Making Sense on Our Own Terms：Breaking Through in Two Directions: Body and Consciousness

Making Sense on Our Own Terms：

Breaking Through in Two Directions: Body and Consciousness

Co-building a Civilizational Tree, Spiritual Lighthouse, and Cultural Map through the Lens of New-type Cultural Productive Forces

The invisible infiltration of cultural colonialism and the systemic monopoly of knowledge centralization have pushed contemporary cultural creation into a double bind of bodily discipline and mental alienation. This has produced a collectively unconscious tendency toward homogenized creation, and has brought about a threefold crisis in the so-called post-work era: aesthetic bullying, the collapse of credibility, and a vacuum of values.

Taking new-type cultural productive forces (a recent Chinese concept that describes new configurations of productivity driven by digital technology, creativity, and innovation) as its theoretical lens, this essay proposes a core pathway for a dual, body-and-consciousness breakthrough:

1. to reconstruct creative autonomy on the philosophical foundation of ontological epistemology (běntǐ rènshìlùn: an epistemology rooted in concrete being),

2. to activate embodied practice as a material form of resistance by treating the body as method,

3. to anchor both culture and self in their coordinates through the ontological cognition of consciousness,

4. to use AI critically in order to build a digital archive of local cultural “dialects”,

5. and to rely on the decentralizing mechanisms of blockchain to break the institutional shackles of knowledge centralization.

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Ultimately, the goal is to sustain the ecological life of a “civilizational tree”, to reestablish a “spiritual lighthouse” of values, and to co-construct a “cultural map” of plurality. In doing so, we can respond to cultural colonialism and knowledge centralization with both theory and practice, and rebuild a living cultural-creative ecology.

The first two essays in this series have already systematically unpacked, first, how cultural colonialism infiltrates the collective unconscious and leads to homogenized creation, and second, how aesthetic bullying, internal cultural colonialism, and a spiritual value vacuum under knowledge centralization together precipitate the early arrival of a post-work era.

The essence of these two predicaments is a double severing:

1. the separation of creative subjects from the ontology of the body (that is, the loss of embodied autonomy under standardized discipline), and

2. the estrangement from the ontology of consciousness (that is, loss of cultural self-awareness under a single, hegemonic value and aesthetic system).

   
   

When the body is reduced to an object disciplined by aesthetic power, and consciousness is turned into a carrier for cultural colonialism’s taming, cultural creation loses both its material grounding in reality and its inner spiritual core of self-anchoring. The result is a systemic standstill in which there are “no works left to make, and no meaning left to seek”.

New-type cultural productive forces, understood as a new form of production that fuses digital technology and cultural creativity, offer a key perspective for breaking this deadlock. On one side, they deploy tools such as AI and blockchain to challenge the monopolistic walls of knowledge centralization. On the other, by placing “cultural ontology” at the center, they seek to prevent technological alienation, ensuring that technology serves the activation of cultural diversity rather than the intensification of homogenization.

This essay therefore proposes a dual body-and-consciousness pathway for breakthrough: to begin from the embodied practice of the body, resisting the material violence of standardized discipline; and to begin from the ontological cognition of consciousness, reconstructing the spiritual core of creative autonomy. These two are then coupled with the technical empowerment of new-type cultural productive forces in order to elevate individual resistance into collective co-construction. The ultimate aim is the ecological continuity of a civilizational tree, the value-led guidance of a spiritual lighthouse, and the plural drawing of a cultural map, so that cultural creation can return to its essential mission: being rooted in place, expressing the self, and connecting the collective.

I. Theoretical Foundation: Coupling New-type Cultural Productive Forces and Ontological Epistemology

The core feature of new-type cultural productive forces is the deep integration of digital technology and cultural creation, together with a systemic restructuring of cultural production relations. What distinguishes this from traditional cultural production is that it uses technology both to break through resource monopolies and barriers to circulation, and at the same time keeps the human as cultural being at its value center. This naturally aligns with the “ontological epistemology” proposed earlier: ontological epistemology insists that creators establish their self-coordinates from within concrete historical, cultural, and lived experience. New-type cultural productive forces then provide the technical and institutional conditions for such “ontological expression”. Together they form the theoretical basis for a dual breakthrough in body and consciousness.

In terms of its connotation, the “new quality” of new-type cultural productive forces appears along three dimensions:

1. Digitalization of production tools. Through AI, blockchain, and other technologies, cultural creation shifts from something “reserved for elites” to a field of “broad participation”, breaking the monopoly that knowledge centralization has held over creative channels.

