Shanghai postmodern
Yang Fudong, The First Intellectual, 2000.
I spent last week in Shanghai for the first half of a theory workshop convened by a humanities center from the University of California system. The theme is “Designing China,” and the speakers are a lot of the people whose names circulate enough that I feel like I have longstanding intellectual relationships with them even though we’ve never really talked, or in some cases even met–Yung Ho Chang, Hung Huang, Liu Suola, Leo Ou-fan Lee. For those of us who exist in intellectual professions outside the academy proper, it’s a strange but joyous thing to be thrust back into the seminar room. You quickly catch up on the new words that weren’t yet in vogue while you were an undergrad: “haptic,” “conviviality,” “elsewheres.” You remember that every point made, every question raised (every speech-act, I should say), is to be called an “intervention,” a word that to me at least skews a bit fierce for what are ultimately civil interchanges among mutually respectful colleagues. (Then again, I used to find it annoying that people in the art world called every room a “space,” and I got used to that.) Ultimately you have to cherish the quaintness of a professional community whose comfort and status derives so transparently from its function of preparing the ninety-nine percent of undergraduates who don’t go on to further disciplinary study for “regular” careers staking so much self-worth on the possibility of envisioning itself as deeply critical.
That said, their conversations are to mass opinion as the haute couture shows are to Zara, and I know which I like better. People trade in smart, generally extemporaneous coinages that, while not suited for mass consumption, seem to explain everything for a second or two: “recombinant urbanism,” “every city needs its big idea,” “not deconstruction, reconstruction.” You sit there and listen to folks, your age or a bit older or younger, who have spent the last few years “avoiding the pitfalls of both localism and exceptionalism,” wondering “how to take the surface seriously as an analytical space.” As in any field, the best maxims are those that seem completely trite to the speaker but completely novel to the listener, as in, “Every anthropologist who’s sat in on or led brainstorming sessions knows that they’re closely related to ritual and magic.” I also still relish good post-structuralist wordplay, and am glad to note that the belabored multi-parenthetical zingers of the fin-de-siècle (”medi(t)ation,” “dissemi-nation,” “(gyn)ecology”) seem to have given way to a more brazen form of punning–searching for the “Dasein of design” and locating “the ‘decade’ in ‘decadence.’” Sometimes, people say things that are downright insightful, like Benjamin Lee’s extended analysis yesterday of the reflexivity of financial instruments like derivatives as rehashing the ethnographic conundrum of how to account for the observer’s always-already disturbing presence. (He somehow got from there to Frank Knight’s 1921 distinction between uncertainty and risk, and from there to Knight as Weber’s first translator, and from there to the Protestant Ethic as a response to the fundamental salvation uncertainty of Calvinism. Wow. PDF here.)
For all that smartness, though, people still make the same sorts of pedestrian observations (lane-house-next-to-the-Starbucks stuff) and traffic in the same vulgar pomo/poco contentions you get at most art world panels. The big question–Whither, China?–is still the big question. “Context” as concept looms large, but people don’t find the specific dynamics of how this or that text gets made very interesting, and they still fail to pick up the earnest treatises on Harmony placed at the seminar room entrance by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences hosts. If the art world is, as Jonathan Napack once said, a parody of the real world, then the humanities are a really long conversation about it. Investments differ and affects fluctuate, but at the end of the day, the two are cousins, and we’re all clear on the fact that both beat actually having to “intervene” in anything so specific as, say, an assembly line, a construction site, or even a state-secrets trial in Chengdu.