Over a meal with QU and Xiao, Qu asks about this paper we are writing. I try to say “micropolitics” in Chinese. He asks, “How can there be politics in the hutong? There is no politics (政治 zhengzhi, in Chinese) between the people in this yard. Politics is something from above; it’s government.” So we try to find a Chinese equivalent of our English sense of the word ‘politics’. We come to ‘relations’, ‘neighbourhood interconnections’, something along these lines… In thinking about it, he recalls for us the story of two other neighbours getting into a huge dispute last year, whereby one neighbour, a 70 year-old woman, tried to build a small coal shed in front of her home, thus making the ‘public’ corridor narrower — a nuisance to the other household who would have to pass it everyday. When the woman went ahead and had workers build the shed for her, the husband of the other family took a hammer and smashed it down. She had the workers build it up again. As the workers carried out their job, the husband began a brawl with them, and the police and chengguan were finally called in to intervene. Yes, a micropolitics of interpersonal relations. A politics inevitably linked to power and space. One becomes the other. Does this serve as a screen for something? A filter for something larger or smaller? I worry about applicability, have fallen into the postmodern traps. And noticed yesterday that you have been identified as a postmodern philosopher… so tell me, under fog of screen and language, how can anything be translated anymore?
时间 posted on: 22 April 2009 | 
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April 23rd, 2009 - 00:59
has translation become (or always been) an ideal? is it something we can never achieve but must always strive for in the attempt?
and what are these postmodern traps you speak of? does this postmodern philosopher you are talking about know of them?
mcluhan: “instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.”
is thought an application’s idea for generating new applications?
April 23rd, 2009 - 06:02
yes, the opening ceremonies were perhaps one of the most elaborately crafted exercises in narrative and mass consumption ever constructed, a logistics of perception meticulously designed to captivate each member of the worldwide audience: the four great inventions and parade of nations as tele-colonial act. but this does not, nor cannot, tell the whole story.
generally speaking, one’s options within beijing on 08.08.08 were to either watch on television in the privacy of one’s own home alone or with a handful of family and friends; watch at one of the state-controlled, corporate-sponsored public viewing areas; or not watch at all. the outdoor quasi-public viewing area in the hutong with homeshop was an alternative to these options. one could say that it was simply a scaled-down version of one of the public viewing areas scattered around the city, but this misses the subtle nuances of difference.
once the neighbours realized what was unfolding, it seemed to me that the opening ceremonies at homeshop became a very collaborative diy event. so many wanted to contribute, whether it was in buying beer for the party, sharing marinated peanuts brought from home, serving watermelon and tidying up afterwards, or performing a very local history of the hutong. and i would argue that the subsequent events hosted by homeshop during its 17 days wouldn’t have had the same traction with the neighbours — either in explicit participation or as a tacit acceptance of outsiders occupying local space — were it not for that initial encounter with an optics of familiarity (television) coupled with a haptic and supple molecular form that was not too small (isolated in living room) nor too large (the mass of the public viewing area).
(certainly the dynamism of the loser’s party and the wii would like to play // we don’t have tickets event would have been drastically different in that case.)
at the same time the scale of the homeshop public viewing cannot be disconnected from the fact that this was one of the most-watched television broadcasts in human history and hence the desire to be in the hutong to begin with. so while it is evident that the intimate nature of homeshop’s public viewing served as a catalyst for what might be described as a temporary autonomous zone, there is a need to interrogate this micropolitical space on a sliding spatiotemporal scale from global to local — not smaller or larger, but both/and — or at least read it stereoscopically as an experience of here and now.
April 25th, 2009 - 03:14
i was thinking of translation as being the means or the attempt, specifically, the act of translation. and this somehow related to some sort of postmodern condition, whereby we are full and full of ends and products and ideas and multiplicities, yet become somehow paralysed, without means… (i think we also hit some of this in victor’s class?)
applicability somehow always visualises itself to me as a motion of bending forward, that bit of going to, sticking or spreading that simply does not work when one is paralysed… or rather, if paralysis，the numb or–in Chinese–the 麻木, describes our general condition, then what point is there to any kind of application?
April 26th, 2009 - 21:54
i also think it is the attempt that is so crucially important, the act that we cannot risk foregoing due to the paralysis of the contemporary (media) condition….in terms of applicability, i think what i am hearing from you is **how do we break out of paralysis?**
which is great, because i was getting from you before a sort of nihilism about translation and the attempt, which didn’t seem to ring true given past discussions….so i hope we can still develop, i feel very naive about this subject, wanting to learn more….