Happy Friends Reading Club will be meeting on Saturday, the 31st of July at the shop in Caochangdi with special guests Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art. A description is below.
If you would like to receive links to the texts or for more information, please email: eddy at vitamincreativespace dot com.
For directions to the current location of the shop see here.
A set of donkey essays from the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art to Happy Friends Reading Club, with short texts by Catherine Ingraham, Eyal Weizman and Richard MacGregor compiled by DICA Co-Founder Michael Yuen.
Says Yuen: “By choosing short texts about the Communist Party, one about donkeys in architecture and one about the Israel-Palestine conflict, the point is not to be obtuse nor to be topically provocative. Instead, I see in these texts detailed analyses, at times conceptual traps, ways forward and a devastating look at various ideological agendas played out in the city. And, these themes play out in Paris, the West Bank and Shanghai.”
Two essays were omitted from this collection. They are Borges’ “The Art of Verbal Abuse” and Pier Vittorio Aureli’s “The Project of Autonomy”. Including these would have made the amount of reading onerous. But, also briefly mentioning them here can give us some insight. Aureli’s essay on architecture begins with its main thesis from the Greek-French rightist philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis: the agenda of the French intellectual left of dismantling hierarchies has become an ideology of conforming. Aureli and Castoriadis attack a philosophy that they see as no longer a radical–it is itself another, having become another hierarchy. As for Borges’s essay, here we find ways of acting or maybe ways of speaking: humour, lightness, imagination and intelligence. These are parts of Borges’ writing some continental philosophers forgot.
As a way of closing this short introduction, a few words about ‘cities’. It is clear to me, our old ways of viewing cities are dying. Around us we continually see people reconfirming recognizable ideas. This reconfirming leads us nowhere. And, as we look for new visions for cities, we must avoid merely proposing programs. Perhaps, there is value in remembering this as you read the programs detailed in the following essays and chapter excerpts.”
For the second part of the meeting we turned to the text “N-i-n-e-t-e-e-n-e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e and the historical roots of neoliberalism” by Wang Hui (2004), who is known as one of the protagonists of the “New Left” in China.
While it predated Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine,” Wang’s text shared continuities with the theme of the seeming, superficial contradiction between neoliberalism and what it called neoauthoritarianism.
“One theoretical characteristic of neoliberalism is to deny that there is an intimate relationship between market and political processes and, in the name of the disarticulation of the state, to force the abandonment of all investigation into the problem of democracy under the conditions of marketization” (p. 49)
This text began by tracing the reforms from 1978 to N-i-n-e-t-e-e-n-e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e, and their consequences, then continues to 2004, focusing on the various historical, economic and political views that intellectuals had promoted, and the horizon represented by the discussions happening through those years.
Sitting at the table on the patio of a café mostly frequented by Westerners, and discussing all of this in English, we didn’t feel at all threatened, although one’s mind always wanders to the next table over, if only to wonder whether they are sitting there listening and judging. Aside from chemical reasons, then, it’s clear why a café would be a place to debate high-minded things, protected as it is by this cultural force-field and the relatively cheap cost of a coffee—a drink that, for the exact same reason it is cheap for some, is too expensive for others.
Firstly providing background for the reasons behind the social movement, Wang explained how during the rural reforms the attempt was to stabilize the lives of the rural population through policy changes, raising the prices of rural products and encouraging rural consumption. (p. 12)
From 1984, a series of urban reforms were then implemented to redistribute state-monopoly industrial resources. Because of the complexities of this process, the result was an unregulated and unequal transfer of benefits incomparable to the rural reforms, and which affected the country as a whole.
“The actual situation was that, under the rhetoric of politics/enterprise separation, what was separated was not the relationship between politics and the economy, but rather ownership and management.” (p. 16)
One of the members told an anecdote of being stopped by the police while driving home one night, and given a breathalyzer test. Totally oblivious to the fact that, to make the beverage that much more profitable, the bartender had spiked his drink after he had asked for something non-alcoholic, the reading club member had breathed out a 0.02, and was then brought to spend the night in the police station. After a great ethical struggle our protagonist called on a family member with ties to the police department. By the powers of “guanxi” (connections, relations) he was released, but just as one of the system’s hands had made him vulnerable, with the other hand it had granted him freedom that the other young men in his cell waited wondering about. He emerged, compromised.
