87

EME 14 (1+2) pp 87ndash95 Intellect Limited 2015

Explorations in Media Ecology Volume 14 Numbers 1 amp 2

copy 2015 Intellect Ltd Article English language doi 101386eme141-287_1

Keywords

BeijingMcLuhanhotcool

Peter ZhangGrand Valley State University

Beijing hot Beijing cool

aBstract

This article uses McLuhanrsquos notions of hot and cool as heuristics to advance a critique of the city of Beijing as a living and lived material-symbolic complex It both extends the applicability of these notions and draws attention to their paradoxi-cal coexistence when the analysis becomes specific The article ends by calling for a cooler Beijing a society to come

The main function of the city as a node is the production of subjectivity(Guattari 1985 460)

IntroductIon

The cityscape is a medium It positions people in specific ways and consti-tutes specific kinds of people It presupposes its second persona namely its imagined dwellers and nomads It is also an unsettled medium Beijing has always been a multiplicity with its rhythms and velocities time-binding iner-tia and lived fluidity It is hypermodern premodern and postmodern all at once It has never been modern Beijing is a symbolically over-sedimented place shrugging off some of its symbolic overload in a radically material way It induces aspiration angst and amnesia Its velocity surpasses that of its inhabitants nomadic or not A few cool places betoken life lost to oblivion as they witness life unfolding The heartless arteries and veins bespeak law and order in the midst of commotion and restiveness Life inters lives Order over-rides orders The cityscape overwhelms compels and confuses as it extends

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 87 122415 15658 PM

Peter Zhang

88

As a symbolic space it is alien to the voices it subsumes and is subjected to the voice it assumes

This article reconstructs snapshots of Beijing as it was pausing on the threshold of the WTO and as it was living the aftermath of the Olympics It presents a rhetorical media ecological encounter with the at once material and symbolic cityscape of Beijing for purposes of cultural commentary One way to proceed is to do a genealogy tracing where Beijing has been and where it is going without assuming any teleology or logical necessity thereby making it possible for the reader to imagine the multiplicity of Beijings that could have been In essence this approach effects lsquoan archaeology of the presentrsquo with its vectors twists knots and loose ends (Deleuze 1995 96) Such an operation can properly be called a peoplersquos spatial analysis of Beijing It is mediumistic in nature insofar as we understand lsquomediumrsquo to be synonymous with lsquomilieursquo An alternative strategy is to take stock of peoplersquos actual use or consumption of the place with consumption to be understood as an active operation in a Certeauan sense (de Certeau 1984) I leave this second possibility for future engagements

the gate of heavenly Peace

That Tiananmen is a far cry from the Eiffel Tower is a matter of course It is a feudal structure appropriated as a mythic symbol for the Peoplersquos Republic After witnessing the birth of the Peoplersquos Republic it became the symbolic endpoint of Chinarsquos early modern history which is a narrative Ever since it has stood there as a synecdoche for a story of victory and the inevitability of the victory Its usefulness as a symbol lies in its practical uselessness as a struc-ture Architecturally it is the equivalent of the cover of a book ndash a lsquoparatextrsquo a threshold of interpretation a facade (Genette 1997) If by imperial architec-tural logic Tiananmen was the facade of the imperial court then 1949 turned it into a pure facade whose inside is elsewhere or nowhere Therein lies the logic of a mythic symbol ndash a sublime void whose meaning comes purely from the affective investment of a willing collectivity

The Peoplersquos Republicrsquos appropriation of the imperial Tiananmen is a double gesture of distancing and invoking On the one hand the new order is nothing like the old one Tiananmen is the continuity that evidences and announces the discontinuity the difference in kind In this sense Tiananmen is a frozen moment a symbolic event a historical break and a shorthand condensed closed narrative of inevitability Its meaning is secured by other structures around the Tiananmen Square Together they make a signifying formation On the other hand Tiananmen invokes a new power ndash the power of the peoplersquos democratic dictatorship which displaces overrides imperial power and finds its legitimacy partially in the old powerrsquos rottenness The implied attitude towards history is dialectical and teleological with the new power assuming the stance of Hegelian lsquosynthesisrsquo relative to imperial power and the power of the Nationalist government

As a reappropriated symbol Tiananmen is necessarily lsquodouble-voicedrsquo (Bakhtin 1981) Symbolic erosion and overlaying coincide with symbolic allu-sion and recalcitrance The old meaning system never really goes away form-ing the necessary bedrock upon which new layers of meaning are sedimented or the dark shadow of a luminous presence The new order symbolizes itself by repurposing Tiananmen which at a subterranean level works obstinately as a reminder of continuity ndash a continuity that serves the new order just fine

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 88 122415 15658 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

89

As a sacred symbol Tiananmen cannot preclude its contamination precisely because to be a vital symbol it has to reside in time Events take place to change its meaning Symbolic contamination typically resists physical cleans-ing Paradoxically the line between purgation and contamination is precarious

hot and cool Places and moments

In an eventful world nothing stays hot or cool for good The Forbidden City as the name suggests used to be a lsquohotrsquo place that defied participation on the part of the populace (McLuhan 1964) Its use as a museum signif-icantly cools it down Compared with modern architecture in Beijing the Forbidden City is cool The opening of a Starbucks store made it less cool Between the Forbidden City and the Yuanming Gardens looted and burned down by western invaders in 1860 the former gives the appearance of being intact despite the looting it sustained at about the same time The latter was reduced to ruins and has never been returned to its original shape There is not much to see there but as evidence of the insults sustained by the nation it gets people to think more As such the Yuanming Gardens make a cooler place

Curly and unlevel the Great Wall which lies to the north of Beijing but is nevertheless attached to it as part of a symbolic package is a time-binding cool structure The installation of cable cars to facilitate sightseeing makes it less cool As a reductive sececdoche for the entirety of the Great Wall Badaling is hot The less frequented parts are cool During holiday seasons when it is impossible to get onto it impossible to get down from it impossible to appre-ciate it because of the throngs of sightseers flooding it all at once the Great Wall is hot An intended cool getaway reverses into a hot congregation of innumerable strangers The ill-segmented spacendashtime turns play into labour but does not keep wealth from aggregating

During the partially ceremonial ritualistic annual congressional and polit-ical consultative meetings the city is hot while during spontaneous mass congregations it is cool ndash a rarity though The former constitute a moment of lsquoarrhythmiarsquo that overrides the day-to-day rhythms of the city (Lefebvre 2004 68) The latter embody the eacutelan vital the lsquopolyrhythmic and eurhythmicrsquo movement of the city (Lefebvre 2004 67) The long-time absence thereof is an anomaly Representation is hot Self-presentation on the part of the popu-lace is cool The grand presentational vehicles from the localities around select National Days are pseudo presentations lsquoSovereign powerrsquo is hot lsquobare lifersquo is sacred and cool but can be hottened up biopolitically to become a vehi-cle of sovereign power (Agamben 1995) To remain cool is to be minor and nomadic which calls for strenuous efforts In our times coolness is always an achievement never a given

The standardized McDonaldrsquos is hot Manually stretched north-western-style beef noodles are cool Beijing roast duck pre-packaged in a vacuum bag is hot Roast duck cut on the spot at the dinerrsquos table is cool Etiquette-regulated banquets are hot Serve-yourself hotpot is cool Driving is hot Biking is cool The standardized sign for the Ministry of Civil Affairs is hot The calligraphic sign for Tsinghua University is cool since it involves more human effort more unpredictability and invites more participation The impeccable self-contained Beijing Opera is hot The more interactive less artistically accomplished pop singing at the Bohemian nightclubs on Bar Street is cool Hot and cool are relative terms after all

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 89 122415 15658 PM

Peter Zhang

90

vIsual versus aural BeIjIng

That there is no super high structure proffering a panoramic panoptic or synoptic view of the city core does not make Beijing less lsquovisualrsquo (as McLuhan uses the term) or rational But visual Beijing follows a peculiarly Chinese spatial logic ndash one that is premodern in nature This spatial logic is in partial accord with western rationality in the sense that both prescribe a cityscape of straight lines and right angles The demolition of the old city walls signifi-cantly reduced the feudal aura of the city Once upon a time the imperial sacrificial altars for heaven earth the sun and the moon ensured the legiti-macy of the Ming and Qing feudal regimes by linking them to the Mandate of Heaven now they remain only as historic relics The legitimacy of the new regime rests on a logic of immanence ndash power is supposedly from the people for the people and exercised by the people The Buddhist wisdom of nondual-ity can be read into this discourse

As far as the eye can see the streets mostly criss-cross each other to form a grid-like pattern which is hardly distinguishable from what was achieved in the West under high modernism This spatial orderliness however does not always translate into convenience Rather it often spells blockage especially along a longitudinal dimension For one thing the Forbidden City itself both straddles and blocks the central meridian The southndashnorth distance in Beijing is not a smooth one to cover both physically and status-wise The south side of Beijing makes a psychological third world in the city a lsquoheterotopiarsquo or an lsquoother spacersquo to use Foucaultrsquos terminology (1986)

While McLuhan (1989) associates rational Euclidean space with the phonetic alphabet one wonders why the square-shaped Chinese characters and the long-time presence of print technology in China would not translate into rational Euclidean space as well McLuhanrsquos explanation is that lsquoChinese script is not visual but iconic and tactilersquo (McLuhan and Carson 2003 258) Put otherwise Chinese script affords an aesthetic and synaesthetic experi-ence rather than purely rational sense-making In a way the eye that reads a Chinese text works more like a hand It is hard to tell how McLuhan would have taken account of the grid city in imperial China where the phonetic alphabet was unused We need to look elsewhere for an adequate explanation In contrast to McLuhanrsquos notion of the alphabet effect in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1988) Jack Goody shifts the emphasis from the alphabet to writing in general Building on the arguments of Goody and others Paul Grosswiler puts forward the notion of the writing effect which is well in line with Claude Leacutevi-Straussrsquos idea that writing ndash no matter what kind of script is used ndash makes the whole difference between the lsquocivilizedrsquo mind and lsquoprimi-tiversquo thinking As per the logic of this notion the grid city which is a hot way of arranging the cityscape came into being in imperial China thanks to writ-ing In Seeing Like a State (1998) James C Scott dedicates a chapter to a similar but more lsquoadvancedrsquo development in the West the high-modernist city

Given the complexity of the Chinese writing system for a long time in history literacy was confined to an elite class of literati only It could be that the elite class has always mapped the terrain in a rectilinear grid-like way while the populace has always lived actual spaces aurally As such the rational spatial layout may always have been a regulating and alienating force in the eyes of the populace With their everyday poetics however the populace never seems to be overly bewitched by the apparent regularity of the urban environment On the other hand it could be that decisions have always been

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 90 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

91

made in an oral-aural setting with the written or printed word serving the purpose of lsquocommunicationrsquo only communication being a means of control (Carey 1989) Hence the indispensability of the secretary function (wenshu) in organizations large and small If visual Beijing displays state power then aural Beijing holds the secret as to how that power is exercised by the elite on the one hand and lived sometimes jujitsued by the populace on the other If the visual is hot then the aural at least as it is experienced in China is ambivalent ndash having both hot and cool propensities An aurally received edict or verdict for example is as hot as can be To use another example there is nothing cool about the aural space created by an emperor or a bad boss As the popular saying goes lsquoTo keep the emperor company is like keeping a tiger companyrsquo

Aural spaces are acoustic spaces A literal example of such a space would be that created by the circular Echo Wall (huiyin bi) at the Temple of Heaven But the traditional square-shaped courtyard would also proffer an aural space despite the apparent visual regularity Among other things fengshui is there to make sure that such courtyards are never lived as Euclidean spaces Structural symmetry always gives way to psychological asymmetry Closed in on itself such a courtyard defies visual penetration from without Aural spaces are regu-lated by an economy of voices and beget their own kinds of silence Fengshui a premodern legacy has resurfaced as a covert principle regulating the produc-tion and consumption of spaces in Beijing As per its logic for example the ninth floor in a high-rise office building typically has the alpha male as its occupant Visual or aural no quarter in Beijing is lived as a Euclidean space

With the growing penetration of the Internet in Beijing comes a new acous-tic space ndash the neo-acoustic with decentralization being its seeming promise But the reality of this new acoustic space is more complicated than what logi-cal deduction tells us Suffice it to say that the lsquoinformationizationrsquo of Beijing (a term beloved by bureaucrats and business leaders alike) is a potentially cool becoming that nevertheless falls short of being truly cool Internet policing to maintain central control is a hottening factor Digital Beijing is a multiplicity a mixture of hot and cool spaces and practices deserving closer analysis

