The Fensiting Community bulletin board announces some very important news for local residents: the Number Five United Meat Factory will be arriving to Xiaojingchang Hutong today, July 5th, from 7:00-11:00 am. If you need meat, you can come buy.

Dousing one’s patio with water helps to beat the summer heat. Brother Zheng (老二) redefines our local radius by improving upon our meagre efforts.

姓名： 江老焉儿 （左）／ 百利 （右）
年龄： 江老焉儿：22 ／ 百利：22
你从什么地方来的？ 江老焉儿：北京人 ／ 百利：一样
你们在这里作什么？ 江老焉儿：开网店，做vintage服饰 ／ 百利：学设计
你早上穿衣服的时候，什么更重要——自己穿得舒服（包括心理）或者从外面看起来好看？ 江老焉儿：心理感受比较重要吧
当你今天穿上这身衣服的时候是什么感觉？ 江老焉儿：舒服范儿 ／ 百利：是那种随时可以去睡觉的感觉。
关于你今天穿的衣服有没有什么故 事或者特别的回忆？请给大家描绘一下。 江老焉儿：有什么特别的话，那就是上衣是我妈妈的，估计是她年轻时的衣服。还有，我手里的这个蓝色包，是去上缝纫课用的，里面都是上课用到的布和乱七八糟的材料。

Jianglaoyan’r and Baili are 22 year-old newskool Beijingers. We found them passing by hipster/tourist-laden Nanluoguxiang, reunited arm-in-arm after a long half-year of not hanging out together. Jianglaoyan’r passes her days with an online vintage shop on Taobao and tailoring classes on the side (her blue bag is filled with her latest sewing project); Baili is studying design. The number of vintage shops that have sprung up in the neighbourhood in the last year is indeed a sign of the trendy rising (fall of the old superstitions…); all of our post-80’s born friends are just so nostalgic over histories that they haven’t had yet.

突然，夏天…they said it suddenly became summer…

21 june 2009.

On one hand, she says “cultural” outside of the ‘China vs. the World’ binaries that are so well-preserved in these parts, but on another she’s hand, let’s focus upon the “exchange” part of that phrasing rather than the “cultural”.

Okay, so naïvely, let’s broaden our minor understandings of culture:

From the Department of Social Relations, (why people act as they do)… 1. the “behavioral system” of biological needs… 2. the “personality system” of an individual’s characteristics affecting their functioning in the social world… 3. the “social system” of patterns of units of social interaction, especially social status and role… 4. the “cultural system” of norms and values that regulate social action symbolically.

If we can focus upon such exchanges with less quantitative referent to their final outcomes——e.g., commodity, your value for the money, the art product——we try to focus instead upon the cycles, flows and transmissions thereof, observation and documentation as an active process and deconstruction. I don’t know how much it is possible to tear down what we want to see. I don’t know how much it is possible to open oneself to the context, how that refers to the organisational motions toward content. What content can be put forth without specific agendas, can means without ends really be a geopolitical question (the living organisation of the city), or is it just too banal (the routine), too asocial (acommunicative)? what about adding another word to the question of context as content? “Continuity.” The minor displacements over time in Reich-ian fashion, repetition conjoined with all our failures in memory as an open-ended form of exchange. Growing up.

(small note for sportsbabel: wondering if my hesitation about ‘the gift’ has to do with that isolated ending, if “gift-ing” as a theoretical practice renders something different?)

The Games 2008 series is continuing. The Paralympics are still coming, even if the feeling of event spectacle is over. Of course we can admit obvious issues regarding the status of the handicapped, but is it also reasonable to say that we simply cannot sustain the prolonged excitement of this culmination of seven years of anticipation? What happens to our sense of time now, in this period between the Olympic games and the straddled Paralympics? The stadium stays closed to the public. Incoming and outgoing post is on intense inspection and delay. Yet we already reminisce on buses and subway cars as we watch constant replays of the Games and its opening/closing ceremonies. All major western media had already pre-prepared the requisite article for print the day after the closing ceremonies—-tag phrases including “Olympic Reflections“, “Where to go post-Olympics“, “The Day After Verdict” (yes, we are being tried here) and “Afterglow of Games, what’s Next for China?”  There is an intensely compressed sense of time to be noted here—-one that is self-conscious and thrusting outward with pointed fingers—-that is the more precise point in question about the current state of affairs.

I am still trying to catch up, two weeks behind updating the latest news, what should be a daily log of hutong life during the Beijing Olympics. Circling through and around wide-eyed impressions and an attempted absorption of the 16-day countdown, anxious about making sure the next days were organised, layering and folding the blog posts and the nows with the question of “what happens next?” The New York Times asks and Baudrillard, too, as in the joke of the man who leans quietly out of the group in the midst of a wild orgy: “So what do we do after the orgy?” Well, isn’t it exactly that which we’ve forgotten, perhaps necessarily so, that part about getting on with our everyday lives? Those of us living in Beijing at this moment know that this period is by no means “daily life”. Or is it? This was a mega world event, certain to be extrapolated out from the context of a larger global politics. But under the magnifying glass of this attempted map, what is the ergon, the “being-in-operative” that points to the simultaneous inoperability and “pure potentiality” that we have as everyday citizens or human beings (for these are not the same)? [1] What has simultaneity done to our senses of space in this map of Beijing? It is this “being-in-operative” that renders the map ridiculous and clunky, for we were merely attempting to go with the flow, Olympics/politics aside. But actually, because politics and our subjectification as citizens can never be merely aside, can we affect-ively trace a new map therein?

——–

[1] Giorgio Agamben references here Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics:

For just as the goodness and performance of a flute player, a sculptor, [Olympic athlete] or any kind of expert, and generally of anyone who fulfills some function or performs some action, are thought to reside in his proper function [ergon], so the goodness and performance of man would seem to reside in whatever is his proper function. Is it then possible that while a carpenter and a shoemaker have their own proper function and spheres of action, man as man has none, but was left by nature a good-for-nothing without a function [argōs]?

Giorgio Agamben. “In this Exile (Italian Diary 1992-94)”. from Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000. pp. 140-141.

[click for larger image]

b, where was that café again? can never find it anymore!