Wang explained that the social movement that arose around these urban reforms, whose effects were already being felt sharply among certain strata of society (the rural reforms, for example, were finding the latest urban reforms reversing any progress they had experienced), was neither unified nor really self-conscious of what it was really looking for. There were clashes within the state level, with certain political figures or state companies supporting the movement, while “special interest groups that had been big winners in the 1980s decentralization of power and benefits and that were now dissatisfied with the impending adjustment policies” also joined in with the students, whose abstract demands “included such constitutional rights as workable democratic politics, press freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the rule of law” (p. 19) among more concrete demands from workers that centered on distributing economic and social benefits.
“In the context of globalization, neoliberals believe that it is possible to use the strength of multinational and domestic capital to reconfigure Chinese society and the market; they recognize that the state plays a certain protective, favorable, and adjustment role in the context of the relations between globalization and the expansion of the domestic market. Thus they no longer simply charge the state with motivating market expansion: this is the secret history of the mutual entanglement of neoliberalism and neoauthoritarianism.” (p. 21)
The impossibility of the social movement; the necessity of the social movement. This is the corner many conversations push themselves into, especially when faced with texts whose historical or political bases claim the objective and reasonable parts of our imagination. They are hard to refute, they are as crisp and clear as playing cards, sharp and constructive; but sitting in a café, consuming, we can only shuffle these cards, dovetailing facts, impressing and boring by turns.
This virtual experience isn’t helped by the knowledge that the facts are still facts, and history more recent than these texts has compounded rather than alleviated the facts. A scene from downtown Toronto during the G20 meetings there would provide many illustrations.
Sometimes you hear people assessing politics like weather; forecasting change according to the rumblings up in the clouds; decisions like the one-child policy reflect the visionary capability possessed only by an entity like The Party. Now if we could only get someone on the inside with a passion for the environment, etc. (insert cause)… a twinkle of hope in the tone of voice.
As is expressed in Naomi Klein’s book as well, “the dominant analysis of the N-i-n-e-t-e-e-n-e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e social movement in the world was one most advantageous to those special interests advocating radical privatization.” (p. 23) This pointed out that the economic relations affecting the globe as a whole were alive and well in China, but that the language and intellectual context with which to criticize it were unavailable. This was because of oppositional intellectuals at the time embracing everything American as the alternative model to the Chinese system (p. 33), let alone the second-guessing of any form of radicalism in the wake of the crackdown, or the tempting proposition to “jump into the sea [xia hai],” a description for intellectuals capitalizing on their privileged social status within the new market paradigm. The various stages of these intellectual debates from e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e to the present were examined in the last part of Wang’s text.
“That is, the 1990s discussion moved from a conviction that the establishment of democracy could be achieved only through a radical transformation in political frame-work, to a conviction that reliance upon market processes, the formation of local and departmental special interest factions, and the uprooting of clan and other traditional resources would ultimately lead to political democracy.” (p. 42)
With no intention of sounding wearied, another tendency can be observed in this type of discussion, when we turn to the questions of what else we can do, how does it affect us, where is the hope: things like this are spaces of difference.
We talked about spaces; the spaces of cities, for instance, bear the marks of these quite abstract, factual reorganizations in tangible ways. The public sphere, emptied, discredited, shamed, hovers phantomlike over the contemporary urban experience, with its fractured relations and atomized groupings, its obliviousness to the citizens who navigate through its price tags. What is this space in which the normal rules seemingly don’t apply?
Happy Friends met on a sultry Sunday afternoon in Ritan Park, Beijing. There were two parts to our meeting. The first was a recapitulation of the book The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (2007). It is a long and thoroughly investigative book, so the below summary is simply a tracing of some points in its narrative that will hopefully give and idea what it’s about and just maybe inspire some to find a copy of the book.