1999 and after Keeping up with the times

Beijingrsquos margins had been withdrawing often in spurts The typical enclosed courtyards owned by three-generation families had given way to standard high-rise apartment buildings Yards that used to be available for play were turning into parking spaces Development had become an ideology dubbed as lsquothe hard truthrsquo What was once privately occupied or commonly shared ended up becoming corporate properties Having been viewed as dirt all along non-native bread earners were finding it increasingly costly to get a foothold in Beijing The temporary residence permit a practice enforced around 1999 was an insult for which they had to pay For a time the derogatory discriminatory label lsquoblind flow (mangliu)rsquo was used to designate nomads scraping along in the cityrsquos interstices The city seemed to be set up for the established and the newly rich ndash those positioned to represent rather than to be represented

There had been a confluence between the powerful and the entrepreneur-ial Power was recognized as a prime species of capital One had to learn to read the hidden rules or better still to invent new ones and articulate them to those who occupied the loci of power The new game spelled mediocrity for careerists As salary earners wishfully waited for houses to become more

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 91 11216 94348 AM

Peter Zhang

92

affordable as property developers turned more and more cool agricultural land into commercial and residential lots housing prices had risen by multi-fold over the years making the city feverish in appearance and exclusivity

Like the rest of the country turn-of-the-century Beijing was hottening up under the discourse of WTO Standard Accounting Principles (SAP) the Anglo-American trade regime and the English language became visible forces carrying normative power The idea of WTO was received as a good a matter of course and a wakeup call If elite entrenched member states of the interna-tional community had an interest in producing and maintaining literal mean-ing under the WTO regime then the relatively hot English language would be the fitting medium for indoctrinating literal-mindedness to help WTO work The absence of visible dissent from the discourse of WTO during this time attested to the hotness of Beijing which displayed a downright conforming attitude towards western normativities

Post-olymPIan BeIjIng

Beijing in summer 2009 was wrapped up in the discourse of H1N1 Incoming international passengersrsquo first encounter with Beijing was very much a scene in The Cassandra Crossing the 1976 movie directed by George P Cosmatos The starting section of Foucaultrsquos lsquoPanopticismrsquo is another immediate asso-ciation (1995 195ndash228) Beijing assumed a posture of objectification and distancing Behind the cool detachment was a mentality that belongs with the hot alphabet and the even hotter print technology Each and every passenger automatically became a suspect in the eyes of sartorially secured quarantine officers wielding Beijing-flavoured Mandarin and infrared ther-mometers Affinity was denied right away Beijing was hot literally and McLuhanesquely This hotness was confirmed by other aspects of the city For one thing taxi drivers ndash once upon a time humorously conversational ndash were suspecting and hortatory and felt like an integral element of the Panopticon

Unlike other cities Shanghai included which were still awash with bemusing Chinglish on public signs and restaurant menus Beijing had put on an effort to standardize its English texts and mini-texts prior to the Olympics making one oddly nostalgic of carnivalesque wordings such as lsquoSlip and fall down carefullyrsquo the Chinglish equivalent of lsquoWet floorrsquo At the Beijing Railway Station priority entrance was offered as a charged service ndash a sure sign of the fine segmentation and commodification of time and a hot sign for that matter In terms of depth of commodification this practice outshined the timeshare strategy adopted in Florida and other places What it meant for the less fortunate passenger was more sweat more hassle For air-conditioning was off making the station a hotter place than it needed to be One thing was for free though ads on LCDs In this regard though Beijing was yet to learn from Hilton Chicago which had installed its LCDs inside elevators lsquoItrsquos freersquo as the next person would say to you with a wink and irony Regardless of the coolness of the TV medium this practice simply hottened up the whole space

Under the grip of a rampant development-mad urbanism the bounda-ries of urban Beijing had extended exponentially accompanied by a dwindling communal life The now deeper-pocketed state had injected an enormous amount of capital to the municipality for it to take up the slack in the back

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 92 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

93

alleys (hutong) Hutong a cool abnormality in a hypermodern city had become a regulated unified phenomenon mainly showcased in the west part of the city core ndash a mummified version of itself with the hottening regularization undercutting the intended cool display

The new metro lines while being a hottening factor contributing to the overall velocities of Beijing also served to cool down the turbulence of life at street level The cheap fare effectively kept a considerable portion of the lower social strata out of sight at any given moment The new development was that because of the Olympics metro riders in Beijing had acquired a detect-able lineal-mindedness Or their bodies had internalized the disciplinary marks regulating their use of the metro space To line up for a ride had finally become a habit infectiously so The lines formed by riders coincided with and reinforced the hot spatial logic as embodied by sharp edges and right angles making the metro a hot space Packed as the metro was during rush hours the new metro lines effectively contracted the super-size city for commuters Where property value was concerned the new metro lines had been a hotten-ing factor

It is true there were a few cool western-style structures diversifying the cityscape as a meaning system such as the Birdrsquos Nest (niaochao nickname for the Beijing National Stadium) and the Big Boxer Shorts (da kucha nick-name for the CCTV headquarters building) but it would not take much time for one to realize that these were alibis The unstated rules governing affairs in the city were slow to change although their operationalization had become more sophisticated To host the Olympics was to subject the city and the polity under the gaze of the international community Further hottening up was an expected outcome regardless of what cool symbols were erected

Like the grandiose Three Gorges Dam which gave birth to the Chongqing Municipality the Olympic Village was born of an act of the state It was no surprise that the infrastructure for the Olympics was completed in time for the games It was not really something to celebrate either if one thinks about it One could not help wondering how much say dwellers of the city who had an inalienable right to the city had had in this massive project of displace-ment and expansion As lsquomass mediarsquo the Games changed the environment of Beijing for good (McLuhan 1964 245) There is no going back On balance the Olympic Village was a huge ecological signature left by the Olympics Now that the Games were over people would have to face up to the fact that the Olympics were nothing like a country fair ndash the structures were there to stay having limited use value and yet trapped within the logic and life cycle of capital nonetheless

concludIng remarKs

The interplay between hot and cool is not unlike that between yang and yin or that between the actual and the virtual As Beijing hottens up it gains in the actual but loses in the virtual The symptoms are for all to see forest-like high-rises inhibitive real estate prices smog traffic jams and so on At street level blockage at one intersection instantly spreads to great lengths and all directions Up in the air lsquoAPEC bluersquo is artificial and therefore ephemeral Beijing has come to the point where it needs to work on its virtu-ality potentiality and emptiness In the business arena made men are turn-ing to Chan meditation to nurture their emptiness Public officials are yet to

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 93 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

94

relearn the wisdom of nonduality between virtue and wuwei provided that they are virtue-minded Where technology is concerned the smartphone as a vampiric medium does seem to have produced some cooling effect On the flip side though mobile computing is also quickly turning Beijing into a control society Cyberspace itself is hottening up With almost everything being managed by computer networks the populationrsquos geographic mobility has been put under automatic surveillance

As the above analysis indicates hot and cool are not purely descriptive terms They are interpretive resources and heuristics for practising cultural critique even though critique is often underappreciated as a way of serv-ing the city and the polity Beijing defies simplistic labelling as acoustic or visual right-hemisphere or left-hemisphere cool or hot It has been impli-cated in a global process of hybridization The lsquogroundrsquo is becoming increas-ingly complex calling for closer analyses after the fashion of an archaeology of the present Overall however Beijing is still too much of a capital city It is yet to become a vibrant society with a properly minor voice Better still an unabashed cacophony of minor voices In this sense Beijing has been hot all along its cool spots cool moments and cool symbols notwithstanding What is in order is a cool Beijing a society to come

references

Agamben Giorgio (1995) Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Bakhtin Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays Austin University of Texas Press

Carey James W (1989) Communication as Culture Essays on Media and Society Boston Unwin Hyman

De Certeau Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley University of California Press

Deleuze Gilles (1995) Negotiations 1972ndash1990 New York Columbia University Press

Foucault Michel (1986) lsquoOf other spacesrsquo Diacritics 161 pp 22ndash27mdashmdash (1995) Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison New York Vintage

BooksGenette Gerard (1997) Paratexts Thresholds of Interpretation New York

Cambridge University Press Goody Jack (1988) The Domestication of the Savage Mind New York

Cambridge University Press Grosswiler Paul (2004) lsquoDispelling the alphabet effectrsquo Canadian Journal of

Communication 292 pp 145ndash58 Guattari Feacutelix (1985) lsquoResponse to questionnaire on the cityrsquo Zone 12

p 460 Lefebvre Henri (2004) Rhythmanalysis Space Time and Everyday Life New

York Continuum Leacutevi-Strauss Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning New York Schocken Books McLuhan Marshall (1964) Understanding Media The Extensions of Man New

York McGraw-Hill Book Company mdashmdash (1989) The Global Village Transformations in World Life and Media in the

21st Century New York Oxford University Press McLuhan Marshall and Carson David (2003) The Book of Probes Corte

Madera CA Ginko Press

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 94 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

88

As a symbolic space it is alien to the voices it subsumes and is subjected to the voice it assumes

This article reconstructs snapshots of Beijing as it was pausing on the threshold of the WTO and as it was living the aftermath of the Olympics It presents a rhetorical media ecological encounter with the at once material and symbolic cityscape of Beijing for purposes of cultural commentary One way to proceed is to do a genealogy tracing where Beijing has been and where it is going without assuming any teleology or logical necessity thereby making it possible for the reader to imagine the multiplicity of Beijings that could have been In essence this approach effects lsquoan archaeology of the presentrsquo with its vectors twists knots and loose ends (Deleuze 1995 96) Such an operation can properly be called a peoplersquos spatial analysis of Beijing It is mediumistic in nature insofar as we understand lsquomediumrsquo to be synonymous with lsquomilieursquo An alternative strategy is to take stock of peoplersquos actual use or consumption of the place with consumption to be understood as an active operation in a Certeauan sense (de Certeau 1984) I leave this second possibility for future engagements

the gate of heavenly Peace

That Tiananmen is a far cry from the Eiffel Tower is a matter of course It is a feudal structure appropriated as a mythic symbol for the Peoplersquos Republic After witnessing the birth of the Peoplersquos Republic it became the symbolic endpoint of Chinarsquos early modern history which is a narrative Ever since it has stood there as a synecdoche for a story of victory and the inevitability of the victory Its usefulness as a symbol lies in its practical uselessness as a struc-ture Architecturally it is the equivalent of the cover of a book ndash a lsquoparatextrsquo a threshold of interpretation a facade (Genette 1997) If by imperial architec-tural logic Tiananmen was the facade of the imperial court then 1949 turned it into a pure facade whose inside is elsewhere or nowhere Therein lies the logic of a mythic symbol ndash a sublime void whose meaning comes purely from the affective investment of a willing collectivity

The Peoplersquos Republicrsquos appropriation of the imperial Tiananmen is a double gesture of distancing and invoking On the one hand the new order is nothing like the old one Tiananmen is the continuity that evidences and announces the discontinuity the difference in kind In this sense Tiananmen is a frozen moment a symbolic event a historical break and a shorthand condensed closed narrative of inevitability Its meaning is secured by other structures around the Tiananmen Square Together they make a signifying formation On the other hand Tiananmen invokes a new power ndash the power of the peoplersquos democratic dictatorship which displaces overrides imperial power and finds its legitimacy partially in the old powerrsquos rottenness The implied attitude towards history is dialectical and teleological with the new power assuming the stance of Hegelian lsquosynthesisrsquo relative to imperial power and the power of the Nationalist government

As a reappropriated symbol Tiananmen is necessarily lsquodouble-voicedrsquo (Bakhtin 1981) Symbolic erosion and overlaying coincide with symbolic allu-sion and recalcitrance The old meaning system never really goes away form-ing the necessary bedrock upon which new layers of meaning are sedimented or the dark shadow of a luminous presence The new order symbolizes itself by repurposing Tiananmen which at a subterranean level works obstinately as a reminder of continuity ndash a continuity that serves the new order just fine

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 88 122415 15658 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

89

As a sacred symbol Tiananmen cannot preclude its contamination precisely because to be a vital symbol it has to reside in time Events take place to change its meaning Symbolic contamination typically resists physical cleans-ing Paradoxically the line between purgation and contamination is precarious

hot and cool Places and moments

In an eventful world nothing stays hot or cool for good The Forbidden City as the name suggests used to be a lsquohotrsquo place that defied participation on the part of the populace (McLuhan 1964) Its use as a museum signif-icantly cools it down Compared with modern architecture in Beijing the Forbidden City is cool The opening of a Starbucks store made it less cool Between the Forbidden City and the Yuanming Gardens looted and burned down by western invaders in 1860 the former gives the appearance of being intact despite the looting it sustained at about the same time The latter was reduced to ruins and has never been returned to its original shape There is not much to see there but as evidence of the insults sustained by the nation it gets people to think more As such the Yuanming Gardens make a cooler place

