素质的身体政治学

The Corporeal Politics of Quality(Suzhi)

1990年代的中国,素质作为价值的反面形象,其话语广为流传。要对这个过程进行理论解释,解构性地阅读马克思的价值概念是很有意义的。＂素质＂并不内在于作为＂活劳动＂的物质载体的身体当中,它是通过社会与父母投资于＂身体＂这个场所使之接受教导而获得具体的能力灌输进身体当中的,而价值是一种无实质内容的＂差异＂而从身体中被抽离出来。本文在民族志观察和大众媒体文本的基础上,侧重于将流动劳动与城市中产阶级的独生子女以一种互为否定的身体并置在一起,而这两者的并置必然遭到否定,以便在两者之间产生一种可想往的隔绝。因此,素质话语不仅是在经济层面中流传,而且也在社会区隔的象征体系中流传。在＂文明的＂都市家庭及其情感价值的生产新近私密化的空间里面,这种体系已得到了最充分的表达。

Deconstructive readings of Marx’s concept of value are useful in theorizing the circulation of suzhi discourse in 1990 s China as a kind of inverse figure of value.Rather than inhering in bodies as the corporeal containers of"living labor " from which value is extracted as a contentless " differential ",suzhi encompasses " qualities " that must be built into bodies through the inculcation of embodied competencies that make the body the site of societal and parental investment.Based on ethnographic observation as well as mass media texts,this article draws attention to an implicit juxtaposition of the migrant laborer with the single child of the urban middle class in a kind of ghostly doubling of bodies that must be denied in order to effect a desired separation between the two.The discourse of suzhi therefore circulates not just at the economic level,but also in a symbolic economy of social distinctions that achieves its fullest expression in the newly interiorized space of a"civilized" urban domesticity and its production of affective value.