Excellent—let’s explore resistance to the CCP discursive complex in psychoanalytic terms, as Parker might frame it: not simply as counter-discourse, but as attempts to rupture the fantasy, displace the master-signifiers, and reveal the Real behind the ideological screen.
We’ll focus on three powerful modes of resistance:
1. Satire: Subversion from Within the Signifier Chain
Satire, parody, and internet “egao” (惡搞) culture crack the coherence of CCP ideology by twisting the signifier—mocking, mimicking, or exaggerating Party slogans, official language, or patriotic symbols.
Lacanian/Parkerian Reading:
• Satire operates within the symbolic, but introduces slippage—it exposes the gap between S1 (master-signifier) and the real effects of its deployment.
• It reveals that the Big Other does not exist, or is inconsistent, ridiculous, even perverse.
Example:
• Memes that sarcastically celebrate censorship or glorify meaningless achievements.
• The image of “Winnie the Pooh” as Xi Jinping—a childlike, infantilized representation that mocks the paternal authority of the leader.
Effect on the discursive complex:
• Short-circuits imaginary identification (“I am one with the nation”).
• Destabilizes jouissance: The subject begins to laugh instead of sacrifice.
• The master-signifier is hollowed out—no longer taken seriously.
This is not just political mockery—it is psychic disidentification. The subject says: I no longer derive enjoyment from this fantasy.
2. Diaspora Subjectivity: Exile from the Ideological Fantasy
Diaspora intellectuals, artists, and writers often experience a rupture from the CCP’s discursive complex by virtue of physical, cultural, or linguistic distance. But more importantly, they develop new subject positions outside the CCP’s fantasy.
Lacanian/Parkerian Reading:
• The diaspora subject is excluded from the symbolic order of the CCP—but this exclusion can be transformative.
• Freed from the Big Other’s gaze, the diaspora subject re-encounters the Real—not repressed, but now articulated: loss, trauma, silencing.
Example:
• Writers like Ma Jian, Murong Xuecun, or artists like Ai Weiwei articulate a split from the fantasy of national unity.
• Their works often contain ambiguity, melancholy, rage, and shame—affects that signal a crisis of symbolic coherence.
Effect on the discursive complex:
• Shows that subjectivity is possible outside the Party’s mirror.
• Articulates a new desire not grounded in nationalist fantasy or submission.
• Makes visible the cost of identification—what must be repressed to “belong.”
3. Trauma Writing: The Return of the Real
When writers and survivors speak or write about unrepresentable historical trauma—e.g. the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen—they force the Real into the symbolic. These are not simply counter-narratives; they are unassimilable elements that the CCP ideological structure cannot fully integrate.
Lacanian/Parkerian Reading:
• Trauma = the Real: that which resists symbolization but marks the subject.
• Trauma narratives are symptomatic, but also revelatory—they show what ideology must repress to remain coherent.
• They produce a subject who is not whole, who bears witness to lack.
Example:
• Works like Yang Jisheng’s《墓碑》(Tombstone) on the Great Famine, or Tiananmen Mothers’ testimonies, Feng Congde’s diaries, etc.
• These texts often refuse closure, resist reconciliation, and speak in halting, repetitive, or fragmented forms.
Effect on the discursive complex:
• Breaks the fantasy of “great rejuvenation” by insisting on the wound.
• Constructs a subject of responsibility, not submission.
• Forces a non-identificatory gaze: the reader must not look away, even when the Other (the Party) demands forgetting.
Conclusion: Cracks in the Discursive Complex
|
Mode of Resistance |
Psychoanalytic Mechanism |
Challenge to CCP Ideology |
|
Satire |
Slippage of the signifier; exposure of lack in the Big Other |
Undermines authority and enjoyment |
|
Diaspora |
Disidentification; exile from the Symbolic |
Opens space for alternative subjectivities |
|
Trauma Writing |
Return of the Real; symptom of repression |
Forces reckoning with historical truth |
Together, these modes of resistance expose that the CCP discursive complex is not total—it is haunted by cracks, by the subject’s dividedness, and by a Real it cannot domesticate.
Let me know if you want to take this further—say, into a theoretical paper outline, or into specific texts (e.g. Tiananmen literature, Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary, Xu Zhiyuan’s essays).