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein “This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story—that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies.” p. 18
The beginning of shock therapies
Ewen Cameron was a psychiatrist at McGill University in Montréal, whose radical research on various experimental “treatments” (including shock therapy, extreme isolation, audio and light effects, and use of a huge variety of drugs) on unwitting mental patients was being secretly funded by the CIA. The effect of these treatments (and probably the intention) was not to cure but to create docile subjects; not to fix but to wipe away and start new (a metaphor commonly used by free market deregulation enthusiasts).
As a parallel to therapeutic work, these methods produced a set of conditions and instructions on how to terrify, disorient and infantilize, literally constructing a guide later used by military and para-military interrogators. However, it has been shown such approaches aren’t really effective in producing dependable information, but as forms of state terror. “From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade. But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine’s underlying logic.” p. 15
What is the Chicago School?
The University of Chicago Economics department under the leadership of Milton Friedman in the 1950s, with Friedman going on to become one of the most influential economist of the 20th Century. “Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to that pristine state, Friedman dreamed of depatterning societies, of returning them to a state of pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions—government regulations, trade barriers and entrenched interests.” p. 50
Friedman dreamed of a pure capitalism, stripped of all its “distortions”, like a force of nature. “the policy trinity—the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending” p. 15
Contrast this to the at-the-time more popular models among many other post-war countries. “Chicagoans did not see Marxism as their true enemy. The real source of the trouble was to be found in the ideas of the Keynesians in the United States, the social democrats in Europe and the developmentalists in what was then called the Third World.” p. 53 (Keynesianism’s basic premise was that “countries in severe economic recession should spend money to stimulate the economy” p. 145).
On the Developmentalist trends in South America: “The extraordinary rise of developmentalism meant that the area was a cacophony of precisely the policies that the Chicago School considered distortions or “uneconomic ideas.”” … “These were believers not in a Utopia but in a mixed economy, to Chicago eyes an ugly hodgepodge of capitalism for the manufacture and distribution of consumer products, socialism in education, state ownership for essentials like water services, and all kinds of laws designed to temper the extremes of capitalism.” p. 53
And Developmentalism, not only insulting to the Chicago School purists, was not appreciated by the American corporations with stakes in countries where this trend was growing, and with close ties to US Adminstrations. When the chance came in Chile to experiment with an economic context “wiped clear” of governmental obstacles, Friedman was a champion of measures such as spontaneous mass-scale firing, privatization, deregulation and elimination of job security, and downplayed the political repression, which was often facilitated by American interventions, by the CIA and others.
But contrary to the hands-off rhetoric, the freeing of the markets had to be done in coercive fashion, because the chaos of currencies they created, the raising of prices of basic necessities, the instability and lack of social security they demanded, and the flight of capital to foreign corporations would generally not be accepted by a democratically engaged public. “Chile’s coup, when it finally came, would feature three distinct forms of shock, a recipe that would be duplicated in neighboring countries and would reemerge, three decades later, in Iraq. The shock of the coup itself was immediately followed by two additional forms of shock. One was Milton Friedman’s capitalist “shock treatment,” a technique in which hundreds of Latin American economists had by now been trained at the University of Chicago and its various franchise institutions. The other was Ewen Cameron’s shock, drug and sensory deprivation research, now codified as torture techniques in the Kubark manual and disseminated through extensive CIA training programs for Latin American police and military.” p. 71
