The Human–Machine Continuum in Maoism: The Intersection of Soviet Socialist Realism, Japanese Theoretical Physics, and Chinese Revolutionary Theory

Abstract

T wentieth-century science shared a belief with the century's revolutionary projects in a dynamic malleability and Xuidity of form that conjoined machines to human beings. Projects that developed out of this shared belief addressed issues of social organization, science, and creative imagination. Together, they invoked spatial alignments and embodied practices that reconceptualized the boundaries between humans and machines. Throughout the century, East Asia, the Soviet Union, and the United States acquired meaning and form partially in relation to the ways in which human-machines populated particular spaces. At the same time, who and what constituted humans, human- ity, and machines emerged out of interactions between interconnected landscapes and the creative imagination. The other articles in this clus- ter draw our attention to these dynamics in texts of science Wction and animated television series. This article shifts our attention to the ways in which revolutionary theory and scientiWc knowledge informed each other and were mediated through transformation of the natural landscape in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Mao Zedong, rev- olutionary theorist and leader of the PRC from 1949 to 1976, concep- tualized dialectical materialism as part of broader twentieth-century conversations about the potential for particular scientiWc methods, materials, and social organization to enable collective human libera- tion. As such, reading PRC popular cultural mediations of science and revolutionary theory in a manner that is attentive to the operation of human-machine continuums in the metaphors, visual imagery, rep- resentational bodies, and landscapes provides new insight into mass subjectivity in Maoist China.