Curly and unlevel the Great Wall which lies to the north of Beijing but is nevertheless attached to it as part of a symbolic package is a time-binding cool structure The installation of cable cars to facilitate sightseeing makes it less cool As a reductive sececdoche for the entirety of the Great Wall Badaling is hot The less frequented parts are cool During holiday seasons when it is impossible to get onto it impossible to get down from it impossible to appre-ciate it because of the throngs of sightseers flooding it all at once the Great Wall is hot An intended cool getaway reverses into a hot congregation of innumerable strangers The ill-segmented spacendashtime turns play into labour but does not keep wealth from aggregating

During the partially ceremonial ritualistic annual congressional and polit-ical consultative meetings the city is hot while during spontaneous mass congregations it is cool ndash a rarity though The former constitute a moment of lsquoarrhythmiarsquo that overrides the day-to-day rhythms of the city (Lefebvre 2004 68) The latter embody the eacutelan vital the lsquopolyrhythmic and eurhythmicrsquo movement of the city (Lefebvre 2004 67) The long-time absence thereof is an anomaly Representation is hot Self-presentation on the part of the popu-lace is cool The grand presentational vehicles from the localities around select National Days are pseudo presentations lsquoSovereign powerrsquo is hot lsquobare lifersquo is sacred and cool but can be hottened up biopolitically to become a vehi-cle of sovereign power (Agamben 1995) To remain cool is to be minor and nomadic which calls for strenuous efforts In our times coolness is always an achievement never a given

The standardized McDonaldrsquos is hot Manually stretched north-western-style beef noodles are cool Beijing roast duck pre-packaged in a vacuum bag is hot Roast duck cut on the spot at the dinerrsquos table is cool Etiquette-regulated banquets are hot Serve-yourself hotpot is cool Driving is hot Biking is cool The standardized sign for the Ministry of Civil Affairs is hot The calligraphic sign for Tsinghua University is cool since it involves more human effort more unpredictability and invites more participation The impeccable self-contained Beijing Opera is hot The more interactive less artistically accomplished pop singing at the Bohemian nightclubs on Bar Street is cool Hot and cool are relative terms after all

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 89 122415 15658 PM

Peter Zhang

90

vIsual versus aural BeIjIng

That there is no super high structure proffering a panoramic panoptic or synoptic view of the city core does not make Beijing less lsquovisualrsquo (as McLuhan uses the term) or rational But visual Beijing follows a peculiarly Chinese spatial logic ndash one that is premodern in nature This spatial logic is in partial accord with western rationality in the sense that both prescribe a cityscape of straight lines and right angles The demolition of the old city walls signifi-cantly reduced the feudal aura of the city Once upon a time the imperial sacrificial altars for heaven earth the sun and the moon ensured the legiti-macy of the Ming and Qing feudal regimes by linking them to the Mandate of Heaven now they remain only as historic relics The legitimacy of the new regime rests on a logic of immanence ndash power is supposedly from the people for the people and exercised by the people The Buddhist wisdom of nondual-ity can be read into this discourse

As far as the eye can see the streets mostly criss-cross each other to form a grid-like pattern which is hardly distinguishable from what was achieved in the West under high modernism This spatial orderliness however does not always translate into convenience Rather it often spells blockage especially along a longitudinal dimension For one thing the Forbidden City itself both straddles and blocks the central meridian The southndashnorth distance in Beijing is not a smooth one to cover both physically and status-wise The south side of Beijing makes a psychological third world in the city a lsquoheterotopiarsquo or an lsquoother spacersquo to use Foucaultrsquos terminology (1986)

While McLuhan (1989) associates rational Euclidean space with the phonetic alphabet one wonders why the square-shaped Chinese characters and the long-time presence of print technology in China would not translate into rational Euclidean space as well McLuhanrsquos explanation is that lsquoChinese script is not visual but iconic and tactilersquo (McLuhan and Carson 2003 258) Put otherwise Chinese script affords an aesthetic and synaesthetic experi-ence rather than purely rational sense-making In a way the eye that reads a Chinese text works more like a hand It is hard to tell how McLuhan would have taken account of the grid city in imperial China where the phonetic alphabet was unused We need to look elsewhere for an adequate explanation In contrast to McLuhanrsquos notion of the alphabet effect in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1988) Jack Goody shifts the emphasis from the alphabet to writing in general Building on the arguments of Goody and others Paul Grosswiler puts forward the notion of the writing effect which is well in line with Claude Leacutevi-Straussrsquos idea that writing ndash no matter what kind of script is used ndash makes the whole difference between the lsquocivilizedrsquo mind and lsquoprimi-tiversquo thinking As per the logic of this notion the grid city which is a hot way of arranging the cityscape came into being in imperial China thanks to writ-ing In Seeing Like a State (1998) James C Scott dedicates a chapter to a similar but more lsquoadvancedrsquo development in the West the high-modernist city

Given the complexity of the Chinese writing system for a long time in history literacy was confined to an elite class of literati only It could be that the elite class has always mapped the terrain in a rectilinear grid-like way while the populace has always lived actual spaces aurally As such the rational spatial layout may always have been a regulating and alienating force in the eyes of the populace With their everyday poetics however the populace never seems to be overly bewitched by the apparent regularity of the urban environment On the other hand it could be that decisions have always been

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 90 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

91

made in an oral-aural setting with the written or printed word serving the purpose of lsquocommunicationrsquo only communication being a means of control (Carey 1989) Hence the indispensability of the secretary function (wenshu) in organizations large and small If visual Beijing displays state power then aural Beijing holds the secret as to how that power is exercised by the elite on the one hand and lived sometimes jujitsued by the populace on the other If the visual is hot then the aural at least as it is experienced in China is ambivalent ndash having both hot and cool propensities An aurally received edict or verdict for example is as hot as can be To use another example there is nothing cool about the aural space created by an emperor or a bad boss As the popular saying goes lsquoTo keep the emperor company is like keeping a tiger companyrsquo

Aural spaces are acoustic spaces A literal example of such a space would be that created by the circular Echo Wall (huiyin bi) at the Temple of Heaven But the traditional square-shaped courtyard would also proffer an aural space despite the apparent visual regularity Among other things fengshui is there to make sure that such courtyards are never lived as Euclidean spaces Structural symmetry always gives way to psychological asymmetry Closed in on itself such a courtyard defies visual penetration from without Aural spaces are regu-lated by an economy of voices and beget their own kinds of silence Fengshui a premodern legacy has resurfaced as a covert principle regulating the produc-tion and consumption of spaces in Beijing As per its logic for example the ninth floor in a high-rise office building typically has the alpha male as its occupant Visual or aural no quarter in Beijing is lived as a Euclidean space

With the growing penetration of the Internet in Beijing comes a new acous-tic space ndash the neo-acoustic with decentralization being its seeming promise But the reality of this new acoustic space is more complicated than what logi-cal deduction tells us Suffice it to say that the lsquoinformationizationrsquo of Beijing (a term beloved by bureaucrats and business leaders alike) is a potentially cool becoming that nevertheless falls short of being truly cool Internet policing to maintain central control is a hottening factor Digital Beijing is a multiplicity a mixture of hot and cool spaces and practices deserving closer analysis

1999 and after Keeping up with the times

Beijingrsquos margins had been withdrawing often in spurts The typical enclosed courtyards owned by three-generation families had given way to standard high-rise apartment buildings Yards that used to be available for play were turning into parking spaces Development had become an ideology dubbed as lsquothe hard truthrsquo What was once privately occupied or commonly shared ended up becoming corporate properties Having been viewed as dirt all along non-native bread earners were finding it increasingly costly to get a foothold in Beijing The temporary residence permit a practice enforced around 1999 was an insult for which they had to pay For a time the derogatory discriminatory label lsquoblind flow (mangliu)rsquo was used to designate nomads scraping along in the cityrsquos interstices The city seemed to be set up for the established and the newly rich ndash those positioned to represent rather than to be represented

There had been a confluence between the powerful and the entrepreneur-ial Power was recognized as a prime species of capital One had to learn to read the hidden rules or better still to invent new ones and articulate them to those who occupied the loci of power The new game spelled mediocrity for careerists As salary earners wishfully waited for houses to become more

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 91 11216 94348 AM

Peter Zhang

92

affordable as property developers turned more and more cool agricultural land into commercial and residential lots housing prices had risen by multi-fold over the years making the city feverish in appearance and exclusivity

Like the rest of the country turn-of-the-century Beijing was hottening up under the discourse of WTO Standard Accounting Principles (SAP) the Anglo-American trade regime and the English language became visible forces carrying normative power The idea of WTO was received as a good a matter of course and a wakeup call If elite entrenched member states of the interna-tional community had an interest in producing and maintaining literal mean-ing under the WTO regime then the relatively hot English language would be the fitting medium for indoctrinating literal-mindedness to help WTO work The absence of visible dissent from the discourse of WTO during this time attested to the hotness of Beijing which displayed a downright conforming attitude towards western normativities

Post-olymPIan BeIjIng

Beijing in summer 2009 was wrapped up in the discourse of H1N1 Incoming international passengersrsquo first encounter with Beijing was very much a scene in The Cassandra Crossing the 1976 movie directed by George P Cosmatos The starting section of Foucaultrsquos lsquoPanopticismrsquo is another immediate asso-ciation (1995 195ndash228) Beijing assumed a posture of objectification and distancing Behind the cool detachment was a mentality that belongs with the hot alphabet and the even hotter print technology Each and every passenger automatically became a suspect in the eyes of sartorially secured quarantine officers wielding Beijing-flavoured Mandarin and infrared ther-mometers Affinity was denied right away Beijing was hot literally and McLuhanesquely This hotness was confirmed by other aspects of the city For one thing taxi drivers ndash once upon a time humorously conversational ndash were suspecting and hortatory and felt like an integral element of the Panopticon

Unlike other cities Shanghai included which were still awash with bemusing Chinglish on public signs and restaurant menus Beijing had put on an effort to standardize its English texts and mini-texts prior to the Olympics making one oddly nostalgic of carnivalesque wordings such as lsquoSlip and fall down carefullyrsquo the Chinglish equivalent of lsquoWet floorrsquo At the Beijing Railway Station priority entrance was offered as a charged service ndash a sure sign of the fine segmentation and commodification of time and a hot sign for that matter In terms of depth of commodification this practice outshined the timeshare strategy adopted in Florida and other places What it meant for the less fortunate passenger was more sweat more hassle For air-conditioning was off making the station a hotter place than it needed to be One thing was for free though ads on LCDs In this regard though Beijing was yet to learn from Hilton Chicago which had installed its LCDs inside elevators lsquoItrsquos freersquo as the next person would say to you with a wink and irony Regardless of the coolness of the TV medium this practice simply hottened up the whole space

Under the grip of a rampant development-mad urbanism the bounda-ries of urban Beijing had extended exponentially accompanied by a dwindling communal life The now deeper-pocketed state had injected an enormous amount of capital to the municipality for it to take up the slack in the back

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 92 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

93

alleys (hutong) Hutong a cool abnormality in a hypermodern city had become a regulated unified phenomenon mainly showcased in the west part of the city core ndash a mummified version of itself with the hottening regularization undercutting the intended cool display

The new metro lines while being a hottening factor contributing to the overall velocities of Beijing also served to cool down the turbulence of life at street level The cheap fare effectively kept a considerable portion of the lower social strata out of sight at any given moment The new development was that because of the Olympics metro riders in Beijing had acquired a detect-able lineal-mindedness Or their bodies had internalized the disciplinary marks regulating their use of the metro space To line up for a ride had finally become a habit infectiously so The lines formed by riders coincided with and reinforced the hot spatial logic as embodied by sharp edges and right angles making the metro a hot space Packed as the metro was during rush hours the new metro lines effectively contracted the super-size city for commuters Where property value was concerned the new metro lines had been a hotten-ing factor

It is true there were a few cool western-style structures diversifying the cityscape as a meaning system such as the Birdrsquos Nest (niaochao nickname for the Beijing National Stadium) and the Big Boxer Shorts (da kucha nick-name for the CCTV headquarters building) but it would not take much time for one to realize that these were alibis The unstated rules governing affairs in the city were slow to change although their operationalization had become more sophisticated To host the Olympics was to subject the city and the polity under the gaze of the international community Further hottening up was an expected outcome regardless of what cool symbols were erected