2. Ontologization of production content. Technical empowerment allows “dialect-like” local knowledges to be digitally preserved and newly expressed, thereby resisting the homogenizing erosion of cultural colonialism.

3. Democratization of production relations. Decentralized technical architectures restructure systems of cultural resource allocation and evaluation, undermining the class basis of aesthetic bullying.

   
   

Ontological epistemology, in turn, sets the value boundaries for new-type cultural productive forces. If they are detached from “the body’s real perception” and “the local roots of culture”, these technologies will inevitably become new tools of centralization; for example, algorithmic systems that are solely driven by traffic metrics will intensify aesthetic echo chambers and value monoculture. Only when ontological epistemology is taken as the internal core can new-type cultural productive forces truly become a driving force for breakthrough, rather than a continuation of the existing deadlock.

II. Breaking Through via the Body: Embodied Practice as the Material Ground of Resistance to Discipline

Knowledge centralization constructs “body classes” in order to enact aesthetic bullying, while cultural colonialism erases the material carriers of local knowledge by taming bodily expression. The first pathway out of this predicament is to adopt “the body as method”: using embodied practice to re-activate the deep connections between body, regional culture, and lived experience, so that the body becomes the material foundation of resistance to discipline.

1. Awakening bodily memory: a creative escape from the erasure of “dialects”

The essence of “dialect” here is the collective memory formed through interactions between bodies and regional cultures. For example, the high, piercing tone of Shaanbei folk songs is the body’s acoustic response to the vast, open spaces of the Loess Plateau; the stamping rhythms in the Miao “Fanpai wooden drum dance” are the body’s tactile perception of land during ancestral migration; the gait of the She ethnic group’s “treading songs” emerges from bodily adaptation to mountainous labor. Once these “bodily dialects” are subjected to standardized discipline, local knowledge loses its most vivid carrier.

Using the awakening of bodily memory to achieve a creative breakthrough is not a matter of simply reproducing traditional symbols, but of allowing the body to once again become the subject of dialect expression.

For instance, a choreographer working in so-called “ethnic dance” might set aside the codified floorwork patterns of modern dance, return to an analysis and reconstruction of original movement from within their own ethnic tradition, and transform bodily memory into contemporary choreographic vocabulary. Similarly, folk musicians might extract the rhythmic logic of bodily voice from local opera singing and spoken recitative, fusing it with contemporary musical forms to produce work that is both locally grounded and contemporary.

Through such work, “dialects” are no longer museum specimens but living cultural expressions. Just as the rural documentary filmmaker in the previous essay feared the erasure of memory more than poverty, the awakening of bodily memory preserves the most fundamental “gene bank” of cultural diversity.

2. Expressing bodily perception: rebuilding subjectivity against aesthetic conditioning

Cultural colonialism creates bodily anxiety by manufacturing “standard bodies” (for example, the “three longs and one short” ideal in ballet [long legs, long arms, long neck, with a small head], or the “advanced face” ideal in film and television), pushing creators into an “alienation of expression” where technical display replaces emotional communication and bodily discipline suppresses individual expression.

Treating the body as method demands that creators place their own bodily perceptions at the center of their work, using non-standardized bodily expression to generate shared affect.

For example, a dancer without a professional training background can choose not to aim at “imitation of high-status movement”, but to turn their unique bodily sensations into dance vocabulary, allowing audiences to see the diversity of life through those honest expressions. A visual artist working with rural subject matter might reject “filtered” pastoral aesthetics and instead present the rough textures of hands and the darkened skin of farmers’ bodies, undermining the elite aesthetic’s idealized images of the countryside.

This kind of bodily expression does not create confrontation through difference, but dissolves aesthetic conditioning through authenticity. When viewers recognize their own life traces in non-standard bodies, the high/low aesthetic binary erected by dominant taste begins to collapse.

3. Collective resonance in bodily practice: rebuilding group connection beyond “body classes”

The solidification of body classes stems from the elite privileging of standard bodies. Collective bodily practice can break this class division and generate cross-class cultural resonance.

In early human communities, collective dances and rituals created group cohesion through shared jumping, spinning, and chanting. Even today, public square dancing or collective singing and dancing in folk festivals continue this logic of bodily resonance; these practices do not rely on professional discipline, but instead use simple movements to link people across differences.

Creators can harness such collective bodily practices to build cross-class cultural dialogues. For instance, a choreographer might invite folk artists and professional dancers into a shared creative process, studying and reworking the rhythmic patterns of folk collective dance so that “dialect bodies” and “standard bodies” confront and enrich one another. Theater makers can work at the scale of neighborhoods, organizing residents into participatory physical theater workshops where people of different professions and ages express their own lived experiences through movement.