The shock doctrine, then, is that disaster, war and shock are very useful for promoting large-scale economic changes in pursuit of this elusive “pure state” of the free market. Klein goes on to provide dozens of case studies in which the Chicago School policies were implemented by force or trickery in countries outside the United States, from Argentina and much of South America (where political repression resulted in thousands disappeared and assassinated), to Poland (in which a democracy newly formed from the breaking up of the Soviet Union was forced by massive debt to accept privatization conditions by the IMF, a recurring theme) and Russia (in which overnight privatization and handouts by Yeltsin’s government resulted in huge, unchecked concentrations of wealth and glut of poverty) to China (whose liberalization of the market disproved any theories of consequential political liberalization) and Southeast Asia (results of economic crash), as well as the UK and United States (Thatcher and Reagan) and elsewhere. “In Russia the billionaire private players in the alliance are called “the oligarchs”; in China, “the princelings”; in Chile, “the piranhas”; in the U.S., the Bush-Cheney campaign “Pioneers.” Far from freeing the market from the state, these political and corporate elites have simply merged, trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources previously held in the public domain—from Russia’s oil fields, to China’s collective lands, to the no-bid reconstruction contracts for work in Iraq.” p. 15
“As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning—this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance.” p. 9
How these processes are “legitimately,” systemically spread is in cases of disasters or political upheaval and regime change, where a country is in need of help and the aid funding bodies (IMF, World Bank) mandate vast, swift Chicago-School-style changes to economic policies in order to release funds, but they are also done by a government on its own people (for example in China). “In China in n-i-n-e-t-e-e-n-e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e, it was the shock of the T-A-M S-q-u-a-r-e m-a-s-s-a-c-r-e and the subsequent arrests of tens of thousands that freed the hand of the Communist Party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights.” p. 10
As the spread of Neoliberal economic reforms exhausted possible developing countries, post-socialist states or changed regimes to exploit, it seemed to be facing its own limits. “In retrospect, it is striking that capitalism’s monopoly period, when it no longer had to deal with competing ideas or counterpowers, was extremely brief—only eight years, from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the collapse of the WTO talks in 1999. But rising opposition would not slow the determination to advance this extraordinarily profitable agenda; its advocates would simply ride the waves of fear and disorientation created by bigger shocks than ever before.” p. 280
One of the bigger shocks Klein refers to is the timely beginning of the second Iraq war, where the disaster capitalism process took another turn, with the Chicago School ideology dismantling the State itself from the inside. Consequently, it was very good for business. “Hollow Government,” the goal of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and a host of other Bush administration figures, means that the government sheds many of its previously core responsibilities and basically call on corporations for disaster response, war-fighting, defense, as well as the many secondary support industries.
“It was a move that brought the shock doctrine to a new, self-referential phase: until that point, disasters and crises had been harnessed to push through radical privatization plans after the fact, but the institutions that had the power both to create and respond to cataclysmic events—the military, the CIA, the Red Cross, the UN, emergency “first responders”—had been some of the last bastions of public control. Now, with the core set to be devoured, the crisis-exploiting methods that had been honed over the previous three decades would be used to leverage the privatization of the infrastructure of disaster creation and disaster response. Friedman’s crisis theory was going postmodern.” p. 288
“Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex—a full-fledged new economy in homeland security, privatized war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatized security state, both at home and abroad. The economic stimulus of this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalization and the dot-com booms had left off. Just as the Internet had launched the dot-com bubble, 9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble.” p. 299
“The role of the government in this unending war is not that of an administrator managing a network of contractors but of a deep-pocketed venture capitalist, both providing its seed money for the complex’s creation and becoming the biggest customer for its new services. ” p. 12
In this new order, Klein claims that where before there used to be an unspoken “revolving door” between government and industry, the corporatist state has installed an archway between governments and corporations. (list on p. 315) Many US politicians (and Israelis, ch. 21) have direct investment in the defense industry, and therefore have an interest in prolonging the endless cycle of destruction, fighting and reconstruction.
Klein sees hope in newer developments, such as the return of a social awareness and sense of control to areas of the former Southern Cone (South America), some 20 or 30 years after the fact. Getting over the shock is a matter of time, but also of being given the ability to reconstruct on their own, without the intervention of multi-national corporations providing ready-made and usually inadequate and indifferent solutions at a profit.
