Performing Plasticity: On Recycling, Prosthetic Memories, and the Precarious Working-Class Renaissance

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of post-industrial malaise in post-socialist China through a case study of the plastic characters of the 2019 hit song Disco Alaskan Wolves (野狼disco). Gem Dong, the singer/composer from Northeastern China, inflects Cantonese with accented Mandarin, utilizing a "disco" motif to express his generation's traumatic transition to the market economy in a laid-off worker's family. Taking a threefold connotation of “plasticity” as references to the materiality of media affordance, the kitschy aesthetic form, and a mode reflective of neoliberalist flexible corporeal politics, I claim that lyrics, singing, and derivative amateur dancing videos of the song all demonstrate “plasticity” as a performing tactic that undermines the glorification of post-socialist economic reform through a paradoxical self-exploitation of underclass bodies. I argue that the song’s parody of Cantonese and stunt performances manifests prosthetic memories formed with spectatorial experiences of "plastic media waste" — cut-out disco CDs and pirate Hong Kong films. They simultaneously unsettle the neoliberalist aesthetic of flexibility through plastic clumsiness. Controversies around the copyright of choreography, however, reveal an uneven distribution of cultural capital in the global capitalist structure that may continuously mutate and ironize the social undertone. Plasticity thus embodies and delivers sensory knowledge of desire, trauma, and precariousness for the post-socialist working class and asks for an ecological understanding of the working-class cultural renaissance.