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60x90x2cm
Oil on Linen Cotton
On Contradiction
Mao Zedong
1937, Foreign Languages Press
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The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics. Lenin said, "Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects." Lenin often called this law the essence of dialectics; he also called it the kernel of dialectics. In studying this law, therefore, we cannot but touch upon a variety of questions, upon a number of philosophical problems. If we can become clear on all these problems, we shall arrive at a fundamental understanding of materialist dialectics. The problems are: the two world outlooks, the universality of contradiction, the particularity of contradiction, the principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction, the identity and struggle of the aspects of a contradiction, and the place of antagonism in contradiction.
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The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the fundamental law of nature and of society and therefore also the fundamental law of thought. It stands opposed to the metaphysical world outlook. It represents a great revolution in the history of human knowledge. According to dialectical materialism, contradiction is present in all processes of objectively existing things and of subjective thought and permeates all these processes from beginning to end; this is the universality and absoluteness of contradiction. Each contradiction and each of its aspects have their respective characteristics; this is the particularity and relativity of contradiction. In given conditions, opposites possess identity, and consequently can coexist in a single entity and can transform themselves into each other; this again is the particularity and relativity of contradiction. But the struggle of opposites is ceaseless, it goes on both when the opposites are coexisting and when they are transforming themselves into each other, and becomes especially conspicuous when they are transforming themselves into one another; this again is the universality and absoluteness of contradiction. In studying the particularity and relativity of contradiction, we must give attention to the distinction between the principal contradiction and the non-principal contradictions and to the distinction between the principal aspect and the non-principal aspect of a contradiction; in studying the universality of contradiction and the struggle of opposites in contradiction, we must give attention to the distinction between the different forms of struggle. Otherwise we shall make mistakes. If, through study, we achieve a real understanding of the essentials explained above, we shall be able to demolish dogmatist ideas which are contrary to the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism and detrimental to our revolutionary cause, and our comrades with practical experience will be able to organize their experience into principles and avoid repeating empiricist errors. These are a few simple conclusions from our study of the law of contradiction.
事物的矛盾法则，即对立统一的法则，是唯物辩证法的最根本的法则。列宁说：“就本来的意义讲，辩证法是研究对象的本质自身中的矛盾。”[1]列宁常称这个法则为辩证法的本质，又称之为辩证法的核心[2]。因此，我们在研究这个法则时，不得不涉及广泛的方面，不得不涉及许多的哲学问题。如果我们将这些问题都弄清楚了，我们就在根本上懂得了唯物辩证法。这些问题是：两种宇宙观；矛盾的普遍性；矛盾的特殊性；主要的矛盾和主要的矛盾方面；矛盾诸方面的同一性和斗争性；对抗在矛盾中的地位。
事物矛盾的法则，即对立统一的法则，是自然和社会的根本法则，因而也是思维的根本法则。它是和形而上学的宇宙观相反的。它对于人类的认识史是一个大革命。按照辩证唯物论的观点看来，矛盾存在于一切客观事物和主观思维的过程中，矛盾贯串于一切过程的始终，这是矛盾的普遍性和绝对性。矛盾着的事物及其每一个侧面各有其特点，这是矛盾的特殊性和相对性。矛盾着的事物依一定的条件有同一性，因此能够共居于一个统一体中，又能够互相转化到相反的方面去，这又是矛盾的特殊性和相对性。然而矛盾的斗争则是不断的，不管在它们共居的时候，或者在它们互相转化的时候，都有斗争的存在，尤其是在它们互相转化的时候，斗争的表现更为显着，这又是矛盾的普遍性和绝对性。当着我们研究矛盾的特殊性和相对性的时候，要注意矛盾和矛盾方面的主要的和非主要的区别；当着我们研究矛盾的普遍性和斗争性的时候，要注意矛盾的各种不同的斗争形式的区别。否则就要犯错误。如果我们经过研究真正懂得了上述这些要点，我们就能够击破违反马克思列宁主义基本原则的不利于我们的革命事业的那些教条主义的思想；也能够使有经验的同志们整理自己的经验，使之带上原则性，而避免重复经验主义的错误。这些，就是我们研究矛盾法则的一些简单的结论。
There is a mark pressed into the brass. Tiny, almost invisible, tucked into the hinge of a cigarette case or the underside of a handle: a woman's head in profile, wearing a kokoshnik, the traditional Russian headdress. Beside her, in an oval no larger than a fingernail: two Cyrillic initials. HW. Henrik Wigström, chief workmaster, Fabergé atelier, St. Petersburg, 1903 to 1918. Then a date code. A city mark. Sometimes, if the object is small enough that there is no interior to hide in, all of this migrates to the centrepiece: a proud little column of proof, elegant even in its insistence on being believed.
I have been painting these marks.Not the objects themselves. I wouldn't dare. The objects are too beautiful to compete with. The point isn't the beauty. The point is that the stamp outlasted everything: the Tsar who commissioned it, the Empress who received it, the revolution that confiscated it, the American capitalist who bought it, and the auction house that sold it again for several million pounds to a buyer whose name, by agreement, will never appear in the record. The mark is the only thing that stayed. The only continuous identity across five completely different economic systems, five completely different theories of what a thing is worth and why.Value, in other words, is not in the object. It was never in the object. It is in the accumulation of relationships the object passed through, and the stamp is the scar tissue of all of them.
Here is what happened to these things.The People's Commissariat of Finance printed a catalogue in 1925. Four volumes, three languages: Russian, French, English, the better to attract foreign currency. Its title was Russia's Treasure of Diamonds and Precious Stones. Its purpose was to liquidate. Between 1927 and 1936, three-quarters of the Russian imperial jewel collection left the country through Christie's London. Gifts from the Tsar to the Tsarina. From the Emperor to his mother. From an empire to itself, on the occasion of a coronation, a birth, an Easter, a war victory. Sold. Converted. Ploughshares, locomotives, tractors, as the Bolsheviks themselves put it. The proletarian utopia was built, in part, on the auctioned sentiment of the aristocracy it had just destroyed.
