Information Fantasies
Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China
Xiao Liu
Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism. Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, it constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries.
Xiao Liu’s creative, erudite, and richly researched book entirely reconfigures our understanding of the media landscape in 1980s China. Her dense explorations of how new media emerged, coalesced, and interacted in this crucial period range over multiple formats—forgotten science fiction stories, neglected films, photographs, videotapes, computers, television and teletext, qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories—to draw science and aesthetics into a charged and illuminating encounter. The result is unquestionably one of the most original works to appear in Chinese cultural studies since the millennium.
Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford
Although the scale of the information economy and the impact of digital media on social life in China today could pale that of any other country, the story of their emergence in the post-Mao sociopolitical environment remains untold. Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was not determined by the technology of digitization alone but developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism.
Anticipating discussions on information surveillance, data collection, and precarious labor conditions today, Xiao Liu goes far beyond the current scholarship on internet and digital culture in China, questioning the limits of current new-media theory and history, while also salvaging postsocialism from the persistent Cold War structure of knowledge production.
Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, Information Fantasies constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries—one that will change how we look at the development of the postsocialist world and the emergence of digital technologies.
Awards
Winner of the Science Fiction Research Association Book Award
$28.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-0274-2
$112.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-0273-5
328 pages, 45 b&w photos, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 2019
Xiao Liu is assistant professor of East Asian studies at McGill University.
Xiao Liu’s creative, erudite, and richly researched book entirely reconfigures our understanding of the media landscape in 1980s China. Her dense explorations of how new media emerged, coalesced, and interacted in this crucial period range over multiple formats—forgotten science fiction stories, neglected films, photographs, videotapes, computers, television and teletext, qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories—to draw science and aesthetics into a charged and illuminating encounter. The result is unquestionably one of the most original works to appear in Chinese cultural studies since the millennium.
Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford
Liu solidly connects a very unique system with the IT perceptual revolution, essential for understanding the present futuristic scenario.
Neural
Information Fantasies strives to maintain a balance between the
Asiascape
Information Fantasies shows that the close reading of signs, symptoms and systems need not be at odds with descriptions of materiality and technicity.
Critical Inquiry
An ambitious academic dream turned into reality. The book shows the author’s diligence in research and skills in organizing extensive and dispersive materials with a clear focus. . . . A valuable work in the study of communication and humanity.
China Review International
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e-flux excerpt: Information Fantasies
Neural: Information Technologies Fantasies
e-flux excerpt: Information Fantasies
A cosmological view that was formed and developed around the last three centuries BC, when a unified and centralized political order arose for the first time in the history of China, “resonance between heaven and mankind” provided legitimacy and guidance to the imperial power and its rulership.
A rich account of postsocialist intellectual history as well as a nuanced study of film and literary works that have thus far received scant attention, Information Fantasies also gestures at new directions for future Chinese film and media studies. Among its several achievements is the identification of TV, rather than cinema, as the medium central to the popular imagination of information platforms and digital convergence. This observation joins recent scholarship such as Thomas Lamarre’s study of Japanese anime and its televisual distribution in enlarging a field previously focused on cinematic representations.