一大堆看客停下来关注一个人帮一个出租车司机从树上摘出租车的钥匙。在这个过程中马路上的一排车变得越来越长——都堵在没有钥匙的出租车后面。整个场面持续了差不多10分钟。拿到钥匙之后，一个凶狠的年轻小伙子试图挡住出租车，被“灭火者”拉走，最后的高潮是小伙子疯狂的追着出租车跑但最后还是没有追上。一切终于回到“正常”。神奇的中国!

The crowd gathers as an unknown man takes initiative to help a taxi driver get his car keys out of a tree. While this is happening, the line of cars grows steadily behind his cab, which is stopped in the middle of a single-lane street. The scene lasts for approximately 10 minutes, only returning to ‘normalcy’ after the climax of a fiercely angry young man trying to block the taxi driver from driving away and finally chasing him down the street. Glorious China!

我原来公司有一个员工，他也喜欢玩户外。他那个时候他就，他原来，他也是湖南的，湖南跟我是校友。 他是属于那种什么呢？在上学期间有一天骑自行车，从学校骑出来骑到那大马路上，突然之间想我为什么不骑远一点？于是他就骑到了越南。当然那种事特例。但是这种就是说，这种性格就还是有这种性格。就我去玩儿我不追求很好的装备。

There is a guy in my company, he’s also from Hunan so we became friends. When he was still going at school, he took his bike to go home, and when he arrived on the main road he suddenly thought, why not going a bit further? And he rode his bike until Vietnam. Of course it’s a special case, but you know, it’s about character.

Sometimes we think about something, and we just do it. Comes from the transcription of a conversation I had last year with the director of an outdoor activities company.

Songs of the Donkey

The reading club meeting, involving three texts somewhat innocent of each other’s connections, was held in the shop in Caochangdi. The texts—”The Burdens of Linearity: Donkey Urbanism” by Catherine Ingraham (1999), “Lethal Theory” by Eyal Weizman (2006) and “The Shanghai Gang” by Richard MacGregor (2010)—encompassed a broad range of issues whose relations could potentially crisscross and veer in various directions, for and against the grain of theory, out of or in the range of empirical topic. These texts were all further intertwined by their being chosen within the frame of the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art’s Co-Director Michael Yuen, inviting speculation on applied theory or grounded discussion.

Within the sequence, the first text to be discussed was Weizman’s, which happened to be about the use of theory by the Israeli military in dealing with or rather in “interpreting” architecture, in their raids on Palestinian towns and settlements. The discussion led us from the “radical” technique of walking through walls, which is done by creating holes in existing architecture to make new paths through private spaces, and the supposedly non-hierarchical swarming techniques by which individual Israeli  soldiers carry out their tasks independently and in no particular order, to tactical specificity (targeting particular individuals for capture or assassination), all ostensibly based on ideas derived from theorists such as Foucault, Deleuze and Tschumi. But that is not to say these techniques or theories, though they explain the complexity of contemporary built environments, populations and conflicts, are any less traumatic or destructive than conventional warfare. Consider the upending of the categories of private and public, which, after seeming like a novel shift in print, is utterly destabilizing when your house becomes a thoroughfare. We talked about  how implicated theory itself was in this outcome, and whether such outcomes mandated changes in the way theory would be written.

Meanwhile Michael had to run outside because the donkey was getting some grief from one of the caretakers at the gate for trying to enter the brick art district. DICA had arrived, but for the moment, we pressed on with the texts.

Ingraham’s article counterposed a number of texts to draw out the subject of the beast in Modern architecture’s scheme of things. Beginning with Le Corbusier, who ridiculed the distractedness of the donkey vis à vis the straight intentional lines of Modern man and his cities; and continuing with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ description of getting lost on his mule in the jungle, which in the end becomes a revelation of his views of the relationship between writing systems, architecture, human organization and therefore mass violence; Ingraham’s account thereby leads its winding way to Jacques Derrida and to the subject of writing. To the ideas of the “origins” of straight lines and their import for urbanism. Ingraham says: “Urbanism and architecture, as we have already seen through the strange narratives of Le Corbusier and Lévi-Strauss, come (in a state of considerable hegemony) to the geometric (straight) line in the immediate presence of the animal (swerving, making a path), which irrevocably perturbs the hegemonic and the straight. And, lest we forget, the animal is not “The Animal,” but the principle of animality that belongs entirely to human culture.”