“Such people’s reconstruction efforts represent the antithesis of the disaster capitalism complex’s ethos, with its perpetual quest for clean sheets and blank slates on which to build model states. Like Latin America’s farm and factory co-ops, they are inherently improvisational, making do with whoever is left behind and whatever rusty tools have not been swept away, broken or stolen. Unlike the fantasy of the Rapture, the apocalyptic erasure that allows the ethereal escape of true believers, local people’s renewal movements begin from the premise that there is no escape from the substantial messes we have created and that there has already been enough erasure—of history, of culture, of memory. These are movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around. As the corporatist crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it encounters, these projects point a way forward between fundamentalisms. Radical only in their intense practicality, rooted in the communities where they live, these men and women see themselves as mere repair people, taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resilience—for when the next shock hits.” p. 466
After 450 pages of tales of disaster, exploitation and domination, such a conclusion might appear defensive and make-do, rather than a way to end the cycle. Our discussion in Part 2 of the Happy Friends meeting on June 20th was an elaboration of this theme of where there might be hope, in light of the atomization of groups and spaces, and with reference to the text “N-i-n-e-t-e-e-n-e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e and the historical roots of neoliberalism” by Wang Hui (2004). Appearing soon…
The next meeting of the Happy Friends Reading Club will take place in an uninhabited hutong near the South entrance to Nan Luoguxiang. The discussion is taken from a chapter from one of Yi-Fu Tuan‘s earliest publications, Space and place: the perspective of experience. Download the chapter “Attachment to Homeland” here [PDF, 9.5mb], and the book’s Epilogue there [PDF, 1mb].
We are meeting on the corner at the South entrance to Nan Luoguxiang on Sunday at 2:45pm and will proceed to the location from there. We will head over there, too, anyone is welcome to join, just be on time so that we can head to site. If there are any problems, please phone Mr. Eddy at 15001127304.
Architect daucle‘s installation at HomeShop contracted or expanded between planes of public and private, opening up varying usages of space according to daucle’s working hours. On the left, daucle is at home; on the right, daucle is at work.
Happy Friends Reading Club met at HomeShop in Xiaojingchang Hutong at 8pm on December 14th. A convertible stretcher and canvas installation by architect Claude Tao provided a setting for dialogue, which from outside on the street resembled a shallow-depth stage for a chamber drama. A small round table loaded with bottles of beer held the center; the fluorescent tubes above flattened the off-white cube: TV space.
The reading was a substantial passage from David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity from 1990. Written on the other side of the postmodernism hump, Harvey had much material to go over, and many interpretations to play off each other. As the observations of a geographer, Harvey’s book puts space in a central role. But one of the most intensely-felt accomplishments of the postmodern age is the twisting of space and time around each other, annhilating their former understandings. Harvey points out that earlier theoretical formulations of postmodernism, such as those of Fredric Jameson (Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, first published 1984) in which he called for a program of “cognitive mapping” in the midst of the disorienting effects of late-capitalism, neglected to examine in-depth the received conceptions of space and time, and their variations under varying regimes of time-space use.
Harvey therefore sets to the task of describing several of them, from the (gendered) cycles of peasant lives to the more recent mastery over space by processes of “flexible accumulation” (flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products and patterns of consumption). He outlines a tripartite diagram of spaces (with diagrams themselves as a category contributing a significant position in a spectrum of spaces) and presents a typology of social times as assembled by Georges Gurvich.
He refers to the theorists who have tried to define time and space in historical and phenomonological terms: space marking social reproduction and control (Foucault); space produced through use and necessity (de Certeau); time memorialized not as flow but as still memories, and history as poetry (Bachelard); the social practices that produce space and time mediated by a “durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations”– by social formation, or “habitus” (Bourdieu).
Harvey’s discussion measures all of these attempts at grasping definitions of time and space against the ever-mutating capitalist determinations and uses that structure the world at large. For instance, Harvey plays “place” off against “space,” the former (place) marking the limits that revolutionary or worker movements are able to effect; the latter (space) falling more and more, through technologies and social and political crises, under the control of capital–workers can occupy a factory, but not the distribution or transport networks, nor the distances in between the financial centers and the developing nations to which their jobs are being shifted.
Through the terms of geography, Harvey’s critique points out that “the ‘othernesses’ and ‘regional disturbances’ that postmodernist politics emphasize can flourish in a particular place. But they are all too often subject to the power of capital over the coordination of universal fragmented space and the march of capitalism’s global hisorical time that lies outside the purview of any one of them.”