Like the grandiose Three Gorges Dam which gave birth to the Chongqing Municipality the Olympic Village was born of an act of the state It was no surprise that the infrastructure for the Olympics was completed in time for the games It was not really something to celebrate either if one thinks about it One could not help wondering how much say dwellers of the city who had an inalienable right to the city had had in this massive project of displace-ment and expansion As lsquomass mediarsquo the Games changed the environment of Beijing for good (McLuhan 1964 245) There is no going back On balance the Olympic Village was a huge ecological signature left by the Olympics Now that the Games were over people would have to face up to the fact that the Olympics were nothing like a country fair ndash the structures were there to stay having limited use value and yet trapped within the logic and life cycle of capital nonetheless

concludIng remarKs

The interplay between hot and cool is not unlike that between yang and yin or that between the actual and the virtual As Beijing hottens up it gains in the actual but loses in the virtual The symptoms are for all to see forest-like high-rises inhibitive real estate prices smog traffic jams and so on At street level blockage at one intersection instantly spreads to great lengths and all directions Up in the air lsquoAPEC bluersquo is artificial and therefore ephemeral Beijing has come to the point where it needs to work on its virtu-ality potentiality and emptiness In the business arena made men are turn-ing to Chan meditation to nurture their emptiness Public officials are yet to

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 93 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

94

relearn the wisdom of nonduality between virtue and wuwei provided that they are virtue-minded Where technology is concerned the smartphone as a vampiric medium does seem to have produced some cooling effect On the flip side though mobile computing is also quickly turning Beijing into a control society Cyberspace itself is hottening up With almost everything being managed by computer networks the populationrsquos geographic mobility has been put under automatic surveillance

As the above analysis indicates hot and cool are not purely descriptive terms They are interpretive resources and heuristics for practising cultural critique even though critique is often underappreciated as a way of serv-ing the city and the polity Beijing defies simplistic labelling as acoustic or visual right-hemisphere or left-hemisphere cool or hot It has been impli-cated in a global process of hybridization The lsquogroundrsquo is becoming increas-ingly complex calling for closer analyses after the fashion of an archaeology of the present Overall however Beijing is still too much of a capital city It is yet to become a vibrant society with a properly minor voice Better still an unabashed cacophony of minor voices In this sense Beijing has been hot all along its cool spots cool moments and cool symbols notwithstanding What is in order is a cool Beijing a society to come

references

Agamben Giorgio (1995) Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Bakhtin Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays Austin University of Texas Press

Carey James W (1989) Communication as Culture Essays on Media and Society Boston Unwin Hyman

De Certeau Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley University of California Press

Deleuze Gilles (1995) Negotiations 1972ndash1990 New York Columbia University Press

Foucault Michel (1986) lsquoOf other spacesrsquo Diacritics 161 pp 22ndash27mdashmdash (1995) Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison New York Vintage

BooksGenette Gerard (1997) Paratexts Thresholds of Interpretation New York

Cambridge University Press Goody Jack (1988) The Domestication of the Savage Mind New York

Cambridge University Press Grosswiler Paul (2004) lsquoDispelling the alphabet effectrsquo Canadian Journal of

Communication 292 pp 145ndash58 Guattari Feacutelix (1985) lsquoResponse to questionnaire on the cityrsquo Zone 12

p 460 Lefebvre Henri (2004) Rhythmanalysis Space Time and Everyday Life New

York Continuum Leacutevi-Strauss Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning New York Schocken Books McLuhan Marshall (1964) Understanding Media The Extensions of Man New

York McGraw-Hill Book Company mdashmdash (1989) The Global Village Transformations in World Life and Media in the

21st Century New York Oxford University Press McLuhan Marshall and Carson David (2003) The Book of Probes Corte

Madera CA Ginko Press

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 94 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

89

As a sacred symbol Tiananmen cannot preclude its contamination precisely because to be a vital symbol it has to reside in time Events take place to change its meaning Symbolic contamination typically resists physical cleans-ing Paradoxically the line between purgation and contamination is precarious

hot and cool Places and moments

In an eventful world nothing stays hot or cool for good The Forbidden City as the name suggests used to be a lsquohotrsquo place that defied participation on the part of the populace (McLuhan 1964) Its use as a museum signif-icantly cools it down Compared with modern architecture in Beijing the Forbidden City is cool The opening of a Starbucks store made it less cool Between the Forbidden City and the Yuanming Gardens looted and burned down by western invaders in 1860 the former gives the appearance of being intact despite the looting it sustained at about the same time The latter was reduced to ruins and has never been returned to its original shape There is not much to see there but as evidence of the insults sustained by the nation it gets people to think more As such the Yuanming Gardens make a cooler place

Curly and unlevel the Great Wall which lies to the north of Beijing but is nevertheless attached to it as part of a symbolic package is a time-binding cool structure The installation of cable cars to facilitate sightseeing makes it less cool As a reductive sececdoche for the entirety of the Great Wall Badaling is hot The less frequented parts are cool During holiday seasons when it is impossible to get onto it impossible to get down from it impossible to appre-ciate it because of the throngs of sightseers flooding it all at once the Great Wall is hot An intended cool getaway reverses into a hot congregation of innumerable strangers The ill-segmented spacendashtime turns play into labour but does not keep wealth from aggregating

During the partially ceremonial ritualistic annual congressional and polit-ical consultative meetings the city is hot while during spontaneous mass congregations it is cool ndash a rarity though The former constitute a moment of lsquoarrhythmiarsquo that overrides the day-to-day rhythms of the city (Lefebvre 2004 68) The latter embody the eacutelan vital the lsquopolyrhythmic and eurhythmicrsquo movement of the city (Lefebvre 2004 67) The long-time absence thereof is an anomaly Representation is hot Self-presentation on the part of the popu-lace is cool The grand presentational vehicles from the localities around select National Days are pseudo presentations lsquoSovereign powerrsquo is hot lsquobare lifersquo is sacred and cool but can be hottened up biopolitically to become a vehi-cle of sovereign power (Agamben 1995) To remain cool is to be minor and nomadic which calls for strenuous efforts In our times coolness is always an achievement never a given

The standardized McDonaldrsquos is hot Manually stretched north-western-style beef noodles are cool Beijing roast duck pre-packaged in a vacuum bag is hot Roast duck cut on the spot at the dinerrsquos table is cool Etiquette-regulated banquets are hot Serve-yourself hotpot is cool Driving is hot Biking is cool The standardized sign for the Ministry of Civil Affairs is hot The calligraphic sign for Tsinghua University is cool since it involves more human effort more unpredictability and invites more participation The impeccable self-contained Beijing Opera is hot The more interactive less artistically accomplished pop singing at the Bohemian nightclubs on Bar Street is cool Hot and cool are relative terms after all

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 89 122415 15658 PM

Peter Zhang

90

vIsual versus aural BeIjIng

That there is no super high structure proffering a panoramic panoptic or synoptic view of the city core does not make Beijing less lsquovisualrsquo (as McLuhan uses the term) or rational But visual Beijing follows a peculiarly Chinese spatial logic ndash one that is premodern in nature This spatial logic is in partial accord with western rationality in the sense that both prescribe a cityscape of straight lines and right angles The demolition of the old city walls signifi-cantly reduced the feudal aura of the city Once upon a time the imperial sacrificial altars for heaven earth the sun and the moon ensured the legiti-macy of the Ming and Qing feudal regimes by linking them to the Mandate of Heaven now they remain only as historic relics The legitimacy of the new regime rests on a logic of immanence ndash power is supposedly from the people for the people and exercised by the people The Buddhist wisdom of nondual-ity can be read into this discourse

As far as the eye can see the streets mostly criss-cross each other to form a grid-like pattern which is hardly distinguishable from what was achieved in the West under high modernism This spatial orderliness however does not always translate into convenience Rather it often spells blockage especially along a longitudinal dimension For one thing the Forbidden City itself both straddles and blocks the central meridian The southndashnorth distance in Beijing is not a smooth one to cover both physically and status-wise The south side of Beijing makes a psychological third world in the city a lsquoheterotopiarsquo or an lsquoother spacersquo to use Foucaultrsquos terminology (1986)

While McLuhan (1989) associates rational Euclidean space with the phonetic alphabet one wonders why the square-shaped Chinese characters and the long-time presence of print technology in China would not translate into rational Euclidean space as well McLuhanrsquos explanation is that lsquoChinese script is not visual but iconic and tactilersquo (McLuhan and Carson 2003 258) Put otherwise Chinese script affords an aesthetic and synaesthetic experi-ence rather than purely rational sense-making In a way the eye that reads a Chinese text works more like a hand It is hard to tell how McLuhan would have taken account of the grid city in imperial China where the phonetic alphabet was unused We need to look elsewhere for an adequate explanation In contrast to McLuhanrsquos notion of the alphabet effect in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1988) Jack Goody shifts the emphasis from the alphabet to writing in general Building on the arguments of Goody and others Paul Grosswiler puts forward the notion of the writing effect which is well in line with Claude Leacutevi-Straussrsquos idea that writing ndash no matter what kind of script is used ndash makes the whole difference between the lsquocivilizedrsquo mind and lsquoprimi-tiversquo thinking As per the logic of this notion the grid city which is a hot way of arranging the cityscape came into being in imperial China thanks to writ-ing In Seeing Like a State (1998) James C Scott dedicates a chapter to a similar but more lsquoadvancedrsquo development in the West the high-modernist city

Given the complexity of the Chinese writing system for a long time in history literacy was confined to an elite class of literati only It could be that the elite class has always mapped the terrain in a rectilinear grid-like way while the populace has always lived actual spaces aurally As such the rational spatial layout may always have been a regulating and alienating force in the eyes of the populace With their everyday poetics however the populace never seems to be overly bewitched by the apparent regularity of the urban environment On the other hand it could be that decisions have always been

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 90 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

91

made in an oral-aural setting with the written or printed word serving the purpose of lsquocommunicationrsquo only communication being a means of control (Carey 1989) Hence the indispensability of the secretary function (wenshu) in organizations large and small If visual Beijing displays state power then aural Beijing holds the secret as to how that power is exercised by the elite on the one hand and lived sometimes jujitsued by the populace on the other If the visual is hot then the aural at least as it is experienced in China is ambivalent ndash having both hot and cool propensities An aurally received edict or verdict for example is as hot as can be To use another example there is nothing cool about the aural space created by an emperor or a bad boss As the popular saying goes lsquoTo keep the emperor company is like keeping a tiger companyrsquo

Aural spaces are acoustic spaces A literal example of such a space would be that created by the circular Echo Wall (huiyin bi) at the Temple of Heaven But the traditional square-shaped courtyard would also proffer an aural space despite the apparent visual regularity Among other things fengshui is there to make sure that such courtyards are never lived as Euclidean spaces Structural symmetry always gives way to psychological asymmetry Closed in on itself such a courtyard defies visual penetration from without Aural spaces are regu-lated by an economy of voices and beget their own kinds of silence Fengshui a premodern legacy has resurfaced as a covert principle regulating the produc-tion and consumption of spaces in Beijing As per its logic for example the ninth floor in a high-rise office building typically has the alpha male as its occupant Visual or aural no quarter in Beijing is lived as a Euclidean space

With the growing penetration of the Internet in Beijing comes a new acous-tic space ndash the neo-acoustic with decentralization being its seeming promise But the reality of this new acoustic space is more complicated than what logi-cal deduction tells us Suffice it to say that the lsquoinformationizationrsquo of Beijing (a term beloved by bureaucrats and business leaders alike) is a potentially cool becoming that nevertheless falls short of being truly cool Internet policing to maintain central control is a hottening factor Digital Beijing is a multiplicity a mixture of hot and cool spaces and practices deserving closer analysis

1999 and after Keeping up with the times

Beijingrsquos margins had been withdrawing often in spurts The typical enclosed courtyards owned by three-generation families had given way to standard high-rise apartment buildings Yards that used to be available for play were turning into parking spaces Development had become an ideology dubbed as lsquothe hard truthrsquo What was once privately occupied or commonly shared ended up becoming corporate properties Having been viewed as dirt all along non-native bread earners were finding it increasingly costly to get a foothold in Beijing The temporary residence permit a practice enforced around 1999 was an insult for which they had to pay For a time the derogatory discriminatory label lsquoblind flow (mangliu)rsquo was used to designate nomads scraping along in the cityrsquos interstices The city seemed to be set up for the established and the newly rich ndash those positioned to represent rather than to be represented