We took a group trip to the roadside display of books currently on view in DICA. A small crowd had gathered even on this side street, but this is the curious custom of the institute. The books were all translated with post-it notes, but there was one Chinese reader with his shirt off slowly, systematically orating aloud the English captions of David Shrigley’s red book. Someone stroked the animal’s muzzle (in fact, it looked like a bit like a horse). It’s interesting to see DICA at rest, because it is one of the rare moments when an institution can be seen to be loitering, waiting for the next thing, to move on, the cart owners squatting in the hot sun.

Finally, returning to the air-conditioned interior, we discussed the urban state of Beijing. To some degree the straight lines of Beijing were already unstraight from the beginning based on behavior like opposing traffic, bringing the intimate to the sidewalk; and the city’s fabric was already porous, plurally interpreted, multipurpose, because of the means and necessities of daily life, in the spaces of difference between the so-called privileged and underprivileged and the state and reality, most poignantly felt in the reducing to rubble of communities and erection of new developments within no time at all. And history. And some are happy, others angry, some come up with entrepreneurial solutions and some flee and some bear brunts. And yet as far as those people in the reading club meeting were aware, there is not much theory to support these observations, to reflect on the new perceptual and cognitive spaces that make up contemporary reality from this point of view. Not even co-opted theory. The last text was a chapter from Richard McGregor’s book about the inside of the Communist Party, a not-so-well understood organization. This chapter by McGregor, a financial journalist in his day-job, concerned the anti-corruption campaigns that targeted Shanghai’s dizzy urban developers and their government friends, marking the period of politcal turnover from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, while it also demonstrated the difficulties facing anyone on a lower level trying to expose corruption using official bureaucratic channels. The philosophy behind this situation is challenging, because it is often not outwardly debated or addressed; but looking around at the cityscape, the effects of this hidden philosophy—visible at least in deed beneath the bold slogans—certainly seemed materially manifest. Perhaps the theory of the donkey can only be just such a blunt confrontation of material, and the reading group’s radar could simply not pick it up. When one person present, who was a local, was asked what happened to the people who get displaced when the buildings come down, he said he didn’t know.

《穿》杂志在驴子当代艺术协会的移动图书馆。Wear journal takes part in the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art‘s mobile library.

__
Along the lines of the donkey (re: recent outing), who stands the rather lonely figure amidst the chatty crowd, it is a questionable act to gather with a basket of beers from around the world on the occasion of artist books. Or, it’s just that one mustn’t gather here. Security guards erupt upon slyly innocent donkey caretakers, but artists’ non-communication says enough to call the big brothers who have a bit more persuasive powers. The Donkey Institute and its books were not necessarily here to make a stand, though, so a few prods of the ass and everyone is fine to make a leisurely dashed and dotted caravan further up the street, where we do not disturb the south entrance of Lido Park! It’s a smooth-awkward transition, a meandering gathering that slips away just as the 城管 chéngguǎn slide in with their marked car. The sight of an indignant security guard explaining gross offenses to the 城管 chéngguǎn fades away behind us.

Half a block away, the roving Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art settles into its new location at a busy intersection of northeastern Beijing during rush hour. Passersby range from pyjama-clad grandmothers to young boys on electric scooters and white collar foreigners. Donkey’s rough institutionalising feels like the park we’ve just left, and casual social gathering leads quite naturally to sitting on the ground with knees up, idle chatter, dangling cigarettes. There are stark contrasts within the formations of a socius: park up-spring, lonely donkey, noisy traffic.

And friends. I don’t know many of you, but it supposes that our mutual presencing here around the book cart of a lonely donkey brings us together. What Nancy says about the lack of feeling of the social contract, we know must be much more demanding than that. Like the tall friend in the yellow t-shirt with the kind of face one cannot place as young or old; his smile tells of feeling in everything. He is the happy friend of Michael or Yam or Edward, warm to everyone, always smiling. He puts his long arm around the shoulders of the friend to whom he may be talking to at any moment. Happy, friendly visitor, come join us for dinner. And yet further inquiry reveals that the terms of these relations may make themselves felt in another way; he is an observer, sent by the 城管 chéngguǎn.

公安局的工作员非得要我们拍到好看一点！ The Public Security Bureau officer insists upon several takes before we get it right.

