Nick Admussen (Cornell University)

Censorship is often imagined as a bureaucratic process in which a government deletes or suppresses an artwork. This lecture will examine an extended concept of literary stricture -- the creation and maintenance of the constraints that limit literature -- as it carefully reads Yu Jian's epic 1994 poem "File Zero." "File Zero" takes place in a file room in which the poem's reader unlocks, accesses, reads, and then edits the poet's surveillance dossier. By citing Chinese government traditions of surveillance, the poem reveals the power and the governmentality of all readers, and by extension the suppressive and shaping power of the literary field, the market, and of the hermeneutic act. In its second part, the lecture will use Yu Jian's insights to reopen Foucault's questions about scholarship, viewership, and power. Can scholarly analysis resist or exceed participation in the authoritarian's centralization and weaponization of knowledge?