Such collective resonance not only dismantles the barrier of body classes, it also shifts cultural creation from “elite self-expression” back to “collective emotional connection”, laying a foundation for rebuilding public cultural life in the post-work era.

III. Breaking Through via Consciousness: Ontological Cognition as the Spiritual Core of Autonomy

Embodied practice without support from ontological cognition eventually degenerates into empty repetition of movements. The core of breaking through at the level of consciousness is to return to ontological epistemology: to let creators anchor their consciousness in concrete histories, cultures, and selves, shifting from a “colonized unconscious” to an “autonomous cultural self-awareness”. In this way, embodied practice gains real spiritual depth.

1. Anchoring in local cultural lineages: undoing the cognitive distortions of cultural colonialism

Cultural colonialism uses a “single-progress view of history” and “cultural Darwinism” to repackage Western cultural standards as universal truths, driving creators into a cognitive self-loathing toward their own cultures. Ontological epistemology requires creators to re-examine the value of local cultures, treating them as cognitive anchors, not as backward relics. This is not blind nostalgia, but an effort to extract conceptual and ethical resources from local cultural cores.

For example, cultural practitioners in Yunnan might draw from their own ethnic epic traditions and ritual practices to articulate values of human–nature co-existence, and then link these to contemporary ecological concerns. In doing so, local culture is no longer framed as “backward tradition”, but as a repository of ideas that speaks directly to contemporary questions. This revaluation of “dialects”, as discussed earlier, allows creators to escape the cognitive taming of cultural colonialism and gain the autonomy needed to “look at the world from a local vantage point”.

2. Activating individual life experience: breaking the discursive enclosure of knowledge centralization

Knowledge centralization monopolizes legitimate expressive languages, pushing creators into an enclosed, elitist mode of “self-talk”, in which obscure terminologies and privatized trauma become markers of in-group identity. This is less about artistic autonomy than it is about maintaining insider boundaries.

Ontological epistemology insists that creation must arise from real lived experience. It asks creators to transform their own pain, joy, and confusion into expressions that speak to a broader public, thereby cracking the discursive wall erected by knowledge centralization.

For instance, a village poet can write from their own experiences of farming and local memory, using plain language to depict rural change and personal emotion. Even without elite literary techniques, such work can resonate deeply because the life it reflects is honest. An independent documentary filmmaker, focusing on their own neighborhood, can use a personal vantage point to document the fates of individuals within urbanization, so that these small-scale stories become mirrors of a broader era.

Such creation draws consciousness away from “codes for insiders” and back toward “sincere expression by individuals”, addressing the anxiety, noted previously among “marginal creators”, that memory is being forgotten. Activating individual life experience restores the most vivid spiritual dimension of cultural practice.

3. Weaving collective emotional memory: rebuilding the spiritual tie in a value vacuum

The vacuum of spiritual values is the central symptom of the post-work era, and it emerges from the severing of creation from collective emotional memory. Ontological epistemology suggests that creators start from their own experience, then connect to shared memories so that their work becomes a bridge for spiritual connection and a counter to the spread of nihilism.

For example, if artistic work on the COVID-19 pandemic focuses only on individual trauma, it risks lapsing into nihilism. However, when a creator begins from a specific person’s pandemic experience and connects it to shared values like the cherishing of life and the recognition of mutual aid, the work acquires a force that goes beyond the individual. This is not a simple reproduction of sweeping, grand narratives of the collective, but the use of individual “micro-narratives” to touch the emotional core of collective life, allowing the public to see themselves in the work and to rebuild a shared spiritual horizon.

Just as a great civilizational tree must rely on the co-growth of its “branches and leaves” (individuals) and its “root system” (the collective), the linking of individual consciousness and collective emotion injects spiritual nourishment back into cultural creation.

IV. Technical Empowerment: The Dual Engines of New-type Cultural Productive Forces

Breaking through at the levels of body and consciousness cannot be separated from the technical empowerment offered by new-type cultural productive forces. The critical use of AI provides digital tools for ontological expression, while the decentralizing mechanisms of blockchain offer institutional guarantees for collective co-construction. Together, they form a dual engine that transforms individual resistance into the collective rebuilding of culture.