__
At the end of a long dinner table, Yam blurts out in English, “He’s police! He’s got a badge!” This kind of information can stun and lend unease to any meal, but after a moment of conscious staring――and seeing that our only potential subversion of donkey cart and artist books has already gone home――Xinjiang food at a long dinner table proceeds in just about the same lively manner. Voices and chopsticks criss-cross in dynamic fashion. The friendly observer is not merely a passive onlooker; during the course of the meal he charmingly makes his way around all edges of the table, offering cigarettes, getting to know everyone. These are tactics, yes, but perhaps no more than those of the smitten out on a first date. Let us get to know the 公安局 Public Security Bureau, of which I later find out he is a part. I am uncertain what forms of freedom or rights I may relinquish in seeing a particular light within this encounter, but perhaps that should depend upon how many dinners we share with those that are watching us. The reports must be written anyway.

As the group disperses after dinner, friendly yellow-shirted PSB officer and I happen to be left alone together to walk a short distance in the same direction, and rather than any other proposed confrontation with the authoritative kind, it is, yes, filled with the awkwardness of potential romance. Me and the PSB! We ask questions about one another. He explains to me how our meeting was set up by the chéngguǎn, which wouldn’t have occurred in the past but now work together after a recently created triumvirate between the police force, PSB and the chéngguǎn (usually separate policing bodies with varying jurisdiction). Why? What threat can there be to fear?

Yellow-shirted friend likes Hong Kong pop music, has been thrust into this line of work by his grandfather and father before him, and now patrols the Dashanzi area in plainclothes as a day-to-day, perhaps making friends with all sorts of people. Our date is not so special, I guess. Even so, my inner monologue is conscious of the rising tension as we walk towards our departure point. He insists upon escorting me all the way to my bicycle, and I wonder what the equivalent of a goodnight kiss would be in this situation.

In the end, I ride away, and he waves goodbye, calling out, “路上要小心!” I like him so much. This could be ridiculous, in consideration that what we in other realms may have considered right could have been infringed upon tonight. It is simply that the contracts make themselves felt in a very different way here, and the small heart of our interactions with representatives of the State are like the awkward openings of an encounter beyond power. I don’t know. This was perhaps just an exception, but it seems like a resolved attitude for many of us in the neighbourhood, where it is possible to acknowledge the overbearing authority of the State and yet pay no heed to it. Everything is means. Like faded propaganda posters, I don’t know how my mind has changed already.

re-jigging around the interruption. a compelling incompleteness. this must be the place.

When you start in-between, what you’re in the middle of is a region of relation. Occurrent relation, because it’s all about event. Putting the terms together, you realize straight away that the relational event will play out differently every time. In repeating, it takes up the past differently. In taking up the past differently, it creates new potentials for the future. The region of occurrent relation is a point of potentiation. It is where things begin anew. Where things begin anew is where they were already present in tendency.

JM: Then what precedes the event? What gives rise to it?
BM: Shock. That’s what Peirce says. Affect for me is inseparable from the concept of shock. It doesn’t have to be a drama. It’s really more about microshocks, the kind that populate every moment of our lives. For example a change in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision that draws the gaze toward it. In every shift of attention, there is an interruption, a momentary cut in the mode of onward deployment of life. The cut can pass unnoticed, striking imperceptibly, with only its effects entering conscious awareness as they unroll. This is the onset of the activation I was referring to earlier. I’d go so far as to say that this onset of experience is by nature imperceptible.

This is one way of understanding “microperception,” a concept of great importance to Deleuze and Guattari. Microperception is not smaller perception; it’s a perception of a qualitatively different kind. It’s something that is felt without registering consciously. It registers only in its effects. According to this notion of shock, there is always a commotion under way, a “something doing” as James would say. There is always a something-doing cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress. For things to continue, they have to re-continue. They have to re-jig around the interruption. At the instant of re-jigging, the body braces for what will come. It in-braces, in the sense that it returns to its potential for more of life to come, and that potential is immanent to its own arising.