There is a contradiction here so perfectly structured that Mao might have designed it himself. In On Contradiction, written in 1937, the same decade the sales were happening, he argues that opposites do not simply coexist. They transform into each other. They are not a binary. They are a process. The bourgeois gift becomes the revolutionary fund becomes the industrial infrastructure becomes, eventually, another auction lot, another closed sale, another anonymous buyer. The object moves through these transformations and arrives, somehow, with its stamp intact.The stamp, in this reading, is not authentication. It is irony made physical.
China and Russia share a revolutionary inheritance. Mao's dialectics are Lenin's dialectics in a different coat. And both empires had their beautiful things confiscated, catalogued, and sold to Western buyers within decades of each other. Aurelia Guo writes from inside the contradiction. In World of Interiors she does not resolve the tension between the private and the structural, the intimate and the systemic. She collages them, lets them sit next to each other without explanation, and trusts the gap to do the work. There is something clarifying about this method. I am a diasporic Chinese artist in Frankfurt with an almost reflective nostalgia for the inside of a Fabergé cigarette case I will never own, a longing that Sventlana Boym describes as it knows the thing it wants was never really available to it.
The stamp interests me because it carries multiple layers of proof simultaneously. The mark of the craftsman: this hand made this thing. The mark of the assay office: this metal is what it claims to be. The mark of the date and the city: this is when and where. And then, invisible but present in the provenance record, the mark of the relationship: this was given by him to her, on this occasion, for this reason, with this much money, with this much feeling, with this much power being transferred between two bodies that are now gone.
What I am painting, when I enlarge the stamp to the scale of a canvas, is that last layer. The one that cannot actually be stamped. The one that disappears the moment the gift changes hands. I am painting the evidence of a transaction whose emotional content has been completely liquidated and whose material trace, the object, the mark, remains, circulating, accruing value from the very relationships it has outlasted.The gift is gone. The obligation it created is gone. The people are gone. The empire is gone. The revolution that destroyed the empire is, depending on your position, also gone.The stamp is still there.
And it is worth considerably more than it was.
I have been painting these marks.Not the objects themselves. I wouldn't dare. The objects are too beautiful to compete with. The point isn't the beauty. The point is that the stamp outlasted everything: the Tsar who commissioned it, the Empress who received it, the revolution that confiscated it, the American capitalist who bought it, and the auction house that sold it again for several million pounds to a buyer whose name, by agreement, will never appear in the record. The mark is the only thing that stayed. The only continuous identity across five completely different economic systems, five completely different theories of what a thing is worth and why.Value, in other words, is not in the object. It was never in the object. It is in the accumulation of relationships the object passed through, and the stamp is the scar tissue of all of them.
Here is what happened to these things.The People's Commissariat of Finance printed a catalogue in 1925. Four volumes, three languages: Russian, French, English, the better to attract foreign currency. Its title was Russia's Treasure of Diamonds and Precious Stones. Its purpose was to liquidate. Between 1927 and 1936, three-quarters of the Russian imperial jewel collection left the country through Christie's London. Gifts from the Tsar to the Tsarina. From the Emperor to his mother. From an empire to itself, on the occasion of a coronation, a birth, an Easter, a war victory. Sold. Converted. Ploughshares, locomotives, tractors, as the Bolsheviks themselves put it. The proletarian utopia was built, in part, on the auctioned sentiment of the aristocracy it had just destroyed.
There is a contradiction here so perfectly structured that Mao might have designed it himself. In On Contradiction, written in 1937, the same decade the sales were happening, he argues that opposites do not simply coexist. They transform into each other. They are not a binary. They are a process. The bourgeois gift becomes the revolutionary fund becomes the industrial infrastructure becomes, eventually, another auction lot, another closed sale, another anonymous buyer. The object moves through these transformations and arrives, somehow, with its stamp intact.The stamp, in this reading, is not authentication. It is irony made physical.
China and Russia share a revolutionary inheritance. Mao's dialectics are Lenin's dialectics in a different coat. And both empires had their beautiful things confiscated, catalogued, and sold to Western buyers within decades of each other. Aurelia Guo writes from inside the contradiction. In World of Interiors she does not resolve the tension between the private and the structural, the intimate and the systemic. She collages them, lets them sit next to each other without explanation, and trusts the gap to do the work. There is something clarifying about this method. I am a diasporic Chinese artist in Frankfurt with an almost reflective nostalgia for the inside of a Fabergé cigarette case I will never own, a longing that Sventlana Boym describes as it knows the thing it wants was never really available to it.
The stamp interests me because it carries multiple layers of proof simultaneously. The mark of the craftsman: this hand made this thing. The mark of the assay office: this metal is what it claims to be. The mark of the date and the city: this is when and where. And then, invisible but present in the provenance record, the mark of the relationship: this was given by him to her, on this occasion, for this reason, with this much money, with this much feeling, with this much power being transferred between two bodies that are now gone.
What I am painting, when I enlarge the stamp to the scale of a canvas, is that last layer. The one that cannot actually be stamped. The one that disappears the moment the gift changes hands. I am painting the evidence of a transaction whose emotional content has been completely liquidated and whose material trace, the object, the mark, remains, circulating, accruing value from the very relationships it has outlasted.The gift is gone. The obligation it created is gone. The people are gone. The empire is gone. The revolution that destroyed the empire is, depending on your position, also gone.The stamp is still there.
And it is worth considerably more than it was.