There had been a confluence between the powerful and the entrepreneur-ial Power was recognized as a prime species of capital One had to learn to read the hidden rules or better still to invent new ones and articulate them to those who occupied the loci of power The new game spelled mediocrity for careerists As salary earners wishfully waited for houses to become more

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 91 11216 94348 AM

Peter Zhang

92

affordable as property developers turned more and more cool agricultural land into commercial and residential lots housing prices had risen by multi-fold over the years making the city feverish in appearance and exclusivity

Like the rest of the country turn-of-the-century Beijing was hottening up under the discourse of WTO Standard Accounting Principles (SAP) the Anglo-American trade regime and the English language became visible forces carrying normative power The idea of WTO was received as a good a matter of course and a wakeup call If elite entrenched member states of the interna-tional community had an interest in producing and maintaining literal mean-ing under the WTO regime then the relatively hot English language would be the fitting medium for indoctrinating literal-mindedness to help WTO work The absence of visible dissent from the discourse of WTO during this time attested to the hotness of Beijing which displayed a downright conforming attitude towards western normativities

Post-olymPIan BeIjIng

Beijing in summer 2009 was wrapped up in the discourse of H1N1 Incoming international passengersrsquo first encounter with Beijing was very much a scene in The Cassandra Crossing the 1976 movie directed by George P Cosmatos The starting section of Foucaultrsquos lsquoPanopticismrsquo is another immediate asso-ciation (1995 195ndash228) Beijing assumed a posture of objectification and distancing Behind the cool detachment was a mentality that belongs with the hot alphabet and the even hotter print technology Each and every passenger automatically became a suspect in the eyes of sartorially secured quarantine officers wielding Beijing-flavoured Mandarin and infrared ther-mometers Affinity was denied right away Beijing was hot literally and McLuhanesquely This hotness was confirmed by other aspects of the city For one thing taxi drivers ndash once upon a time humorously conversational ndash were suspecting and hortatory and felt like an integral element of the Panopticon

Unlike other cities Shanghai included which were still awash with bemusing Chinglish on public signs and restaurant menus Beijing had put on an effort to standardize its English texts and mini-texts prior to the Olympics making one oddly nostalgic of carnivalesque wordings such as lsquoSlip and fall down carefullyrsquo the Chinglish equivalent of lsquoWet floorrsquo At the Beijing Railway Station priority entrance was offered as a charged service ndash a sure sign of the fine segmentation and commodification of time and a hot sign for that matter In terms of depth of commodification this practice outshined the timeshare strategy adopted in Florida and other places What it meant for the less fortunate passenger was more sweat more hassle For air-conditioning was off making the station a hotter place than it needed to be One thing was for free though ads on LCDs In this regard though Beijing was yet to learn from Hilton Chicago which had installed its LCDs inside elevators lsquoItrsquos freersquo as the next person would say to you with a wink and irony Regardless of the coolness of the TV medium this practice simply hottened up the whole space

Under the grip of a rampant development-mad urbanism the bounda-ries of urban Beijing had extended exponentially accompanied by a dwindling communal life The now deeper-pocketed state had injected an enormous amount of capital to the municipality for it to take up the slack in the back

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 92 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

93

alleys (hutong) Hutong a cool abnormality in a hypermodern city had become a regulated unified phenomenon mainly showcased in the west part of the city core ndash a mummified version of itself with the hottening regularization undercutting the intended cool display

The new metro lines while being a hottening factor contributing to the overall velocities of Beijing also served to cool down the turbulence of life at street level The cheap fare effectively kept a considerable portion of the lower social strata out of sight at any given moment The new development was that because of the Olympics metro riders in Beijing had acquired a detect-able lineal-mindedness Or their bodies had internalized the disciplinary marks regulating their use of the metro space To line up for a ride had finally become a habit infectiously so The lines formed by riders coincided with and reinforced the hot spatial logic as embodied by sharp edges and right angles making the metro a hot space Packed as the metro was during rush hours the new metro lines effectively contracted the super-size city for commuters Where property value was concerned the new metro lines had been a hotten-ing factor

It is true there were a few cool western-style structures diversifying the cityscape as a meaning system such as the Birdrsquos Nest (niaochao nickname for the Beijing National Stadium) and the Big Boxer Shorts (da kucha nick-name for the CCTV headquarters building) but it would not take much time for one to realize that these were alibis The unstated rules governing affairs in the city were slow to change although their operationalization had become more sophisticated To host the Olympics was to subject the city and the polity under the gaze of the international community Further hottening up was an expected outcome regardless of what cool symbols were erected

Like the grandiose Three Gorges Dam which gave birth to the Chongqing Municipality the Olympic Village was born of an act of the state It was no surprise that the infrastructure for the Olympics was completed in time for the games It was not really something to celebrate either if one thinks about it One could not help wondering how much say dwellers of the city who had an inalienable right to the city had had in this massive project of displace-ment and expansion As lsquomass mediarsquo the Games changed the environment of Beijing for good (McLuhan 1964 245) There is no going back On balance the Olympic Village was a huge ecological signature left by the Olympics Now that the Games were over people would have to face up to the fact that the Olympics were nothing like a country fair ndash the structures were there to stay having limited use value and yet trapped within the logic and life cycle of capital nonetheless

concludIng remarKs

The interplay between hot and cool is not unlike that between yang and yin or that between the actual and the virtual As Beijing hottens up it gains in the actual but loses in the virtual The symptoms are for all to see forest-like high-rises inhibitive real estate prices smog traffic jams and so on At street level blockage at one intersection instantly spreads to great lengths and all directions Up in the air lsquoAPEC bluersquo is artificial and therefore ephemeral Beijing has come to the point where it needs to work on its virtu-ality potentiality and emptiness In the business arena made men are turn-ing to Chan meditation to nurture their emptiness Public officials are yet to

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 93 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

94

relearn the wisdom of nonduality between virtue and wuwei provided that they are virtue-minded Where technology is concerned the smartphone as a vampiric medium does seem to have produced some cooling effect On the flip side though mobile computing is also quickly turning Beijing into a control society Cyberspace itself is hottening up With almost everything being managed by computer networks the populationrsquos geographic mobility has been put under automatic surveillance

As the above analysis indicates hot and cool are not purely descriptive terms They are interpretive resources and heuristics for practising cultural critique even though critique is often underappreciated as a way of serv-ing the city and the polity Beijing defies simplistic labelling as acoustic or visual right-hemisphere or left-hemisphere cool or hot It has been impli-cated in a global process of hybridization The lsquogroundrsquo is becoming increas-ingly complex calling for closer analyses after the fashion of an archaeology of the present Overall however Beijing is still too much of a capital city It is yet to become a vibrant society with a properly minor voice Better still an unabashed cacophony of minor voices In this sense Beijing has been hot all along its cool spots cool moments and cool symbols notwithstanding What is in order is a cool Beijing a society to come

references

Agamben Giorgio (1995) Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Bakhtin Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays Austin University of Texas Press

Carey James W (1989) Communication as Culture Essays on Media and Society Boston Unwin Hyman

De Certeau Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley University of California Press

Deleuze Gilles (1995) Negotiations 1972ndash1990 New York Columbia University Press

Foucault Michel (1986) lsquoOf other spacesrsquo Diacritics 161 pp 22ndash27mdashmdash (1995) Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison New York Vintage

BooksGenette Gerard (1997) Paratexts Thresholds of Interpretation New York

Cambridge University Press Goody Jack (1988) The Domestication of the Savage Mind New York

Cambridge University Press Grosswiler Paul (2004) lsquoDispelling the alphabet effectrsquo Canadian Journal of

Communication 292 pp 145ndash58 Guattari Feacutelix (1985) lsquoResponse to questionnaire on the cityrsquo Zone 12

p 460 Lefebvre Henri (2004) Rhythmanalysis Space Time and Everyday Life New

York Continuum Leacutevi-Strauss Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning New York Schocken Books McLuhan Marshall (1964) Understanding Media The Extensions of Man New

York McGraw-Hill Book Company mdashmdash (1989) The Global Village Transformations in World Life and Media in the

21st Century New York Oxford University Press McLuhan Marshall and Carson David (2003) The Book of Probes Corte

Madera CA Ginko Press

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 94 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

90

vIsual versus aural BeIjIng

That there is no super high structure proffering a panoramic panoptic or synoptic view of the city core does not make Beijing less lsquovisualrsquo (as McLuhan uses the term) or rational But visual Beijing follows a peculiarly Chinese spatial logic ndash one that is premodern in nature This spatial logic is in partial accord with western rationality in the sense that both prescribe a cityscape of straight lines and right angles The demolition of the old city walls signifi-cantly reduced the feudal aura of the city Once upon a time the imperial sacrificial altars for heaven earth the sun and the moon ensured the legiti-macy of the Ming and Qing feudal regimes by linking them to the Mandate of Heaven now they remain only as historic relics The legitimacy of the new regime rests on a logic of immanence ndash power is supposedly from the people for the people and exercised by the people The Buddhist wisdom of nondual-ity can be read into this discourse

As far as the eye can see the streets mostly criss-cross each other to form a grid-like pattern which is hardly distinguishable from what was achieved in the West under high modernism This spatial orderliness however does not always translate into convenience Rather it often spells blockage especially along a longitudinal dimension For one thing the Forbidden City itself both straddles and blocks the central meridian The southndashnorth distance in Beijing is not a smooth one to cover both physically and status-wise The south side of Beijing makes a psychological third world in the city a lsquoheterotopiarsquo or an lsquoother spacersquo to use Foucaultrsquos terminology (1986)

While McLuhan (1989) associates rational Euclidean space with the phonetic alphabet one wonders why the square-shaped Chinese characters and the long-time presence of print technology in China would not translate into rational Euclidean space as well McLuhanrsquos explanation is that lsquoChinese script is not visual but iconic and tactilersquo (McLuhan and Carson 2003 258) Put otherwise Chinese script affords an aesthetic and synaesthetic experi-ence rather than purely rational sense-making In a way the eye that reads a Chinese text works more like a hand It is hard to tell how McLuhan would have taken account of the grid city in imperial China where the phonetic alphabet was unused We need to look elsewhere for an adequate explanation In contrast to McLuhanrsquos notion of the alphabet effect in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1988) Jack Goody shifts the emphasis from the alphabet to writing in general Building on the arguments of Goody and others Paul Grosswiler puts forward the notion of the writing effect which is well in line with Claude Leacutevi-Straussrsquos idea that writing ndash no matter what kind of script is used ndash makes the whole difference between the lsquocivilizedrsquo mind and lsquoprimi-tiversquo thinking As per the logic of this notion the grid city which is a hot way of arranging the cityscape came into being in imperial China thanks to writ-ing In Seeing Like a State (1998) James C Scott dedicates a chapter to a similar but more lsquoadvancedrsquo development in the West the high-modernist city

Given the complexity of the Chinese writing system for a long time in history literacy was confined to an elite class of literati only It could be that the elite class has always mapped the terrain in a rectilinear grid-like way while the populace has always lived actual spaces aurally As such the rational spatial layout may always have been a regulating and alienating force in the eyes of the populace With their everyday poetics however the populace never seems to be overly bewitched by the apparent regularity of the urban environment On the other hand it could be that decisions have always been

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 90 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

91

made in an oral-aural setting with the written or printed word serving the purpose of lsquocommunicationrsquo only communication being a means of control (Carey 1989) Hence the indispensability of the secretary function (wenshu) in organizations large and small If visual Beijing displays state power then aural Beijing holds the secret as to how that power is exercised by the elite on the one hand and lived sometimes jujitsued by the populace on the other If the visual is hot then the aural at least as it is experienced in China is ambivalent ndash having both hot and cool propensities An aurally received edict or verdict for example is as hot as can be To use another example there is nothing cool about the aural space created by an emperor or a bad boss As the popular saying goes lsquoTo keep the emperor company is like keeping a tiger companyrsquo

Aural spaces are acoustic spaces A literal example of such a space would be that created by the circular Echo Wall (huiyin bi) at the Temple of Heaven But the traditional square-shaped courtyard would also proffer an aural space despite the apparent visual regularity Among other things fengshui is there to make sure that such courtyards are never lived as Euclidean spaces Structural symmetry always gives way to psychological asymmetry Closed in on itself such a courtyard defies visual penetration from without Aural spaces are regu-lated by an economy of voices and beget their own kinds of silence Fengshui a premodern legacy has resurfaced as a covert principle regulating the produc-tion and consumption of spaces in Beijing As per its logic for example the ninth floor in a high-rise office building typically has the alpha male as its occupant Visual or aural no quarter in Beijing is lived as a Euclidean space

