Astral Maoism

Notes on the Turbulence of the Infinite

To discuss philosophy and infinite divisibility Mao, on 15 July 1973, invited in American physicist Yang Zhenning accompanied by Zhou Enlai and Zhou Peiyuan… According to the Chinese minutes of the meeting, to Mao's question, “Can light quanta be divided now?” Yang pleaded, “That this problem had not yet been solved." Mao, however, knew the answer to his own question. “Matter is infinitely divisible,” he commented.

Mao never invited Yang in for another talk. — Edward Friedman, ‘Einstein and Mao: Metaphors of Revolution’

I say: the concept is reality, the finite is infinite, the temporal senses are the super-temporal senses, imagination is thought, form is substance, I am the universe, life is death and death is life, the present is the past and the future, the past and the future are the present, small is big, the yang is the yin, up is down, dirty is clean, male is female, and thick is thin. In essence, the many are one and change is permanence. I am the most exalted person, and also the most unworthy person. — Mao, Marginal Notes on Friedrich Paulsen

This post was originally intended to be a review of Robert Allinson’s intriguing book The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections, Insights—but what’s the point of writing a review of a book that, for the most part, is a review of Mao’s own writings, scattered across the whole of his life? It sounds more enjoyable to me to write a meandering, non-linear reflection on the strangest point of Mao’s thinking, those occasional moments when revolutionary fervor transform themselves into ‘metaphysical fugues’ (to quote one person on twitter). Still, it’s worth saying a few words on Allison’s work, which I’ll be pilfering freely for quotes from the Chairman that cannot be found anywhere else (at least in English).

The novelty of Allison’s tome is that he takes seriously Mao’s pre-Marxist period, which saw Mao acting as neither a revolutionary leader nor one of history’s great statesmen. Instead, Allinson gives us a tour of Mao the philosopher, beginning most prominently with the young Mao, the Mao who studiously examined the texts of Leibniz, Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche and, most importantly, German idealist and neo-Kantian Friedrich Paulsen.

The latter was Mao’s deepest study: “In Paulsen’s book of 100,000 words, Mao’s notations add up to over 12,000 word… ‘each word and sentence has circles, dots, single and double underlinings, triangles, crosses and other marks of punctuation…’”. What makes the influence of Paulsen on Mao so interesting that it is not a philosophy of collectivism, but of individualism; even more pertinent is Paulsen’s espousal of a kind of voluntarism, the privileging of the will over the forces of reason as the motive force in action (social or individual). Much ink had been spilt over Mao’s own voluntarism, which was grasped by none other than Henry Kissinger when he met with Mao in China in 1973—

There was no ceremony. Mao just stood there… I have met no one, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, who so distilled raw concentrated will power… He dominated the room—not by the pomp that in most states confer a degree of majesty on the leaders, but by exuding in almost tangible form the overwhelming drive to prevail.

—but the question of this supposed voluntarism is far more complex than even Allinson is willing to admit. The ghost of the ultimate problem, voluntarism and its opposite, determinism, haunts philosophical reflection (it emerges in the third antimony of Kant as the problem of spontaneity and causal or mechanistic determinism) and in particular cuts across the whole of Marxism. We find there a polarity that is not easily resolved. On one hand, a Marx of revolution, wrapped in a quasi-metaphysical and existential blanket, as prophet of social revolution and the formation of a new earth, and on the other, a Marx who labored endlessly in the libraries of London, desks and tabletops smothered in volumes of economic statistics, notebooks filled with reflection on differential calculus, frenzied and often contradictory calculations of profit rates—the Marx who analyzed capitalism as a historical bloc chugging, whether the human race wanted it or not, towards its higher stage. Marx the philosopher of praxis and Marx the scientist.

When the problem passes onto Mao, the question of the will, inherited perhaps (as Allinson holds) from Paulsen intensifies. The will of the masses, forever swept up in an ocean of revolt, is fused together with the attempts to harness the objective criteria of development. On the side of the former, Mao’s commitment to voluntarism to taken to its ultimate limit—in a philosophical register, not one of action, because the limit of action was the Cultural Revolution itself—in the writings of Guy Lardreau. This was the subject of a sprawling two-part essay series by Peter Hallward (here and here). Hallward intended for this set of series to function as a critique of Hallward, but to be quite honest I cannot think of a better advertisement for as strange and idiosyncratic thinker as Lardreau was.