1. Critical use of AI: building a digital “dialect archive” of local culture

If AI is dominated by Western data hegemony, it inevitably becomes a new instrument of cultural colonialism. But when used critically, and “fed” with local data, AI can function as a digital carrier for local knowledge. Creators and researchers can jointly build an AI-based “local cultural dialect archive”, inputting:

1. bodily dialects, such as motion data from folk dances,

2. linguistic dialects, such as singing styles and spoken recitative from regional opera, and textual corpora from folktales,

3. and craft dialects, such as documented processes of traditional handicrafts.

   
   

Through AI’s learning and pattern analysis, these archives can provide locally grounded creative materials and innovative pathways for artists.

For example, we might imagine a future, all-knowing AI model named “Muse” that can sort, classify, and compare the entire database of human civilization, while also functioning like a librarian or museum archivist in terms of information retrieval and question answering. Creators could then “converse” with Muse using their own works, asking for analysis, comparison, and “plagiarism checking”.

In such a scenario, the problem of homogenized creation is alleviated, because real creators do not wish to repeat themselves, much less others. Muse would help them expand their knowledge and aesthetic horizons, supporting more original and distinctive work.

Beyond that, such a system could participate in competition judging, professional evaluations, and project reviews. Since it is free from human politics and interpersonal calculations, it could be more impartial and objective. As a form of new-type cultural productive force, this use of AI could help restore and stabilize credibility in cultural evaluation systems.

2. Decentralization via blockchain: building institutional platforms for collective co-construction

The heart of knowledge centralization lies in monopolizing creative platforms, evaluation systems, and resource distribution. Blockchain’s decentralizing features can disrupt this from the institutional side and support a dual breakthrough in body and consciousness.

First, decentralized creative platforms:

Create distributed cultural platforms where every work receives a tamper-proof timestamp and authorship record, and dissemination no longer depends solely on elite gatekeeping. For instance, a “National Arts Blockchain Platform” could allow creators from different ethnic groups to upload their work, with visibility and support determined by community voting rather than jury preferences. This would finally give equal space to “bodily dialects” from smaller groups such as the Va, Bai, or Blang peoples, alongside more dominant ethnic traditions.

Second, decentralized evaluation systems:

Adopt multi-node evaluation models in which professors from art academies, folk artists, and ordinary audiences all act as equal evaluative nodes. The evaluation process can be recorded through smart contracts to form a visible “chain of aesthetic reasoning”. This undermines the elitist logic of aesthetic bullying. In such a system, “folk color” and Western minimalism, “rural looks” and the “advanced face” can coexist within a single aesthetic spectrum. Differences in taste thereby become proof of cultural richness rather than sources of class antagonism.

Third, decentralized resource distribution:

Establish a “local creation blockchain fund” governed collectively by distributed nodes. Creators whose work exhibits ontological authenticity (for example, sincere engagement with dialect characteristics or deep connection to collective emotion) could receive community votes and funding, without being beholden to the narrowly instrumental demands of capital.

This kind of allocation mechanism grants “marginal creators” sustainable space for their ontological expression, directly responding to earlier critiques of “feudalized monopolies of cultural capital”. Blockchain here fundamentally reconfigures the logic by which cultural resources are distributed.

V. The Ultimate Aims: Co-constructing a Civilizational Tree, Spiritual Lighthouse, and Cultural Map

The dual breakthrough in body and consciousness is oriented toward three ultimate aims:

1. nurturing a civilizational tree through the ecological preservation of cultural diversity,

2. erecting a spiritual lighthouse through the reconstruction of value consensus, and

3. drawing a cultural map by integrating multiple forms of knowledge and aesthetic coordinates.

   
   

Together, these allow cultural creation to return to its essence as something built and shared in common.

1. The civilizational tree: sustaining an ecology of cultural diversity

If we imagine human civilization as an immense tree, then each people and region’s “dialect-like” cultures form its branches, leaves, and roots. Cultural colonialism and knowledge centralization aim to cut off “heterogeneous branches” and sever “local roots”, leading to the tree’s decay. The dual breakthrough in body and consciousness, by contrast, seeks to allow each “leaf” (an individual creative work) to grow freely, and each “root” (a local knowledge system) to sink deeply into its soil.

With the help of AI-based digital dialect archives, local knowledges can be preserved indefinitely. With blockchain-based decentralized platforms, small cultures can circulate and innovate. In this vision, the civilizational tree is no longer a lone sapling built around one dominant culture, but a forest of coexisting cultures. Tibetan, Mongolian, Uyghur, Dai, and other dances, the songs of the She, Blang, and many other groups, and rural craft practices all find their place in this tree, ensuring the ecological survival of cultural diversity.

