Revolutionizing Perspective

ABSTRACT: In the early 1950s, Phan Khôi (1887–1959), a classically trained but re-form-minded Vietnamese modernizer, participated in several re-education (chính huấn) courses designed to correct the problematic perspectives of petit-bourgeois intellectuals and artists. In the self-examination reports he wrote at the conclusion of each course, Phan Khôi adopted a critical meta-perspective, a vantage point from which to survey and evaluate the perspectival commitments (of, for instance, “subjectivism,” “liberal-ism,” “narrow-mindedness”) implicated in his pre-revolutionary writings. In the Vietnamese context, both the problematic perspectives from which revolutionaries attempted to liberate themselves, and the critical meta-perspective that they sought to inhabit, were named and, I suggest, en-registered as relatively stable configurations of entextualizing signs and communicative practice that could be recognized, learned, taught, and, when taken on, would effectively structure collective self-consciousness in determinate ways. In this essay, then, I analyze re-education classes as an institutionalized activity of perspectival reform and describe some aspects of perspectival enregisterment upon which this activity was premised. More generally, I contend that a consideration of Phan Khôi’s end-of-course reports indicates that, for Vietnamese communists, perspective emerged as a profoundly political matter, conceptualized as both a means to and an end of revolutionary action.