The Impossibility of Representation: Delivery Riders and a Failed Storytelling in Li Jianjun’s The Metamorphosis (2024)

This essay analyzes Chinese theater director Li Jianjun’s play The Metamorphosis (Bianxingji) under Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. Reimagining Kafka’s Gregor Samsa as a package delivery rider in contemporary China, the play stages a failed narrative of storytelling through live-feed video and informs the impossibility of representing the riders’ labor resulting from the fragmented realities of postsocialist China. It thus challenges the middle-class writers’ efforts to transform delivery riders’ labor into a form of cultural capital and confronts the audience with the exploitative potential of their spectating position. Ultimately, the impossibility of representation staged by the play articulates the inequality and stratification that structures China at the postsocialist moment. The play interweaves three layers of narratives: Geligaoer’s family’s various forms of labor, documentary clips of real-life delivery riders in contemporary China, and an interplay between an external voice and the performers’ bodily movements. This layered narrative foregrounds the artificiality of storytelling and can be situated within the ongoing discussions in the recent decade in China, in which scholars and journalists attempt to secure their middle-class identities by transforming the riders’ laboring condition into a form of cultural capital. In contrast, the play stages the failure of the narrative of storytelling through a projection screen and live-feed cameras to inform the impossibility of a transparent representation of the delivery riders. By excluding the audience from the riders’ subjectivity, the play blocks the audience’s identification with the latter. Through the heavy beauty filter projected on the screen as a metaphor, the play confronts the audience with their own middle-class identity and warns them of the violence inherent in their spectating position.