For Lardreau, Mao’s thought was not simply an extension of Marxism-Leninism in the Chinese context—it was to Marxism-Leninism as Marxism-Leninism was to Marxism, which is to say, it was a third stage that both affirmed and negated key components of what came before it. Mao’s revolutionary doctrines conducted a critique of the Leninist ‘professional revolutionaries’, lambasted as self-declared ‘subject that is supposed to know’ (and here we have, in rather explicit form, a distillation of the Maoist critique of the new class). Even more important is Lardreau’s argument that the Chinese revolutionary sweep disclosed that it is rebellion and revolt itself, the rising up of the oppressed against their masters, that is the immanent logic of history.

Lardreau stretches Mao’s voluntarism to the point of hypertrophy. Following Lacan, he poses desire itself as the domain of the master—and this desire encompasses the very notion of the will that is so vital to voluntarist action. At this point, the development of his thought swerves, and he rises from the domain of political praxis to the elevated states of theology proper. Serving as an uncanny prefiguration of China’s Red Guards and the extreme states of renunciation that characterized the Cultural Revolution, Lardreau zeros in on the ascetism of the Christian Desert Fathers— “this surreal crowd that swarms in the deserts of the Orient, these monks with wasted bellies, their bodies lacerated with chains, these ruined figures whipped by wind and rain, these worm-eaten but radiant stylites, these voluntary madmen”.

The final turning point, the crisis of Lardreau’s thought—which might be the very crisis of voluntarism itself—is the recuperation of Cultural Revolution, the highest expression of immanent revolt, into the discourse of the master. Pure revolt’s requirements, the revolt against both desire and the will, is never truly realizable, something that can never be achieved atop the mortal plane. It translates back out from the flows of history and moves itself into a wager, a leap of faith. Lardreau positions a mythic image hovering over the leap: the Angel, a purified body that is expunged of all sex and desire for domination.

To take one step beyond Lardreau, we can say that the place that he goes to with his (theo)logical chain is the non-space of the Infinite. Because the unfolding dialectic of rebel and master cannot complete it races off into the lasting horizon—and the Angel is an attempt to reconcile with and come to terms with this infinite character. Faith closes the gap: “the Angel will come”—but will it? In late Lardeau, the crisis never resolves, it goes on forever, and here too he is only expounding on something that was already present, perhaps even ever-present, in Mao’s thought.

Mao, in his early margin notes on Friedrich Paulsen:

I can imagine space without time, and feel that I am placed in an infinite, unbounded, broad, and expansive great place that has no present, no past, no future. In this context, it is possible to maintain the view that both body and spirit are immortal. Is this not an entirely different world?

The inverse of a general will capable of bending historical reality to itself are the objective laws of historical development. Here we are in the realm of natural phenomena and natural law, the analysis of which is the privileged domain of science. It’s telling that, despite the supposedly voluntarist character of Mao’s understanding of radical social transformation, he elevates the dynamics of those transformations to a particular function of the cosmos themselves and now downplays the force of will:

Wave-like advance. All movement is waves. In natural science there are sound waves and electro-magnetic waves. All movement is wave-like advance. This is the law of the development of motion. It objectively exists. It is not changed by human will. All our work… is wave-like advance. It is not a rising straight line.

Why the form of the wave, which has to continued to hover over Chinese scientific and economic (and philosophical) development, and finds its counterpart in the annals of Marxism and political economy more broadly? (think of the K-wave) It is because, Mao writes, “everything in the world is itself a contradiction, a unity of opposites”. This unification of opposites is by no means a harmonious one; it is character by turbulence and, in most cases, antagonism. In their unity they spiral around one another, the state of a thing will undergo a phase shift into the other, they will clash, break, give rise to temporary moments of stabilization before the ground beneath them—and us—begins to shift once again.

This clashing unity produces movement, and movement underpins the process of development of all things, from the advancing tide of socialist revolution to the unfurling of the universe itself. It is always abrupt and never gradual. “Progress is made out of twists and turns and spirals. Sudden change is the most basic law in the universe”.

To return to Allinson’s book for a moment: one of his core arguments is that Mao’s Marxist—and especially his very particular understanding of dialectical materialism—was informed by his studies of traditional Chinese philosophy. The entire hyper-inversion of Hegel that Mao conducted (more on this in a moment), which is the ultimate basis for the statements above, appear to have fallen out from the Yijing, the ancient Chinese oracular Book of Changes. Even here, however, pivotal transformations have been made. Here’s how Allinson puts it:

Mao is closer to the Yijing in which there is always a movement of opposites. Each hexagram is, by its very nature, incomplete and fated, so to speak, to turn into its opposite. Each hexagram is itself a unity of opposites and is unstable. Even the stable hexagrams are instable because stability is not a state that can remain the same. Change is paramount. Change is paramount because at the centre of things is opposition and the need to move. Without movement, there is no life. There is no synthesis or settled state in the Yijing. There is no third stage in the Yijing. There is no need for a third stage. This is not to say that Mao’s thought is the same thinking as the Yijing. Mao’s thought is considerably more turbulent. His concept of change is the thunderstorm, not the morning mist.

