The Mirage of China : : Anti-Humanism, Narcissism, and Corporeality of the Contemporary World / / Xin Liu.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Liu, Xin,
• Place / Publishing House: New York; , Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2009]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Series: Culture and Politics/Politics and Culture ; 5
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (222 p.)

Today’s world is one marked by the signs of digital capitalism and global capitalist expansion, and China is increasingly being integrated into this global system of production and consumption. As a result, China’s immediate material impact is now felt almost everywhere in the world; however, the significance and process of this integration is far from understood. This study shows how the a priori categories of statistical reasoning came to be re-born and re-lived in the People’s Republic - as essential conditions for the possibility of a new mode of knowledge and governance. From the ruins of the Maoist revolution China has risen through a mode of quantitative self-objectification. As the author argues, an epistemological rift has separated the Maoist years from the present age of the People’s Republic, which appears on the global stage as a mirage. This study is an ethnographic investigation of concepts - of the conceptual forces that have produced and been produced by - two forms of knowledge, life, and governance. As the author shows, the world of China, contrary to the common view, is not the Chinese world; it is a symptomatic moment of our world at the present time.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Prologue: Making Up Numbers -- Part I Moral Mathematics -- Chapter One The Mentality of Governance -- Chapter Two The Facticity of Social Facts -- Part II Statistics, Metaphysics, and Ethics -- Chapter Three Discipline and Punish -- Chapter Four The Specter of Marx -- Part III Reason and Revolution -- Chapter Five The Taming of Chance -- Chapter Six Interiorization -- Chapter Seven Exteriorization -- Acknowledgments -- References -- Index