With the growing penetration of the Internet in Beijing comes a new acous-tic space ndash the neo-acoustic with decentralization being its seeming promise But the reality of this new acoustic space is more complicated than what logi-cal deduction tells us Suffice it to say that the lsquoinformationizationrsquo of Beijing (a term beloved by bureaucrats and business leaders alike) is a potentially cool becoming that nevertheless falls short of being truly cool Internet policing to maintain central control is a hottening factor Digital Beijing is a multiplicity a mixture of hot and cool spaces and practices deserving closer analysis

1999 and after Keeping up with the times

Beijingrsquos margins had been withdrawing often in spurts The typical enclosed courtyards owned by three-generation families had given way to standard high-rise apartment buildings Yards that used to be available for play were turning into parking spaces Development had become an ideology dubbed as lsquothe hard truthrsquo What was once privately occupied or commonly shared ended up becoming corporate properties Having been viewed as dirt all along non-native bread earners were finding it increasingly costly to get a foothold in Beijing The temporary residence permit a practice enforced around 1999 was an insult for which they had to pay For a time the derogatory discriminatory label lsquoblind flow (mangliu)rsquo was used to designate nomads scraping along in the cityrsquos interstices The city seemed to be set up for the established and the newly rich ndash those positioned to represent rather than to be represented

There had been a confluence between the powerful and the entrepreneur-ial Power was recognized as a prime species of capital One had to learn to read the hidden rules or better still to invent new ones and articulate them to those who occupied the loci of power The new game spelled mediocrity for careerists As salary earners wishfully waited for houses to become more

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 91 11216 94348 AM

Peter Zhang

92

affordable as property developers turned more and more cool agricultural land into commercial and residential lots housing prices had risen by multi-fold over the years making the city feverish in appearance and exclusivity

Like the rest of the country turn-of-the-century Beijing was hottening up under the discourse of WTO Standard Accounting Principles (SAP) the Anglo-American trade regime and the English language became visible forces carrying normative power The idea of WTO was received as a good a matter of course and a wakeup call If elite entrenched member states of the interna-tional community had an interest in producing and maintaining literal mean-ing under the WTO regime then the relatively hot English language would be the fitting medium for indoctrinating literal-mindedness to help WTO work The absence of visible dissent from the discourse of WTO during this time attested to the hotness of Beijing which displayed a downright conforming attitude towards western normativities

Post-olymPIan BeIjIng

Beijing in summer 2009 was wrapped up in the discourse of H1N1 Incoming international passengersrsquo first encounter with Beijing was very much a scene in The Cassandra Crossing the 1976 movie directed by George P Cosmatos The starting section of Foucaultrsquos lsquoPanopticismrsquo is another immediate asso-ciation (1995 195ndash228) Beijing assumed a posture of objectification and distancing Behind the cool detachment was a mentality that belongs with the hot alphabet and the even hotter print technology Each and every passenger automatically became a suspect in the eyes of sartorially secured quarantine officers wielding Beijing-flavoured Mandarin and infrared ther-mometers Affinity was denied right away Beijing was hot literally and McLuhanesquely This hotness was confirmed by other aspects of the city For one thing taxi drivers ndash once upon a time humorously conversational ndash were suspecting and hortatory and felt like an integral element of the Panopticon

Unlike other cities Shanghai included which were still awash with bemusing Chinglish on public signs and restaurant menus Beijing had put on an effort to standardize its English texts and mini-texts prior to the Olympics making one oddly nostalgic of carnivalesque wordings such as lsquoSlip and fall down carefullyrsquo the Chinglish equivalent of lsquoWet floorrsquo At the Beijing Railway Station priority entrance was offered as a charged service ndash a sure sign of the fine segmentation and commodification of time and a hot sign for that matter In terms of depth of commodification this practice outshined the timeshare strategy adopted in Florida and other places What it meant for the less fortunate passenger was more sweat more hassle For air-conditioning was off making the station a hotter place than it needed to be One thing was for free though ads on LCDs In this regard though Beijing was yet to learn from Hilton Chicago which had installed its LCDs inside elevators lsquoItrsquos freersquo as the next person would say to you with a wink and irony Regardless of the coolness of the TV medium this practice simply hottened up the whole space

Under the grip of a rampant development-mad urbanism the bounda-ries of urban Beijing had extended exponentially accompanied by a dwindling communal life The now deeper-pocketed state had injected an enormous amount of capital to the municipality for it to take up the slack in the back

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 92 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

93

alleys (hutong) Hutong a cool abnormality in a hypermodern city had become a regulated unified phenomenon mainly showcased in the west part of the city core ndash a mummified version of itself with the hottening regularization undercutting the intended cool display

The new metro lines while being a hottening factor contributing to the overall velocities of Beijing also served to cool down the turbulence of life at street level The cheap fare effectively kept a considerable portion of the lower social strata out of sight at any given moment The new development was that because of the Olympics metro riders in Beijing had acquired a detect-able lineal-mindedness Or their bodies had internalized the disciplinary marks regulating their use of the metro space To line up for a ride had finally become a habit infectiously so The lines formed by riders coincided with and reinforced the hot spatial logic as embodied by sharp edges and right angles making the metro a hot space Packed as the metro was during rush hours the new metro lines effectively contracted the super-size city for commuters Where property value was concerned the new metro lines had been a hotten-ing factor

It is true there were a few cool western-style structures diversifying the cityscape as a meaning system such as the Birdrsquos Nest (niaochao nickname for the Beijing National Stadium) and the Big Boxer Shorts (da kucha nick-name for the CCTV headquarters building) but it would not take much time for one to realize that these were alibis The unstated rules governing affairs in the city were slow to change although their operationalization had become more sophisticated To host the Olympics was to subject the city and the polity under the gaze of the international community Further hottening up was an expected outcome regardless of what cool symbols were erected

Like the grandiose Three Gorges Dam which gave birth to the Chongqing Municipality the Olympic Village was born of an act of the state It was no surprise that the infrastructure for the Olympics was completed in time for the games It was not really something to celebrate either if one thinks about it One could not help wondering how much say dwellers of the city who had an inalienable right to the city had had in this massive project of displace-ment and expansion As lsquomass mediarsquo the Games changed the environment of Beijing for good (McLuhan 1964 245) There is no going back On balance the Olympic Village was a huge ecological signature left by the Olympics Now that the Games were over people would have to face up to the fact that the Olympics were nothing like a country fair ndash the structures were there to stay having limited use value and yet trapped within the logic and life cycle of capital nonetheless

concludIng remarKs

The interplay between hot and cool is not unlike that between yang and yin or that between the actual and the virtual As Beijing hottens up it gains in the actual but loses in the virtual The symptoms are for all to see forest-like high-rises inhibitive real estate prices smog traffic jams and so on At street level blockage at one intersection instantly spreads to great lengths and all directions Up in the air lsquoAPEC bluersquo is artificial and therefore ephemeral Beijing has come to the point where it needs to work on its virtu-ality potentiality and emptiness In the business arena made men are turn-ing to Chan meditation to nurture their emptiness Public officials are yet to

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 93 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

94

relearn the wisdom of nonduality between virtue and wuwei provided that they are virtue-minded Where technology is concerned the smartphone as a vampiric medium does seem to have produced some cooling effect On the flip side though mobile computing is also quickly turning Beijing into a control society Cyberspace itself is hottening up With almost everything being managed by computer networks the populationrsquos geographic mobility has been put under automatic surveillance

As the above analysis indicates hot and cool are not purely descriptive terms They are interpretive resources and heuristics for practising cultural critique even though critique is often underappreciated as a way of serv-ing the city and the polity Beijing defies simplistic labelling as acoustic or visual right-hemisphere or left-hemisphere cool or hot It has been impli-cated in a global process of hybridization The lsquogroundrsquo is becoming increas-ingly complex calling for closer analyses after the fashion of an archaeology of the present Overall however Beijing is still too much of a capital city It is yet to become a vibrant society with a properly minor voice Better still an unabashed cacophony of minor voices In this sense Beijing has been hot all along its cool spots cool moments and cool symbols notwithstanding What is in order is a cool Beijing a society to come

references

Agamben Giorgio (1995) Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Bakhtin Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays Austin University of Texas Press

Carey James W (1989) Communication as Culture Essays on Media and Society Boston Unwin Hyman

De Certeau Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley University of California Press

Deleuze Gilles (1995) Negotiations 1972ndash1990 New York Columbia University Press

Foucault Michel (1986) lsquoOf other spacesrsquo Diacritics 161 pp 22ndash27mdashmdash (1995) Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison New York Vintage

BooksGenette Gerard (1997) Paratexts Thresholds of Interpretation New York

Cambridge University Press Goody Jack (1988) The Domestication of the Savage Mind New York

Cambridge University Press Grosswiler Paul (2004) lsquoDispelling the alphabet effectrsquo Canadian Journal of

Communication 292 pp 145ndash58 Guattari Feacutelix (1985) lsquoResponse to questionnaire on the cityrsquo Zone 12

p 460 Lefebvre Henri (2004) Rhythmanalysis Space Time and Everyday Life New

York Continuum Leacutevi-Strauss Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning New York Schocken Books McLuhan Marshall (1964) Understanding Media The Extensions of Man New

York McGraw-Hill Book Company mdashmdash (1989) The Global Village Transformations in World Life and Media in the

21st Century New York Oxford University Press McLuhan Marshall and Carson David (2003) The Book of Probes Corte

Madera CA Ginko Press

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 94 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

91

made in an oral-aural setting with the written or printed word serving the purpose of lsquocommunicationrsquo only communication being a means of control (Carey 1989) Hence the indispensability of the secretary function (wenshu) in organizations large and small If visual Beijing displays state power then aural Beijing holds the secret as to how that power is exercised by the elite on the one hand and lived sometimes jujitsued by the populace on the other If the visual is hot then the aural at least as it is experienced in China is ambivalent ndash having both hot and cool propensities An aurally received edict or verdict for example is as hot as can be To use another example there is nothing cool about the aural space created by an emperor or a bad boss As the popular saying goes lsquoTo keep the emperor company is like keeping a tiger companyrsquo

Aural spaces are acoustic spaces A literal example of such a space would be that created by the circular Echo Wall (huiyin bi) at the Temple of Heaven But the traditional square-shaped courtyard would also proffer an aural space despite the apparent visual regularity Among other things fengshui is there to make sure that such courtyards are never lived as Euclidean spaces Structural symmetry always gives way to psychological asymmetry Closed in on itself such a courtyard defies visual penetration from without Aural spaces are regu-lated by an economy of voices and beget their own kinds of silence Fengshui a premodern legacy has resurfaced as a covert principle regulating the produc-tion and consumption of spaces in Beijing As per its logic for example the ninth floor in a high-rise office building typically has the alpha male as its occupant Visual or aural no quarter in Beijing is lived as a Euclidean space

With the growing penetration of the Internet in Beijing comes a new acous-tic space ndash the neo-acoustic with decentralization being its seeming promise But the reality of this new acoustic space is more complicated than what logi-cal deduction tells us Suffice it to say that the lsquoinformationizationrsquo of Beijing (a term beloved by bureaucrats and business leaders alike) is a potentially cool becoming that nevertheless falls short of being truly cool Internet policing to maintain central control is a hottening factor Digital Beijing is a multiplicity a mixture of hot and cool spaces and practices deserving closer analysis

1999 and after Keeping up with the times

Beijingrsquos margins had been withdrawing often in spurts The typical enclosed courtyards owned by three-generation families had given way to standard high-rise apartment buildings Yards that used to be available for play were turning into parking spaces Development had become an ideology dubbed as lsquothe hard truthrsquo What was once privately occupied or commonly shared ended up becoming corporate properties Having been viewed as dirt all along non-native bread earners were finding it increasingly costly to get a foothold in Beijing The temporary residence permit a practice enforced around 1999 was an insult for which they had to pay For a time the derogatory discriminatory label lsquoblind flow (mangliu)rsquo was used to designate nomads scraping along in the cityrsquos interstices The city seemed to be set up for the established and the newly rich ndash those positioned to represent rather than to be represented

There had been a confluence between the powerful and the entrepreneur-ial Power was recognized as a prime species of capital One had to learn to read the hidden rules or better still to invent new ones and articulate them to those who occupied the loci of power The new game spelled mediocrity for careerists As salary earners wishfully waited for houses to become more

