Chinese Urban Shi-nema

Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China

David H. Fleming, Simon Harrison

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030496746
• eBook ISBN: 9783030496753
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book dives into the mise-en-scène of contemporary China to explore the "becoming cinema" of Chinese cities, societies, and subjectivities. Set in the wake of China's radical and rapid period of urbanization and infrastructural transformation, and situating itself in the processual city of Ningbo, the book combines empirical, ficto-critical, and philosophical methods to generate a dynamic account of everyday life as new forms of consumer culture bed in. Harnessing a Realist approach that allows for different scales of analysis, the book zooms in on five architectural assemblages including: surreal real estate showrooms; a fragmented history museum; China's "first and best" Sino-foreign university; a new "Old town"; and weird gamified "any-now(here)-spaces." Together these modern arrangements and machines for living cast light upon the broader picture sweeping up greater China.

© The Author(s) 2020

D. H. Fleming, S. HarrisonChinese Urban Shi-nemahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

David H. Fleming¹ and Simon Harrison²

(1)

University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

(2)

City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

David H. Fleming (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Simon Harrison

Email: [email protected]

Arguments for the political efficacy of film have always held onto the idea that film must move off the screen into the world.

—Pratt and San Juan (2014, p. 1)

Cities, particularly large cities, were the places where the strangest mixtures of food and genes, money and words, were concocted.

—DeLanda (2000, p. 211)

The postmodern city amounts to its posthumous continuation, its fractal form.

—Clarke (2003, p. 94)

Keywords

Chinese citiesbecoming-cinemaNingbopsychogeographyShi (势)cinematicitysemiocapitalism

End Abstract

Chinese Urban Shi-nema dives into what has aptly been named the mise-en-scène of Capitalism’s Second Coming to China (Li 2016, p. 5), to explore what becomes of Chinese societies, cities and subjectivities during an unprecedented period of urban and economic generation and transformation. Situating itself in the historical aftermath of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, the book offers a series of grounded case studies from within the processual city of Ningbo (as it transitioned from being a second tier city to a “new first tier city”) that mosaic an archival image of how contemporary urban life in China is undergoing a series of radical changes, transformations and reorganisations—including of “genes, memes, norms and routines” (see e.g. DeLanda 2000, p. 212) as new forms of consumer culture bed in. Harnessing a pars pro toto approach, we explore five very different architectural assemblages, or technostructural arrangements—including luxury real estate showrooms, a Pritzker prize winning history museum, China’s “first and best” Sino-foreign university campus, a series of gamified urban “any-now(here)-spaces” (Fleming 2014) (such as shopping malls and building sites that channel and express the frenzied logic of so-called Casino Capitalism) and a new “Old town”—that together cast light upon the broader picture sweeping up Greater China during the most radical and rapid period of urbanisation and infrastructural transformation the planet has ever witnessed.

Our Realist soundings of these different assemblages typically hone in on the psychophysiological experiences of various (domestic and alien) citizens that become transactionally incorporated into these newly emerging forms of affordance space, which we, in a nod to Le Corbusier, frame as contemporary “machines for living” (1986, p. 95) indicative of a postsocialist phase of Chinese modernity. More specifically, the book’s triangulation of philosophical concepts, empirical data and ethnographic observations become mediated through a creative encounter between the Chinese concept of “shi ” (势) and the human geographer David B. Clarke’s notion of “cinematicity.” Shi is described by sinologist philosopher François Jullien as the inherent potentiality at work in configuration, or a “potential born of disposition” (1995, p. 27, emphasis in original), while the portmanteau cinematicity blends theories of urbanism, cinema and contemporary capitalism (illuminating both the cinematic qualities of the city and the city on screen) with a sense of cinematic automaticity, suggesting something akin to the automatic thinking of the city by the cinema and vice versa.

Paramount to this study is the emergence of new “entrepreneurial cities” in China, which arrive in tandem with a historically new species of consumer citizen: or what David Leiwei Li, after Michel Foucault, re-christens homo economicus —that “instrumentalist figure forged in the effervescent conditions of market competition” (Li 2016, p. 58). Keeping one eye on each, or a blend of bodies-cities, we foreground contemporary examples of what we playfully call urban shi-nema (and more on which in Chap. 2) that surface as historically unique sites/sights designed to direct and trigger a range of desired human (trans)actions, thoughts and feelings. Collectively, in the following chapters we thus investigate what we might call the “significant forms” and affective constellations of five different urban configurations, which each expose how China’s external embrace of global capitalism, its internal promotion of consumer culture and its attendant mnemonic practices have radically reshaped modern life and subjectivity. These vary from “apparatuses of capture” (to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology; 2004b) to bona fide artworks, whose contrived arrangements (of objects, materials and their attendant qualities) appear designed to move, make act or transform (change the status/capacities of) the human traffic that pass through them: typically in a profitable way (both to make profit in the case of a showroom in Chap. 3 and the sales rooms of Chap. 6 and to endow the profits of a foreign educational model as per Chap. 5). Or, put differently, the urban spaces we investigate all “intend” something and thus reveal forms of anticipation and affective agency parametrically built into their material structures.