This passage on the unity of opposites is partially why I sought out Allinson’s book in the first place. The term, unity of opposites, will of course be familiar to anyone read in Hegel, Marx, or the annals of dialectical materialism—the interplay of this union is the motor of the dialectic itself, which in various turns have been hypostasized into visions of teleological progress, allowed Marx to glimpse in the infernal machinations of capital (and its eventual overcoming), and provided a language for the Soviet Union to understand and drive forward its revolutionary rupture with the past. Like the statement by Mao cited above, the unity of opposites generates movement, momentum, development itself.

But Mao also does something very peculiar to this dialectical unfurling, and this is why Allinson is so keen to bring in the Yijing. This is the jettisoning of the “third stage” that he alludes to—the third stage being the negation of negation itself, the final point in the dialectical process, which finds its overt articulation in Marx when he wrote in Capital Volume I that the ‘expropriators will be expropriated’ (paraphrased).

By ejecting the negation of negation, and thus banishing the resolving synthesis, Mao untethers the dialectic—and history itself—from any teleological certainty and sense of ultimate culmination. He makes the dialectical process infinite, and by doing so makes struggle, collision, revolution equally extended into the furthest points of duration. This has profound ramifications for every element that is touched by the Marxist analytic and political program: Mao has effectively removed any sense of true guarantees from history. Communism’s realization becomes highly contingent, and even where socialist revolution has succeeded, it will be characterized by the eternal persistence of struggle from both inside and outside itself.

Yet, at the same time, Mao also locates within this infinite something approaching a guarantee; he draws down from these lessons not a pang of defeat—and here, in some strange way, he has redeemed the ‘bad infinity’ of Hegel, turned it on its head—but the opening of revolutionary possibility itself in every domain.

This may seem like a weird paradox, but paradox itself is the very form of the non-resolving dance of contradiction. This is drawn out most sharply by Boris Groys in his little book The Communist Postscript, where communism itself is presented as a kingdom of paradox, as a social order where contradictions are not so much resolved within history, but where the A and not-A co-exist without excluding one another. Other forms of government, such as liberalism, can never properly achieve this absolute fidelity to the form of the paradox, opting instead for a rote process grounded in a formal logic that seeks to banish paradox outright (and here we can better understand Vince Garton’s critique of liberalism’s self-declared status as an ‘end of history’ politics that I discussed in an earlier post).

Maybe this puts us in a better position to better understand Mao’s own apparent contradictory embrace of both voluntarism and a kind of determinist worldview simultaneously—is this not another iteration of the paradox? It also raises the spectral problem of the base and superstructure in Marxism, through which the question of voluntarism and determinism also refracts. The primacy of the base would point towards a deterministic worldview, leading to ‘evolutionary’ interpretations of Marx, which superiority of the superstructure takes us down the road towards a revolution driven by will and ideology. Instead (and Groys himself makes this argument) the base and superstructure relationship is locked as permanent paradox. This is why Mao himself pivots back and forth on which one is primary.

Finally, we can also understand now Xi’s own gambit, discussed in my ‘The Luminous Vertigo of Crisis’ post, to push the world’s trajectory along a dual path, on one side increasing global marketization and on the other towards the realization of a true multipolar geopolitics. It would be simplistic to assign each of these categories to just the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’—instead, this is another iteration of paradox or contradiction that brings to mind both the base and superstructure problem, but even more pertinently the question of the universal and the particular. The subordination of the particular by the universal, Hegel’s move that so irked Adorno, becomes solved in a strange geometry: they become antagonistic forces that will set in motion a sweeping movement taking us somewhere.

(If we’re to take Groys’ proposition on the nature of communism seriously, then it is clear that Xi—and China by extension—indeed has a communist reality, that it has not abdicated revolutionary momentum for the capitalist road, because there is an existence expressed through this very mode of paradox.)

The infinite character of contradiction and opposites is not relegated to the status of human social development or communist revolution alone—as the statements above suggest, Mao took this to be a fundamental law of the cosmos itself, and held that its proper articulation allowed for constant revolutions in science. Infinite opposition extends to the microscopic level: the splitting of base particles and the discovery of ever-smaller units reflected these laws:

Take the atom, he [Mao] said. It used to be thought the ultimate principle of matter. Then people found that the atom could be split into nucleus and electrons and they learned how to liberate the electrons and utilize its energy. Later it was discovered that the nucleus could be split into a number of particles which liberated even more energy—nuclear energy.

