension of the contents in favor of the content of the form, as they say.
[4] And when I say "our" I don't mean "of our Marxism", on the contrary; but, if one can say so, the language of the instruments of mass communication is dominated by the Western ideological code. The naive address of a very young apprentice interpreter to some comrades who were about to get on a city bus in Beijing ("Our Chairman Mao recommended never to forget the class struggle; therefore on the bus, comrades, watch your wallets" ) is a small proof of this. The class struggle includes the moral order to such an extent that any pickpocket is automatically characterized as a class enemy. (And it is certainly necessary to warn the Chinese comrades against their enduring tendency to reverse the relationship and to make a criminal of every class enemy; a Soviet vice and black in consequences). Similarly, amazed by the, at least apparent, lack of protection for the fragile and precious archaeological finds in one of the Ming tombs, I was told that thieves (and even the mentally ill) do not exist in China. Where the "they don't exist" had to be understood as an implicit separation from the good or "recoverable" majority, such as that five percent which (in the tradition of Chinese communist language) represents the acceptable share of irreducible negative, the real presence of antagonistic contradictions , ideologically reduced to symbolic values and presences.
[5] I am not forgetting the gross errors which the Chinese comrades made in evaluating the quality and consistency of the anti-revisionist forces, in Europe and in Italy, about ten years ago.