The members of Happy Friends who were present for the discussion agreed that Harvey’s text, written in 1990, seemed remarkably apt at describing the current crisis-ridden moment accompanying the deterritorialization of the internet and political and social changes that occurred in the 20 years since the text was written. Harvey’s observations were uncannily prescient. For that reason, it is unsurprising that they have been almost entirely subverted in the last 2 years. Space has been digitally re-imaged such that the crevasses formerly separating places are so miniscule as to require decades of travel before one’s limbs are fatigued by the traverse. The flattening imposed on space and time by their masters (cartographic satellites, information engineers and, above all, transportation-communication industry) has progressed neither unidirectionally nor fractally. Control of invisible space can be used to localize as much as to globalize, to connect as to disconnect. Whether one is in Beijing or Urumqi or Asia, space is predicated on will and place is a dialectic between space and the individual. To quote the author, “If there are limits to the accumulation and turnover of physical goods…then it makes sense for capitalists to turn to the provision of very ephemeral services in consumption.” The question is how to limit infinitude.
One late-arriving participant made a meta-observation on the group that had been discussing, trying to identify the positions of those sitting around the round table: the Foucauldian, the Marxist, the Eastern philosopher… those appointed squirmed uncomfortably.
There were other attempts at vocabularies to describe the differences between postmodernism and modernism. Using one of the paper cups as an object-diagram of time, one participant pointed at the lip and the space that it contained; this was an argument for space-as-place.
about description and understanding
Information is over-visualized, which means everything is too specific today. Specific means clear, means shortening the time of understanding, means efficiency, means capitalism. On every billboard, a man is a man, a hamburger is a hamburger, a man eating a hamburger is a man eating a hamburger, a man feels happy when eating a hamburger is a man feels happy when eating a hamburger. It’s a kind of over-description. We enjoy description, because every complete description makes us feel that ‘we are right’. But description can make everything right. A disadvantage of description is, it truly lowers people’s capability of understanding. I consider understanding as of the same importance as description, a profitable communication is based on the balance of description and understanding. Brother Qu said modern art is hard to understand but classic art seems much easier to understand. The answer is Yes if we consider classic art is a kind of advertisement.
The object lesson dissipated to the interstices of the discussion; one participant commented that this is what most Taoist interjections do. Other labels for the promiscuous and not mutually exclusive dichotomies of space/time, post/modernism, included: pleasure, usefulness, efficiency, recycling.
temp_space x time_plot_ratio continues next week by hosting a cross-bred meeting of the Happy Friends Reading Club and the Beijing Critical Theory group. The reading is from a section of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, a chunk of “The experience of space and time” [download PDF here], self-consciously to be reviewed:
HomeShop invites Beijing’s Critical Reading Group to discuss two readings: Doina Petrescu’s “The Indeterminate Mapping of the Common” [download PDF here] and a selection from The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jürgen Habermas. The Habermas chapter, entitled “The Polarization of the Social Sphere and the Intimate Sphere” [download PDF here], didn’t make it to the discussion for reasons of dryness and tardiness, but in about three hours, the group manages to make it through the difficulties of defining a trace, Shaanxi Mo King buns, mapping China, a bit of beer & sake and a curious visit from the local police.