He proceeded to then bring this back to the political by drawing a direct parallel between the splitting of the atom and his strategic approach to revolutionary war: just as the atom is split to harness the very energy of the universe itself, the revolutionary fight proceeded by splitting the enemy’s forces into multiple parts, all along the way liberating along the way more and more catastrophic social energy. Both trendlines converge in the ability of the revolutionary situation to drive forward scientific development and in the escalating nature of military doctrine to protect the efficacy of that revolution.

The world-soul on horseback but it’s not Napoleon in Jena, it’s an anonymous PLA artillery horseman captured in grain-soaked filmstock. The year is 1964 and the location is the Lop Nur atomic weapons testing site in the far western reaches of Chinese territories. Horse and soldier alike are clad in gas masks, they are propelling themselves at full force in the direction of the ballooning explosion, the seismic inferno thrown out by the splitting of the One atom into Two. Ionizing radiation, beta particles and gamma rays swoop down from the sky and wash across the desert sands and the horseman, enveloped in it all, aims his Kalashnikov rifle right towards the camera—it’s frozen in time—

It might seem like an odd strategy, to catapult oneself into the blossoming shadow of atomic fire. There’s a perverse logic at play: the notion, which was also toyed with by the Americans, was to utilize atomic weapons to punch holes in the key lines of the enemy’s offensive, and then rush through, flipping the battlespace on its head. This was part of the fallout of the Third Front, a massive mobilization effort that poured billions of yuan, millions of people, and countless raw resources into the construction of a military-industrial belt spanning the country’s interior. The opposing faces that spurred the Third Front were twofold: on the one hand, the threat of aerial bombardment from American fighters (the Chinese had yet to strike their pseudo-pact with the US) and a massive ground invasion by Soviet forces. It was, in other words, the mobilization of China in preparation for a Third World War.

Almost a decade before the inauguration of the Third Front Mao issued a statement titled ‘The Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed By The Atom Bomb’. It was really a summary of points of a discussion between the chairman and the Finnish envoy to China, and in it Mao suggested a vision that, despite the immediacy of the concerns at play, was ultimately cosmological in scope:

Today, the danger of a world war and the threats to China come mainly from the warmongers in the United States. They have occupied our Taiwan and the Taiwan Straits and are contemplating an atomic war. We have two principles: first, we don't want war; second, we will strike back resolutely if anyone invades us. This is what we teach the members of the Communist Party and the whole nation. The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9,600,000 square kilometres. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system. [my emphasis]

Here we move from the microscopic infinity to a macroscopic one, from the endless division of atoms into smaller and smaller particles to the undulations of the very fabric of the universe. The universe too is infinite, what happens here matters very little to it, and it will persist regardless of what transpires down here on the terrestrial sphere. The infinite moves beyond the singularity of this universe itself; it becomes clear quite quickly that for Mao, because change is constant and unceasing, the end of this universe is by no means the end of time and space. There will be more universes, swept along in an ever-bending cycle. Astral Mao (note, once again, the coming-together of metaphors and examples collapsing together the political with the cosmological):

All phenomena in the world are simply a constant state of constant change for which there is no birth and death, nor formation and demise… The demise of a state is a change in its manifestation. Its land is not destroyed nor are its people. Changes in a state are the germ of its renewal that is necessary for the evolution of society… I used to worry that our China would be destroyed but now I know this is not so… I believe that there must be a complete transformation, like matter that takes form after its destruction, or like the infant born out from its mother’s womb… The demise of the universe is similar. The destruction of the universe is not an ultimate destruction. It is certain that its demise here will necessarily be a formation there. I very much look forward to its destruction, because from the demise of the old universe will come a new universe, and will it not be better than the old universe!

From this cosmological viewpoint, where Mao’s meditation on the infinite is taken to its highest extreme. It’s in this remote station where even the durability of socialism or communism itself is thrown into question. It too will die, and maybe again be reborn, in some new and unexpected way—as will humanity itself:

Socialism, too, will be eliminated… there is the principle, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his need’. Do you believe they can carry on for a million years with the same economics?… Mankind will finally meet its doom. The myriad things develop continuously and limitlessly, and they are infinite. Time and space are infinite.

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I will be taking off the remainder of the month, so I hope all my lovely subscribers have a very good Christmas (or whichever holiday you celebrate) and a happy New Years. See you all in 2025.