As cognitive mechanisms become shared, individual awareness more rapidly crystallizes into shared understanding. Individuals return to bodily instinct and, through that, form collective resonance. Individual cultures and the larger civilizational tree grow together. Homogenization is dispelled, and only uniquely situated thought can generate new knowledge and new works. Only distinctive works and knowledge can sprout as new shoots.

2. The spiritual lighthouse: reconstructing and guiding value consensus

The core of the spiritual lighthouse is the value-guiding role of culture. At heart, this means reclaiming and rebuilding non-instrumental values: resisting the monopoly of consumerism, and re-centering commitments to community mutual aid, respect for tradition, and interior, spiritual pursuits.

The dual breakthrough in body and consciousness returns creation from a “traffic game” to a “source of spiritual nourishment”, allowing works once again to shine into the public’s inner life as a lighthouse. Multiple value orientations and aesthetic perspectives become the bricks and stones of that lighthouse, while the light of human ideals illuminates the entire cultural landscape.

For example, a traditional craftsperson can communicate a “slow, careful workmanship” ethos through their creations, resisting efficiency-obsessed utilitarianism. A rural poet’s work can bring public attention back to village memory and value, easing the sense of spiritual dislocation produced by rapid urbanization.

This kind of value leadership is not top-down preaching but bottom-up resonance. When a work takes root in ontological self-expression and collective emotional memory, the values it carries have a power that genuinely enters people’s hearts.

3. The cultural map: multiple coordinates for knowledge and aesthetics

Drawing a cultural map means dismantling the single, centralized system of knowledge and building, in its place, a decentralized set of plural knowledge and aesthetic coordinates. On such a map, there is no fixed center or periphery. Each cultural node, whether it is the bodily dialect of a particular group or the values of a specific region, can stand as an independent coordinate. Individuals are then free to choose their knowledge pathways and aesthetic expressions according to their own cultural identifications and preferences.

Blockchain makes this map-building feasible. A decentralized knowledge base can store cultural knowledge from many peoples and regions, and individuals can access, study, and innovate upon it through smart contracts. Diverse aesthetic evaluation systems can make room for different taste profiles to be seen, freeing the public from algorithmic echo chambers and enabling them to become both “drawer” and “explorer” of the cultural map.

The ultimate significance of this map is that it allows every person to locate their own spiritual coordinates within the ocean of culture, realizing a vision often summarized in Chinese as “each appreciates its own beauty, and together we appreciate the beauty of others”.

When dialects, traditional cultures, and diverse knowledges are preserved, “marginal” concepts and creations fade as categories, because there is no longer a single center from which the margin is defined. Knowledge centralization transforms into the civilizational tree, and cultural colonialism loses its meaning. Thanks to decentralization and blockchain, every piece of knowledge can become the center of growth for some individual. The system in which knowledge functions as a kind of currency is replaced by a systemic cultural map, where both individual and collective civilizational memories become coordinates. Each human being can choose the knowledge systems they wish to live within and create the life they desire. This is the ideal image of the world after the dual breakthrough of body and consciousness.

Conclusion

The dual body-and-consciousness pathway proposed here takes ontological epistemology as its philosophical foundation, and new-type cultural productive forces as its technical and institutional support. Together they form a complete logical loop of “embodied practice of the body – ontological cognition of consciousness – technologically enabled co-construction”.

This pathway responds directly to the dilemmas of cultural colonialism and knowledge centralization laid out in the first two essays. Through embodied practice, it resists the disciplining of body classes and the erasure of dialects. Through ontological cognition of consciousness, it reconstructs creative autonomy and counters aesthetic conditioning and value vacuums. Through the empowerment of AI and blockchain, it breaks the monopoly of knowledge centralization and elevates individual resistance into collective co-construction.

The civilizational tree’s ecological survival, the spiritual lighthouse’s value guidance, and the cultural map’s plural construction are not only ultimate goals for cultural-creative breakthrough, but they are also concrete practices of a socialist cultural ideal: respecting the value of every “dialect”, making room for every different mode of expression, and allowing cultural creation to once again be a civilizational practice that is rooted in place, linked to the collective, and illuminating to the spirit.

Within the twin contexts of globalization and digitalization, this dual breakthrough pathway offers a way for Chinese culture to realize a dialectical unity of “deeply rooted” and “going global”. Only by holding on to the body’s local grounding and the consciousness’s ontological self-awareness can Chinese culture both maintain its distinctiveness and contribute spiritual values of wider, even universal, relevance to the dialogue of world civilizations.