It might not sound political, at least in the way it’s usually meant. But it is, because the virtuality is of an event to come, and as we saw before the event always has the potential to affectively attune a multiplicity of bodies to its happening, differentially. Aesthetic politics brings the collectivity of shared events to the fore, as differential, a multiple bodily potential for what might come. Difference is built into this account. Affective politics, understood as aesthetic politics, is dissensual, in the sense that it holds contrasting alternatives together without immediately demanding that one alternative eventuates and the others evaporate. It makes thought-felt different capacities for existence, different life potentials, different forms of life, without immediately imposing a choice between them. The political question, then, is not how to find a resolution. It’s not how to impose a solution. It’s how to keep the intensity in what comes next. The only way is through actual differentiation. Different lines of unfolding bring the contrast into actuality, between them. The political question is then what Isabelle Stengers calls an “ecology of practices.” How do you tend this proliferation of differentiation? How can the lines not clash and destroy each other? How do they live together? The “solution” is not to resolve the tension through a choice, but to modulate it into a symbiosis: a cross-fertilization of capacitations that live out to the fullest the intensity of the event of their coming together.

There’s a certain incompleteness to any micropolitical event, like the events I was talking about. A lot of things that you feel were on the verge of taking shape didn’t quite happen. Potentials that you could just glimpse didn’t come into focus. The goal is not to overcome the incompleteness. It’s to make it compelling. Compelling enough that you are moved to do it again, differently, bringing out another set of potentials, some more formed and focused, others that were clearly expressed before now backgrounded. That creates a small, moveable environment of potential. The goal is to live in that moveable environment of potential. If you manage to, you will avoid the paralysis of hopelessness. Neither hope nor hopelessness—a pragmatics of potential. You have to live it at every level. In the way you relate to your partner, and even your cat. The way you teach a class if you’re a professor. The way you create and present your art if you’re an artist. If you participate in more punctual events like the ones I was describing, this will provide a continuous background for what comes of those events to disseminate into and diffuse through. A symbiosis of the special event and the day-to-day, in creative connivance.

Micropolitics is not programmatic. It doesn’t construct and impose global solutions. But it would be naïve to think that is separate from that kind of macro-activity. Anything that augments powers of existence creates conditions for micropolitical flourishings. No body flourishes without enough food and without health care. Micropolitical interventions need macro solutions. But success at the macropolitical level is at best partial without a complementary micropolitical flourishing. Without it, the tendency is toward standardization. Since macropolitical solutions are generally applicable by definition, by definition they act to curtail the variety and exuberance of forms of life. Macropolitical intervention targets minimal conditions of survival. Micropolitics complements that by fostering an excess of conditions of emergence. That inventiveness is where new solutions start to crystallize. The potentials produced at the micropolitical level feed up, climbing the slope that macropolitics descends. Micropolitical and macropolitical go together. One is never without the other. They are processual reciprocals. They aliment each other. At their best, they are mutually corrective.

It has become a commonplace recently to say that we are in a situation where the end of the world is now imaginable—but the end of capitalism isn’t. That is definitely one “solution” that is not likely to come programmatically, top-down— given who’s on top. The dismantling of capitalism is a “corrective” that will only come from a breaking of the reciprocity I was just talking about between the macro- and micropolitical. The prevailing operating conditions of macro/micropolitical reciprocity should not be taken to imply that the symmetry is never broken, that a bifurcation can never occur. The complementarity can be broken in both directions. When macrostructures miniaturize themselves and work to usurp the ground of the micropolitical with scaled-down versions of the dominant generalities, that is fascism. When micropolitical flourishings proliferate to produce a singularity, in the sense of a systemic tipping point, that’s revolution. The ultimate vocation of micropolitics is this: enacting the unimaginable. The symmetry-breaking point, the point at which the unimaginable eventuates, is but a cut, “smaller” than the smallest historically perceivable interval. That is to say, qualitatively different. A moment of a different color, one you never see coming, that comes when it’s least expected. Inevitably, a next micro/macro complementarity will quickly settle in. But it will take a form that could not have been predicted, but is now suddenly doable and thinkable. Micropolitics is what makes the unimaginable practicable. It’s the potential that makes possible.