the notes below are simple tags to help you find your way —- the meeting in full is recorded below; skim through and hopefully find something interesting for you, or try playing them all at once and listen to the signal-to-noise ratio…
ON “THE INDETERMINATE MAPPING OF THE COMMON” | 3′ 23
contradicting, controversy of social mapping, a solipsistic position, Deligny, “the marker of a hidden ontological data”, do they share that relationship with the people imbuing meaning into their normative behaviours?, common to him, loss when you bring in language, discursive things…
MAPPING and TRACING | 7′ 11
GPS versus tracing, locative mapping versus tracing as invocation of essence, tracing has no purpose as such, tracing as the “way of doing it”, intention, Situationist, surprising within everyday life, not about finding something extraordinary, mental maps, how people live space, a minefield of gestures, a social mapping entanglement, ontological presence that you can’t really touch, anthropomorphism, common ground, tracing as creative process, anthropological process, fraught with danger, Sichuan, daily subjectivities within a larger urban plan, practical application, their locomotion, more aesthetic than logical, magnetic waves…
A LATECOMER, INTRODUCTIONS | 4′ 27
as little disturbance as possible, bad theory joke, angie – california, berkley, arts, bea – swiss, phd, geography, anthropology, urban planning, sean – toronto, phd, critical sports theory, olympics, collin – colorado, caijing, not where my interests are exactly, julia – contemporary art history, southern california, chinese, three shadows, elaine – texas, artist, freelancing, hence this, chris – artist, brooklyn, shanghai, theory, hanora – consulting, also not my main area of interest, matthew – long walks on the beach, capricorn, photographer, film, documentary, we’ve been on and off for awhile…
BALL, ANOTHER ARRIVAL | 4′ 06
Deligny, aqueducts, Berkley cognitive science professor, Himalayan graphic image of ball rolling forward, Buddhist monks, physical difference in brains, gravitational differences, dirty your floor, katie – come with duck and things, awkward being in the middle, other vegetables, open the sake, have at it, that’s all i’ve got, i like your haircut, rain, panic, panic, anyway…
THE OTHER | 10′ 12
theories of gravity, Tibetan monks, post-structuralist utilization of the Other, all this other without a kind of an object, autistic kids and Tibetan guys, rationalist flaw, let’s find an Other, ben stiller, line of crisis of modernity, our cities are poorest, flexible spaces, borders keep moving, the softness of cities has come to the fore, meditating, Edward Said’s “Orientalism“, hegemonic white male, Benedict Anderson‘s flaw, concrete Marxist ideals, is it a flaw or a mechanism to understand, language inherently leads to Otherness, polarizing nouns, Deligny breaking down polarization, everyday dispositions, a bridge, tracing that evokes a common space of understanding, describing, the limitations of the cartographic model, alternative models, trace as action, intense attention to something else without explaining, “a seeing that is not related to thinking, a gaze which does not reflect”, shooting for something passive, describe something in its own terms, ton of criticism, not completely there…
DEFINING MAPPING AND TRACING | 9′ 58
weakness of this article, juxtaposition, boundaries not clear, GPS locative mapping versus non-intentive walking, leaving realm for possibility in the act of doing, subjective process, walking as beginning of architecture, gesture as beginning of utterance, speech, writing, tracing as embodied communication, trace to map is shift of sensory focus to intense bias of visual, corporeality, knowing oneself in the world, trace as remnant, left behind, pinpointing, everyone in this room is constantly tracing, tracing as production of space, GPS is inherent map, imposing trails upon places already there, walking through this room, remainders, plotted footprints, embodied act becomes a leftover, mapping as judgmental or critical, tracing ontological, mapping and language, deterministic, mapping as reflexive practice, mapping: scopophilic, hegemonic, totalizing, problematic, tracing: nice, soft, centering closer to the abstract, foucault, approaching the liminal?, the approximation of a definition, never access through language, Deleuze & Guattari, affect before thought, codify affect to thought and thought to language, tracing as affective, embodied experience, codified in language, another way of saying mapping…
TRACING BEIJING OLYMPICS, 警察来了, 就是朋友 | 8′ 16
Does tracing have anything to do with how Beijing was radically altered in advance of the Olympics?, Yuan, Ming, Qing, buildings wiped out, how modern Beijing has been built, tracing like breathing, because the development’s there I go to it, pathways through hedges, desire paths, Beijing is meant to control that, you can never control that, space for improvisation, mapping consciousness versus social consciousness, opposite the hutong vibe, tracing in hutongs, structure businesses, houses, lives, dream of the architects, 没有，就是一些朋友过来吃饭，在北京工作，这个我帮一个朋友, did someone call?, the station’s just down the street, maybe we just carry on like everything’s cool, an example of control, exercise machines, follow that grid exactly, social control built, who you guys were, state-prescribed exercise equipment, 20th century history of hutongs not existing prior to 1949, talking about fashion or something, multiplying things over…
