The CD was composed of American commercial rap and r&b sped up and seamlessly mixed into one-hour mp3’s. He used this pulsing and unrelenting rhythm to fuel his wild progress, despite the near opacity of the lyrics to his ears. Young and tidy, with glistening hair and a craggy cheek surface formed of the new sustenance, he was an image of youth, an animation of the performance of youth under pressures. We climbed in and with the door’s closure, an easygoing promise of timely delivery and an immediate u-turn in front of an oncoming bus set a tone for a sequence of negotiations and split-second decisions informed by flowing intuition. This pointed awareness did not count the law chiefly as its limit, working along its approximate guidelines, but hovering in a parallel state where speed and safety are blurry, immeasurable energies constituting pure duration. Looking at the license on the dashboard, one noted an older, pale, balding man gazing back; the spirit and attitude of driving had either rejuvenated an adult, or made an adult of a boy. The maneuvers, which included burst-passing on the narrow 2-lane causeways that elegantly cross-hatch the edges of East Lake, cutting corners early shadowing mini-vans, and swerving around piles of debris, not to mention hurtling past other speeding cars on the new elevated freeways, all made up a language of an urban space that sprang up and lay half-destroyed and half-in-progress. As such, it was not the code of a single person, though he is the atomic driver in an incalculable system of circulation and friction; but he can only be the atom in tension with the particles exploding around him. Even the pedestrian on the rubble margin senses the shifting values and instant momentum transformations, adjusting to this general spatial intelligence with minimal violence; the other drivers play variations on each other’s motions, together developing the chaotic vocabulary that oscillates between efficiency and entropy, creating such tropes as the cautioning head-lamp flicker and the selfish congesting lane-take. Just like the tireless and carnal mp3 soundtrack accompanying the sequence to its end, these signifying gestures don’t accumulate toward a thesis, but in their isolation gradually chip away at time, leaving us dizzy and early, present, in front of the Hankou train station. There are no straight roads, and in Wuhan, the atomic driver must hustle space with the will of an unstable citizen.

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?)

北京鼓楼东大街 Guloudongdajie, 15:38。因叔叔的moto车而自豪，很欢迎停下来给人拍照片。阿姨坐后面没表情想赶紧回家。