–Brian Massumi, Of Microperception and Micropolitics

国际大缝隙——香港和深圳之间的口岸，或在所有的国与国之间，区与国之间的那些转换地，也就是那些既不属于此国也不属于彼国的国际空间，有时候只是几栋楼房的距离而已。那些有限的 “ 之间 ” 和 “ 飘地 ” 。

身处此地，我们一下子变得什么都不是，也什么都不能做，只能张望和等待。

或许有一天，我们应该在不同的“ 国际缝隙 ”中同时穿梭，算好时差，带着气球。

ranking cities is quite popular these days! beijing is of course no exception and decided to measure its wenming-ness by observing, for example, if people are disciplined in queuing, crossing roads, etc. But last week, during an interview, someone made an interesting comment, saying that the difference between Beijing and Paris or Berlin, is that here, you can’t just borrow a cigarette from some random people in the street. I noticed that in Scandinavian countries too, and the reason is that cigarettes are so expensive there, that you would not even think about asking! but here the reason seems quite different: you can’t  – apparantly – trust anybody. who knows, the cigarette might as well contain some drugs! it’s probably not the case, but I think this small thing says quite a lot about how people “live together” in cities. what is trust built upon? and how far is it important to make cities more urban? maybe this could be an interesting way to compare cities and think about the implications of such a small, daily fact.

I just found this interesting short article that adresses the issue of photographing people when you are a tourist. As i always kind of had this issue in mind, I found that this paper provided a few answers, eventhough I’ve always been a bit too shy to engage photographically with people.

I had a lot of fun with these two girls, as we where trying to photograph each other, and pretended not to, and played at hiding ourselves!

Jet-lag and sleeping until four in the afternoon after arriving in Beijing City seems to find new use in making one groggily well-rested for the upcoming postmodern adventure. The three days thereafter have been filled with the high intensity sport of attempting to obtain a visa extension to stay in pre-Olympics China. (pant, pant, pant) Queuing in huge lines! Leaping buildings! Scanning overly witty online forums filled with bitchy expats! Filling in forms faster than the speed of light! Working the guanxi for all it’s worth!

Oh, sweaty palms…

The outcome of this relay is yet to be known, but it’s extremely interesting in the question of means in the Chinese socio-cultural context. There are ways, and there are ways. And while we can probably say this anywhere in the world (Fred Ulfers talked about the pressure of over-abundance that is often mistaken for an economy of lack and scarcity), it becomes so…incredibly…fantastic here. Ideas of decorum or appropriateness are culturally determined, of course, but how they play out in the public intellect is an interesting game of what we can and cannot, dare and dare not to do in our lives, to get away with or take advantage. The singular heavy-handedness of the oppressive red regime of communist China is a highly fallible idea, not because it is by any means “democratic”, liberal and free, but because it evades singularity altogether. There is no one way of anything in this country, whether it be national policy, cultural identity or simply just getting by. The laowais here have to learn that fast if they want to keep playing the game, and if they blindly stick to the what’s on the cover, well, they are no different than any other well-indoctrinated mass. Of course, what makes China not so different than anywhere else in the world is that money still talks best of all, and after visiting the Public Security Bureau, it seems that official rules, shiny floors and piles of bureacracy are still not up to par with the power and efficiency of the agent. Who is this phantom figure within Chinese society? Singularity steps out of mass and piles of paperwork (toting a hand full of official looking business cards but remaining rather anonymous) as a specter through the network. This is the point where locality moves and maneuvers through officialdom, this is agency enacted on the initiative of subjectivities (or maybe one just calls it survival), and though we may have our qualms about wheelings and dealings, the agent’s politicking is an individualised ingenuity that works on the level of the face-to-face. It is the realm of the private making use of an inefficient public, and while I don’t want to banter triumphant about this veiled version of dirty capitalism, there is something to these micro-networks that exist like nowhere else I’ve been before. I call her mobile phone. Serena comes to my house. There is no office, or if there is, that may as well exist only as a stamp on the business card. The agent moves fluidly through the network! The agent has a mobile number and a name! She can metamorphise seamlessly through the giant hands that haphazardly striate the premises. This is the agency of the little fishes in the China sea, and that’s more than we can say about our dealings with the Public Security Bureau. In fact, here both person and state are highly fluid, but whereas in other cultures we may be taught to engage one with the other in terms of confrontation, dealing with, addressing level with and upon more level, here we can imagine the agent as a concocter of the smooth, shifting through, butting through sometimes rudely but highly flexible and maybe—-just maybe—-with a thing or to from which we could learn.

(p.s. b… can you send me the link again for that 代理 in geneva? i can’t find the e-mail anymore, and have a friend who’s interested! thank you!)