COMMUNITY, CHINA, URBAN ENVIRONMENT | 14′ 42
what’s impossible about community in Beijing, generational differences: Long March survivors, Cultural Revolution generation, first benefits of kaifang, one-child only generation, communications technology generation, how do you resolve disjointing ideas of what community is, what recreation is, fundamental approach to living, what is comfort, what is entertainment, nationalism at its highest, what happens after the Olympics, falls out over the next year, huge economic fallout, currency fluctuations, Chinese community formed on basis of socio-economics versus family, growing middle class, growing upper class, more than any top-down policies, do away with the hukou system entirely in the next few years, 1,000,000 empty apartments, 15 new Shanghais across the interior, 90 new airports, huge headwall in terms of natural resources, employment, pollution, energy use…, the world can’t handle it, 1.2 billion in China living like we do in the U.S., the horror of seeing another United States, consumer model carrot of the Communist Party, house with 3 cars, all the way from Sichuan to work, migrant workers in Africa, promise of increased material wealth, social unrest in countryside, Henan, Hubei, their vision of what it means to be modern and successful, xiaokang shehui, top-down vision, Three Moderns: sewing machine, refrigerator, tv second wave, cell phone third wave, directly equated with happiness, what material wealth means, three C’s in Japan, equal rise in urban and rural dwellers over last 20 years, but skyrocket of urban in last five years, decline just outside of major metropolitan areas, living on site right off Wangfujing, things just don’t seem to be improving, not reported widely at all, trying to negotiate with 15 new Shanghais, exacerbate all the existing problems, Neville Mars’ new book, every book is “this is China’s downfall” or “this is China’s great rise”, high levels of politburo, how is policy implemented in such a fractured manner, rethinking how people live in urban areas, disaster waiting to happen, that book is big…
EVEN-ING, DEVELOPMENT, CHINA AND AMERICA | 11′ 07
world is becoming more even, places look like Nairobi, shoddy worksmanship, infrastructure, Lagos as THE model megacity, general call for alarm, what’s new, every emerging developing nation, an egalitarian peak, a lie, less mobility now than before, 1968 was last year in U.S. where blue-collar worker could sustain a family of five in comfortable middle class lifestyle, accumulation of capital among top 2%, Guilded era in the states, shifting ways in which we assess, we’re making new maps by talking about it new ways, money being available for everyone, renting, property ownership will evaporate, easy for Chinese to get a loan and by a house, China’s American dream, ethnic differences with socio-economic differences, going to hell, we are setting a horrible precedent for the developing world and the developed world, clean-up, rate of growth, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Pearl River Delta, runaway rapacious development, manufacturing sector dying, biggest open pit in China, Tianjin waterfront like Chicago, river-cruise in Chongqing, a complete mess…
CHANGE, PRECEDENT, ADVERTISING, CONSUMPTIVE PATTERNS | 12′ 29
post-War, west Virgina, where my people are from, the ‘Burg, today very difficult for people to buy a home, terrible precedent, cusp of massive wealth transfer, dying babyboomers, money you didn’t work for, young people of floating network, media perpetuation, service and information economy, how does the precedent change?, a missing piece, production and consumption habits, avoiding talking about China as a monolith, splintered, how an individual will accept, opportunity to change things or for further decadence?, is China really looking to America as as an example, consumption, Hong Kong developers, healthcare system based on U.S. system, countryside, basic medical care yes, emergency response is bad, advertising, consumptive patterns are what will be really detrimental, extremely misleading, setting into motion fast consumer cycles, apple juice, technology, two-month cell phones, clothing, 50’s American, education, willingness to be swayed, propaganda, global production of advertising, new millenium techniques with 1950’s propaganda, a technique that works gets disseminated in a month, black & white televisions, separation from reality, no conclusion…
This activity of the HomeShop Games 2008 project was organised by HomeShop and Angie Baecker. Thank you to all who showed up despite the summer rains…
时间 posted on: 22 July 2010 | 
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