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 91 11216 94348 AM

Peter Zhang

92

affordable as property developers turned more and more cool agricultural land into commercial and residential lots housing prices had risen by multi-fold over the years making the city feverish in appearance and exclusivity

Like the rest of the country turn-of-the-century Beijing was hottening up under the discourse of WTO Standard Accounting Principles (SAP) the Anglo-American trade regime and the English language became visible forces carrying normative power The idea of WTO was received as a good a matter of course and a wakeup call If elite entrenched member states of the interna-tional community had an interest in producing and maintaining literal mean-ing under the WTO regime then the relatively hot English language would be the fitting medium for indoctrinating literal-mindedness to help WTO work The absence of visible dissent from the discourse of WTO during this time attested to the hotness of Beijing which displayed a downright conforming attitude towards western normativities

Post-olymPIan BeIjIng

Beijing in summer 2009 was wrapped up in the discourse of H1N1 Incoming international passengersrsquo first encounter with Beijing was very much a scene in The Cassandra Crossing the 1976 movie directed by George P Cosmatos The starting section of Foucaultrsquos lsquoPanopticismrsquo is another immediate asso-ciation (1995 195ndash228) Beijing assumed a posture of objectification and distancing Behind the cool detachment was a mentality that belongs with the hot alphabet and the even hotter print technology Each and every passenger automatically became a suspect in the eyes of sartorially secured quarantine officers wielding Beijing-flavoured Mandarin and infrared ther-mometers Affinity was denied right away Beijing was hot literally and McLuhanesquely This hotness was confirmed by other aspects of the city For one thing taxi drivers ndash once upon a time humorously conversational ndash were suspecting and hortatory and felt like an integral element of the Panopticon

Unlike other cities Shanghai included which were still awash with bemusing Chinglish on public signs and restaurant menus Beijing had put on an effort to standardize its English texts and mini-texts prior to the Olympics making one oddly nostalgic of carnivalesque wordings such as lsquoSlip and fall down carefullyrsquo the Chinglish equivalent of lsquoWet floorrsquo At the Beijing Railway Station priority entrance was offered as a charged service ndash a sure sign of the fine segmentation and commodification of time and a hot sign for that matter In terms of depth of commodification this practice outshined the timeshare strategy adopted in Florida and other places What it meant for the less fortunate passenger was more sweat more hassle For air-conditioning was off making the station a hotter place than it needed to be One thing was for free though ads on LCDs In this regard though Beijing was yet to learn from Hilton Chicago which had installed its LCDs inside elevators lsquoItrsquos freersquo as the next person would say to you with a wink and irony Regardless of the coolness of the TV medium this practice simply hottened up the whole space

Under the grip of a rampant development-mad urbanism the bounda-ries of urban Beijing had extended exponentially accompanied by a dwindling communal life The now deeper-pocketed state had injected an enormous amount of capital to the municipality for it to take up the slack in the back

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 92 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

93

alleys (hutong) Hutong a cool abnormality in a hypermodern city had become a regulated unified phenomenon mainly showcased in the west part of the city core ndash a mummified version of itself with the hottening regularization undercutting the intended cool display

The new metro lines while being a hottening factor contributing to the overall velocities of Beijing also served to cool down the turbulence of life at street level The cheap fare effectively kept a considerable portion of the lower social strata out of sight at any given moment The new development was that because of the Olympics metro riders in Beijing had acquired a detect-able lineal-mindedness Or their bodies had internalized the disciplinary marks regulating their use of the metro space To line up for a ride had finally become a habit infectiously so The lines formed by riders coincided with and reinforced the hot spatial logic as embodied by sharp edges and right angles making the metro a hot space Packed as the metro was during rush hours the new metro lines effectively contracted the super-size city for commuters Where property value was concerned the new metro lines had been a hotten-ing factor

It is true there were a few cool western-style structures diversifying the cityscape as a meaning system such as the Birdrsquos Nest (niaochao nickname for the Beijing National Stadium) and the Big Boxer Shorts (da kucha nick-name for the CCTV headquarters building) but it would not take much time for one to realize that these were alibis The unstated rules governing affairs in the city were slow to change although their operationalization had become more sophisticated To host the Olympics was to subject the city and the polity under the gaze of the international community Further hottening up was an expected outcome regardless of what cool symbols were erected

Like the grandiose Three Gorges Dam which gave birth to the Chongqing Municipality the Olympic Village was born of an act of the state It was no surprise that the infrastructure for the Olympics was completed in time for the games It was not really something to celebrate either if one thinks about it One could not help wondering how much say dwellers of the city who had an inalienable right to the city had had in this massive project of displace-ment and expansion As lsquomass mediarsquo the Games changed the environment of Beijing for good (McLuhan 1964 245) There is no going back On balance the Olympic Village was a huge ecological signature left by the Olympics Now that the Games were over people would have to face up to the fact that the Olympics were nothing like a country fair ndash the structures were there to stay having limited use value and yet trapped within the logic and life cycle of capital nonetheless

concludIng remarKs

The interplay between hot and cool is not unlike that between yang and yin or that between the actual and the virtual As Beijing hottens up it gains in the actual but loses in the virtual The symptoms are for all to see forest-like high-rises inhibitive real estate prices smog traffic jams and so on At street level blockage at one intersection instantly spreads to great lengths and all directions Up in the air lsquoAPEC bluersquo is artificial and therefore ephemeral Beijing has come to the point where it needs to work on its virtu-ality potentiality and emptiness In the business arena made men are turn-ing to Chan meditation to nurture their emptiness Public officials are yet to

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 93 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

94

relearn the wisdom of nonduality between virtue and wuwei provided that they are virtue-minded Where technology is concerned the smartphone as a vampiric medium does seem to have produced some cooling effect On the flip side though mobile computing is also quickly turning Beijing into a control society Cyberspace itself is hottening up With almost everything being managed by computer networks the populationrsquos geographic mobility has been put under automatic surveillance

As the above analysis indicates hot and cool are not purely descriptive terms They are interpretive resources and heuristics for practising cultural critique even though critique is often underappreciated as a way of serv-ing the city and the polity Beijing defies simplistic labelling as acoustic or visual right-hemisphere or left-hemisphere cool or hot It has been impli-cated in a global process of hybridization The lsquogroundrsquo is becoming increas-ingly complex calling for closer analyses after the fashion of an archaeology of the present Overall however Beijing is still too much of a capital city It is yet to become a vibrant society with a properly minor voice Better still an unabashed cacophony of minor voices In this sense Beijing has been hot all along its cool spots cool moments and cool symbols notwithstanding What is in order is a cool Beijing a society to come

references

Agamben Giorgio (1995) Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Bakhtin Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays Austin University of Texas Press

Carey James W (1989) Communication as Culture Essays on Media and Society Boston Unwin Hyman

De Certeau Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley University of California Press

Deleuze Gilles (1995) Negotiations 1972ndash1990 New York Columbia University Press

Foucault Michel (1986) lsquoOf other spacesrsquo Diacritics 161 pp 22ndash27mdashmdash (1995) Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison New York Vintage

BooksGenette Gerard (1997) Paratexts Thresholds of Interpretation New York

Cambridge University Press Goody Jack (1988) The Domestication of the Savage Mind New York

Cambridge University Press Grosswiler Paul (2004) lsquoDispelling the alphabet effectrsquo Canadian Journal of

Communication 292 pp 145ndash58 Guattari Feacutelix (1985) lsquoResponse to questionnaire on the cityrsquo Zone 12

p 460 Lefebvre Henri (2004) Rhythmanalysis Space Time and Everyday Life New

York Continuum Leacutevi-Strauss Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning New York Schocken Books McLuhan Marshall (1964) Understanding Media The Extensions of Man New

York McGraw-Hill Book Company mdashmdash (1989) The Global Village Transformations in World Life and Media in the

21st Century New York Oxford University Press McLuhan Marshall and Carson David (2003) The Book of Probes Corte

Madera CA Ginko Press

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 94 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

92

affordable as property developers turned more and more cool agricultural land into commercial and residential lots housing prices had risen by multi-fold over the years making the city feverish in appearance and exclusivity

Like the rest of the country turn-of-the-century Beijing was hottening up under the discourse of WTO Standard Accounting Principles (SAP) the Anglo-American trade regime and the English language became visible forces carrying normative power The idea of WTO was received as a good a matter of course and a wakeup call If elite entrenched member states of the interna-tional community had an interest in producing and maintaining literal mean-ing under the WTO regime then the relatively hot English language would be the fitting medium for indoctrinating literal-mindedness to help WTO work The absence of visible dissent from the discourse of WTO during this time attested to the hotness of Beijing which displayed a downright conforming attitude towards western normativities

Post-olymPIan BeIjIng

Beijing in summer 2009 was wrapped up in the discourse of H1N1 Incoming international passengersrsquo first encounter with Beijing was very much a scene in The Cassandra Crossing the 1976 movie directed by George P Cosmatos The starting section of Foucaultrsquos lsquoPanopticismrsquo is another immediate asso-ciation (1995 195ndash228) Beijing assumed a posture of objectification and distancing Behind the cool detachment was a mentality that belongs with the hot alphabet and the even hotter print technology Each and every passenger automatically became a suspect in the eyes of sartorially secured quarantine officers wielding Beijing-flavoured Mandarin and infrared ther-mometers Affinity was denied right away Beijing was hot literally and McLuhanesquely This hotness was confirmed by other aspects of the city For one thing taxi drivers ndash once upon a time humorously conversational ndash were suspecting and hortatory and felt like an integral element of the Panopticon

Unlike other cities Shanghai included which were still awash with bemusing Chinglish on public signs and restaurant menus Beijing had put on an effort to standardize its English texts and mini-texts prior to the Olympics making one oddly nostalgic of carnivalesque wordings such as lsquoSlip and fall down carefullyrsquo the Chinglish equivalent of lsquoWet floorrsquo At the Beijing Railway Station priority entrance was offered as a charged service ndash a sure sign of the fine segmentation and commodification of time and a hot sign for that matter In terms of depth of commodification this practice outshined the timeshare strategy adopted in Florida and other places What it meant for the less fortunate passenger was more sweat more hassle For air-conditioning was off making the station a hotter place than it needed to be One thing was for free though ads on LCDs In this regard though Beijing was yet to learn from Hilton Chicago which had installed its LCDs inside elevators lsquoItrsquos freersquo as the next person would say to you with a wink and irony Regardless of the coolness of the TV medium this practice simply hottened up the whole space

Under the grip of a rampant development-mad urbanism the bounda-ries of urban Beijing had extended exponentially accompanied by a dwindling communal life The now deeper-pocketed state had injected an enormous amount of capital to the municipality for it to take up the slack in the back

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 92 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

93

alleys (hutong) Hutong a cool abnormality in a hypermodern city had become a regulated unified phenomenon mainly showcased in the west part of the city core ndash a mummified version of itself with the hottening regularization undercutting the intended cool display

The new metro lines while being a hottening factor contributing to the overall velocities of Beijing also served to cool down the turbulence of life at street level The cheap fare effectively kept a considerable portion of the lower social strata out of sight at any given moment The new development was that because of the Olympics metro riders in Beijing had acquired a detect-able lineal-mindedness Or their bodies had internalized the disciplinary marks regulating their use of the metro space To line up for a ride had finally become a habit infectiously so The lines formed by riders coincided with and reinforced the hot spatial logic as embodied by sharp edges and right angles making the metro a hot space Packed as the metro was during rush hours the new metro lines effectively contracted the super-size city for commuters Where property value was concerned the new metro lines had been a hotten-ing factor

It is true there were a few cool western-style structures diversifying the cityscape as a meaning system such as the Birdrsquos Nest (niaochao nickname for the Beijing National Stadium) and the Big Boxer Shorts (da kucha nick-name for the CCTV headquarters building) but it would not take much time for one to realize that these were alibis The unstated rules governing affairs in the city were slow to change although their operationalization had become more sophisticated To host the Olympics was to subject the city and the polity under the gaze of the international community Further hottening up was an expected outcome regardless of what cool symbols were erected