Chinese Urban Shi-nema accordingly strives to isolate what we might call five pivotal points of 4E psychogeographic articulation within contemporary Ningbo in a manner designed to be at once productively alienating and defamiliarising for (to momentarily speak like others) its Chinese and Western readers alike. Ruminate here that with regard to our alien and alienating methods we are keenly aware that, for good or for bad, the practice generally known as “psychogeography” has, since the work of Guy Debord (1981, p. 53), aptly been described as the “science fiction of urbanism” (Asger Jorn quoted in Coverley 2010, p. 99). And while some might no doubt parse this phrase in a pejorative fashion, we rather—recalling Gilles Deleuze’s description of a good work of philosophy being part detective novel, part science fiction—take this to be a positive thing, and a necessary step in fashioning new perspectives or ways of thinking and proceeding (see e.g. Deleuze 2004a, p. xix; 2004b, p. 162). In point of fact, we push Debord’s science fiction method for producing fresh alien perspectives even further by putting them into transformative compositions with what has variously been called the new “E-approaches” (the “E” of ecological, meaning embodied, extended, embedded and enactive). From such perspectives each chapter explores how different combinatronics of urban sensation and affect become constellated and arrayed in a manner designed to transactionally guide or manipulate certain outcomes.

By such measures Chinese Urban Shi-nema also effectuates a form of provocation, inasmuch as by setting itself the important but always difficult task of merging theoretical discussion with empirical analyses (while blending philosophical thought, empirical data and (auto)ethnographic observations) it strives to push readers to perceive how millennial urban China is increasingly becoming-cinematic, or rather, as we will show in the next chapter, operating upon hyperreal shi-nematic principles.

Notes Towards a Method

In the second half of the twentieth century Deleuze and his erstwhile collaborator Félix Guattari noted that the dominant system of global capitalism had undergone a mutation (see e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 2004a, 2004b; Deleuze 1997; Guattari 2010, 2013). Broadly speaking, since Marx’s writing, capitalism has evolved and shifted away from enclosed industrial structures (and disciplinary systems) geared towards production and services towards new structures concerned with producing “signs, syntax and … subjectivity” (Genosko 2012, p. 151)—a system that Guattari’s friend Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2007, p. 76) later came to call global semiocapitalism , wherein capital-flux increasingly “coagulates in semiotic artefacts without materialising itself” (in Genosko 2012, p. 150) and the “production and exchange of abstract signs has taken the predominant place in the overall process of accumulation” (Berardi 2015, n.p.). These are notions that clearly align and resonate with a longer tradition of cultural criticism (stretching from Herbert Marcuse to Guy Debord through Jean Baudrillard and Jonathan Beller) that foregrounds how capitalism in the West (or the Global North) progressively came to function as “a semiotic operator” that aimed to “[seize] individuals from the inside” with the goal of “control‑ the whole of society” (Guattari in Genosko 2012, p. 149; see also Guattari 2010).

With this last point in mind, Berardi has more recently penned a grim account of what he refers to as our “dark zeitgeist,” honing in on the prevailing conditions of what he now calls absolute capitalism (on account of the etymology of “absolute,” meaning emancipation from any limitation) upon the collective well-being and mental health of people around the planet. The paradigmatic political expressions of our global winter of discontent, he argues, have now become mass murder, murder-suicide and self-murder (Berardi 2015).¹ “Suicide is a reaction of humans facing the destruction of their cultural references, and the humiliation of their dignity. This is one of the reasons that it so indelibly marks the landscape of our time” (2015, p. 159). And although incidences of suicide do form pertinent vectors within each of our case studies here—with both authors having witnessed the aftermath or been made aware of multiple suicides and suicide attempts within and around the architectural assemblages featuring in Chaps. 3, 5 and 6—for various political, personal and ethical reasons we opt to screen out these considerations on this outing and instead make reference to Berardi’s present-day work for an altogether different purpose.

Indeed, above and beyond the overwhelmingly dark picture Berardi extracts from contemporary life under absolute capitalist structures, there remains a ray of light that emerges courtesy of his being convinced to travel to the East Asian city of Seoul to deliver a talk on his political project. Of importance to our approaches here, during this trip (to what is ironically the country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world, see e.g. BBC 2019; WHO 2019), Berardi outlines gaining a fresh perspective courtesy of his alienating encounter with the unfamiliar citizenry and urban construction of the Special City. There, he describes:

inspecting the faces of young people—their signs and gestures, and their ironic declarations of the T-shirts (“I’m easy but too busy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Shi-Story and Theory
• 3. Commercial Overground Shi-Nema: Some Notes on Cinematicity and Its Propensity for Selling Dream (Un)Real Estate in Contemporary China
• 4. In-dependent Art Shi-Nema: Decomposing the Main Melody via Monu-mental Time-Images
• 5. Transnational Sci-Fi Shi-nema: Or, Diary Notes from “Westworld” Regarding Neoliberal Dulosis, “Academic” Automatons and the Franchised Post-historical University in the Era of Global “Excellence”
• 6. Shi-Nematic Games (Casino Capitalism)
• 7. Epilogue: Disneyfied Dreamwork Shi-nema—Tracing a New “Old” Path Through the Inauthentic “Traditional”
• Back Matter