Like the grandiose Three Gorges Dam which gave birth to the Chongqing Municipality the Olympic Village was born of an act of the state It was no surprise that the infrastructure for the Olympics was completed in time for the games It was not really something to celebrate either if one thinks about it One could not help wondering how much say dwellers of the city who had an inalienable right to the city had had in this massive project of displace-ment and expansion As lsquomass mediarsquo the Games changed the environment of Beijing for good (McLuhan 1964 245) There is no going back On balance the Olympic Village was a huge ecological signature left by the Olympics Now that the Games were over people would have to face up to the fact that the Olympics were nothing like a country fair ndash the structures were there to stay having limited use value and yet trapped within the logic and life cycle of capital nonetheless

concludIng remarKs

The interplay between hot and cool is not unlike that between yang and yin or that between the actual and the virtual As Beijing hottens up it gains in the actual but loses in the virtual The symptoms are for all to see forest-like high-rises inhibitive real estate prices smog traffic jams and so on At street level blockage at one intersection instantly spreads to great lengths and all directions Up in the air lsquoAPEC bluersquo is artificial and therefore ephemeral Beijing has come to the point where it needs to work on its virtu-ality potentiality and emptiness In the business arena made men are turn-ing to Chan meditation to nurture their emptiness Public officials are yet to

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 93 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

94

relearn the wisdom of nonduality between virtue and wuwei provided that they are virtue-minded Where technology is concerned the smartphone as a vampiric medium does seem to have produced some cooling effect On the flip side though mobile computing is also quickly turning Beijing into a control society Cyberspace itself is hottening up With almost everything being managed by computer networks the populationrsquos geographic mobility has been put under automatic surveillance

As the above analysis indicates hot and cool are not purely descriptive terms They are interpretive resources and heuristics for practising cultural critique even though critique is often underappreciated as a way of serv-ing the city and the polity Beijing defies simplistic labelling as acoustic or visual right-hemisphere or left-hemisphere cool or hot It has been impli-cated in a global process of hybridization The lsquogroundrsquo is becoming increas-ingly complex calling for closer analyses after the fashion of an archaeology of the present Overall however Beijing is still too much of a capital city It is yet to become a vibrant society with a properly minor voice Better still an unabashed cacophony of minor voices In this sense Beijing has been hot all along its cool spots cool moments and cool symbols notwithstanding What is in order is a cool Beijing a society to come

references

Agamben Giorgio (1995) Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Bakhtin Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays Austin University of Texas Press

Carey James W (1989) Communication as Culture Essays on Media and Society Boston Unwin Hyman

De Certeau Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley University of California Press

Deleuze Gilles (1995) Negotiations 1972ndash1990 New York Columbia University Press

Foucault Michel (1986) lsquoOf other spacesrsquo Diacritics 161 pp 22ndash27mdashmdash (1995) Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison New York Vintage

BooksGenette Gerard (1997) Paratexts Thresholds of Interpretation New York

Cambridge University Press Goody Jack (1988) The Domestication of the Savage Mind New York

Cambridge University Press Grosswiler Paul (2004) lsquoDispelling the alphabet effectrsquo Canadian Journal of

Communication 292 pp 145ndash58 Guattari Feacutelix (1985) lsquoResponse to questionnaire on the cityrsquo Zone 12

p 460 Lefebvre Henri (2004) Rhythmanalysis Space Time and Everyday Life New

York Continuum Leacutevi-Strauss Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning New York Schocken Books McLuhan Marshall (1964) Understanding Media The Extensions of Man New

York McGraw-Hill Book Company mdashmdash (1989) The Global Village Transformations in World Life and Media in the

21st Century New York Oxford University Press McLuhan Marshall and Carson David (2003) The Book of Probes Corte

Madera CA Ginko Press

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 94 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

93

alleys (hutong) Hutong a cool abnormality in a hypermodern city had become a regulated unified phenomenon mainly showcased in the west part of the city core ndash a mummified version of itself with the hottening regularization undercutting the intended cool display

The new metro lines while being a hottening factor contributing to the overall velocities of Beijing also served to cool down the turbulence of life at street level The cheap fare effectively kept a considerable portion of the lower social strata out of sight at any given moment The new development was that because of the Olympics metro riders in Beijing had acquired a detect-able lineal-mindedness Or their bodies had internalized the disciplinary marks regulating their use of the metro space To line up for a ride had finally become a habit infectiously so The lines formed by riders coincided with and reinforced the hot spatial logic as embodied by sharp edges and right angles making the metro a hot space Packed as the metro was during rush hours the new metro lines effectively contracted the super-size city for commuters Where property value was concerned the new metro lines had been a hotten-ing factor

It is true there were a few cool western-style structures diversifying the cityscape as a meaning system such as the Birdrsquos Nest (niaochao nickname for the Beijing National Stadium) and the Big Boxer Shorts (da kucha nick-name for the CCTV headquarters building) but it would not take much time for one to realize that these were alibis The unstated rules governing affairs in the city were slow to change although their operationalization had become more sophisticated To host the Olympics was to subject the city and the polity under the gaze of the international community Further hottening up was an expected outcome regardless of what cool symbols were erected

Like the grandiose Three Gorges Dam which gave birth to the Chongqing Municipality the Olympic Village was born of an act of the state It was no surprise that the infrastructure for the Olympics was completed in time for the games It was not really something to celebrate either if one thinks about it One could not help wondering how much say dwellers of the city who had an inalienable right to the city had had in this massive project of displace-ment and expansion As lsquomass mediarsquo the Games changed the environment of Beijing for good (McLuhan 1964 245) There is no going back On balance the Olympic Village was a huge ecological signature left by the Olympics Now that the Games were over people would have to face up to the fact that the Olympics were nothing like a country fair ndash the structures were there to stay having limited use value and yet trapped within the logic and life cycle of capital nonetheless

concludIng remarKs

The interplay between hot and cool is not unlike that between yang and yin or that between the actual and the virtual As Beijing hottens up it gains in the actual but loses in the virtual The symptoms are for all to see forest-like high-rises inhibitive real estate prices smog traffic jams and so on At street level blockage at one intersection instantly spreads to great lengths and all directions Up in the air lsquoAPEC bluersquo is artificial and therefore ephemeral Beijing has come to the point where it needs to work on its virtu-ality potentiality and emptiness In the business arena made men are turn-ing to Chan meditation to nurture their emptiness Public officials are yet to

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 93 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

94

relearn the wisdom of nonduality between virtue and wuwei provided that they are virtue-minded Where technology is concerned the smartphone as a vampiric medium does seem to have produced some cooling effect On the flip side though mobile computing is also quickly turning Beijing into a control society Cyberspace itself is hottening up With almost everything being managed by computer networks the populationrsquos geographic mobility has been put under automatic surveillance

As the above analysis indicates hot and cool are not purely descriptive terms They are interpretive resources and heuristics for practising cultural critique even though critique is often underappreciated as a way of serv-ing the city and the polity Beijing defies simplistic labelling as acoustic or visual right-hemisphere or left-hemisphere cool or hot It has been impli-cated in a global process of hybridization The lsquogroundrsquo is becoming increas-ingly complex calling for closer analyses after the fashion of an archaeology of the present Overall however Beijing is still too much of a capital city It is yet to become a vibrant society with a properly minor voice Better still an unabashed cacophony of minor voices In this sense Beijing has been hot all along its cool spots cool moments and cool symbols notwithstanding What is in order is a cool Beijing a society to come

references

Agamben Giorgio (1995) Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Bakhtin Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays Austin University of Texas Press

Carey James W (1989) Communication as Culture Essays on Media and Society Boston Unwin Hyman

De Certeau Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley University of California Press

Deleuze Gilles (1995) Negotiations 1972ndash1990 New York Columbia University Press

Foucault Michel (1986) lsquoOf other spacesrsquo Diacritics 161 pp 22ndash27mdashmdash (1995) Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison New York Vintage

BooksGenette Gerard (1997) Paratexts Thresholds of Interpretation New York

Cambridge University Press Goody Jack (1988) The Domestication of the Savage Mind New York

Cambridge University Press Grosswiler Paul (2004) lsquoDispelling the alphabet effectrsquo Canadian Journal of

Communication 292 pp 145ndash58 Guattari Feacutelix (1985) lsquoResponse to questionnaire on the cityrsquo Zone 12

p 460 Lefebvre Henri (2004) Rhythmanalysis Space Time and Everyday Life New

York Continuum Leacutevi-Strauss Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning New York Schocken Books McLuhan Marshall (1964) Understanding Media The Extensions of Man New

York McGraw-Hill Book Company mdashmdash (1989) The Global Village Transformations in World Life and Media in the

21st Century New York Oxford University Press McLuhan Marshall and Carson David (2003) The Book of Probes Corte

Madera CA Ginko Press

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 94 122415 15659 PM

Peter Zhang

94

relearn the wisdom of nonduality between virtue and wuwei provided that they are virtue-minded Where technology is concerned the smartphone as a vampiric medium does seem to have produced some cooling effect On the flip side though mobile computing is also quickly turning Beijing into a control society Cyberspace itself is hottening up With almost everything being managed by computer networks the populationrsquos geographic mobility has been put under automatic surveillance

As the above analysis indicates hot and cool are not purely descriptive terms They are interpretive resources and heuristics for practising cultural critique even though critique is often underappreciated as a way of serv-ing the city and the polity Beijing defies simplistic labelling as acoustic or visual right-hemisphere or left-hemisphere cool or hot It has been impli-cated in a global process of hybridization The lsquogroundrsquo is becoming increas-ingly complex calling for closer analyses after the fashion of an archaeology of the present Overall however Beijing is still too much of a capital city It is yet to become a vibrant society with a properly minor voice Better still an unabashed cacophony of minor voices In this sense Beijing has been hot all along its cool spots cool moments and cool symbols notwithstanding What is in order is a cool Beijing a society to come

references

Agamben Giorgio (1995) Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life Stanford CA Stanford University Press

Bakhtin Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays Austin University of Texas Press

Carey James W (1989) Communication as Culture Essays on Media and Society Boston Unwin Hyman

De Certeau Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley University of California Press

Deleuze Gilles (1995) Negotiations 1972ndash1990 New York Columbia University Press

Foucault Michel (1986) lsquoOf other spacesrsquo Diacritics 161 pp 22ndash27mdashmdash (1995) Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison New York Vintage

BooksGenette Gerard (1997) Paratexts Thresholds of Interpretation New York

Cambridge University Press Goody Jack (1988) The Domestication of the Savage Mind New York

Cambridge University Press Grosswiler Paul (2004) lsquoDispelling the alphabet effectrsquo Canadian Journal of

Communication 292 pp 145ndash58 Guattari Feacutelix (1985) lsquoResponse to questionnaire on the cityrsquo Zone 12

p 460 Lefebvre Henri (2004) Rhythmanalysis Space Time and Everyday Life New

York Continuum Leacutevi-Strauss Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning New York Schocken Books McLuhan Marshall (1964) Understanding Media The Extensions of Man New

York McGraw-Hill Book Company mdashmdash (1989) The Global Village Transformations in World Life and Media in the

21st Century New York Oxford University Press McLuhan Marshall and Carson David (2003) The Book of Probes Corte

Madera CA Ginko Press

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 94 122415 15659 PM

Beijing hot Beijing cool

95

SuggeSted citation

Zhang P (2015) lsquoBeijing hot Beijing coolrsquo Explorations in Media Ecology 14 1+2 pp 87ndash95 doi 101386eme141-287_1

contributor detailS

Peter Zhang is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Grand Valley State University His research interests include McLuhan Deleuze Virilio Flusser I Ching Zen and interality studies (间性研究) Currently he is spear-heading a second collective project on interality

Contact LSH 290 1 Campus Dr Allendale MI 49401 USA E-mail zhangpgvsuedu

Peter Zhang has asserted his right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 95 12116 15649 PM

Intellect is an independent academic publisher of books and journals to view our catalogue or order our titles visit wwwintellectbookscom or E-mail journalsintellectbookscom Intellect The Mill Parnall Road Fishponds Bristol UK BS16 3JG

Metaverse CreativityISSN 2040-3550 | Online ISSN 2040-3569

2 issue per volume | Volume 3 2013

Aims and ScopeMetaverse Creativity investigates the creative content of user defined online virtual worlds While an inquiry into the creative output generated in these environments is the primary focus research of the underlying socio-economic psychological legal and technological framework as it relates to creative activity is also a subject of discourse

Call for PapersMetaverse Creativity seeks contributions from creative practitioners and researchers of user-defined online virtual worlds who wish to increase the under-standing and development of creativity in the metaverse Topics include (but are not limited to) the following

The creative outputThe AvatarEducationThe social and technological infrastructure of the metaverse

EditorsElif AyiterSabanci Universityayitergmailcom

Yacov SharirUniversity of Texas at Austinsharirmailutexasedu

intellectwwwintellectbookscom

publishersof original

thinking

EME_141amp2_Zhang_87-95indd 96 122415 15700 PM