_poking thru the ashes: a review of some what i wrote/read this year_ (+ contemplating my lack of productivity)
OPENING NOTE (productivity) ▣ I am trying to decide whether or not this was a productive year. ▣ I am talking strictly about my professional life. There is an easy way to measure this by adding up words written and translated against income. This year, compared to the seven previous years in which I earned a living as a freelance writer and translator, I worked harder and made considerably less money. ▣ Part of the problem is that I will consistently churn out writing, whether or not there is an outlet for it. The factory keeps running, even if nobody is purchasing the widgets. I remain a poor salesman. Even worse, I seem to be good at finding new ways to write for no compensation. Here is an example: I wrote 151,000 words on this platform over the past twelve months (this estimate might be off by a few thousand either way, and it includes translated texts, as well); when I open this website, I am informed that my gross annualized revenue sits at $270. ▣ I am committed to this kind of irrational behavior, since, in the end, it pleases me, but, looking at my diminished output for the year, I could have run this enterprise with a bit more responsibility. I need to write more. I am not satisfied. ▣
WRITING IN REVIEW ▣ This is a limited survey. It represents some of the writing that I think might be interesting to comment on. It does not include any translation work, which occupied more of my time and generated more income. The order is roughly chronological:
▧ “The world according to Lu Xinghua, China’s renegade philosopher” ▣ I think of this piece about Lu Xinghua 陆兴华, the curator and philosopher and internet poster, thinker on modern art and recently urban planning, as being the twin of a previous one, also for the China Project, which was an obituary for an itinerant Inner Mongolian funeral singer (“Er Housheng, who had his eyes gouged out, dies at 58”). Lu Xinghua and Er Housheng 二后生 are, superficially, very different men, but they are both, despite their art relying on a formally-constrained interpretation of a previous generation’s work, renegades of a sort. The goal with both pieces could be summed up as in presenting two aesthetic dissidents to complicate the Western imagination of China. ▣ And so, at least here, I am mostly interested in Lu Xinghua as a character. I have my own thoughts, but I am hesitant to comment on him as a philosopher. I believe his books on modern art, interpreting Jacques Rancière, are good, but they are not particularly interesting to me. I like his internet posts (an example can be found here: "A Red Guard prayer and an elegy for Osama bin Laden by a disciple of Rancière”). It is important to understand his value. His recent work, like The Anthropocene and Platform Cities 人类世与平台城市, which I translated pieces of in previous entries (“Another attempt at Lu Xinghua”), does not so much as engage with thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Henri Lefebvre, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel de Certeau, or Benjamin Bratton, Bernard Stiegler, and Yuk Hui, as collect their work and set pieces of it in provocative contrast with each other. He is a curator. This is impressive work, especially as he is translating texts from English, French, and German—but it is good to be honest about it, I think. ▣ The final assessment is: A bit flimsy, too invested in Lu Xinghua boosterism, but overall satisfactory. ✸✸
▧ "Yamagami Tetsuya’s Revenge" ▣ I try not to write about Japan or Japanese politics. This is partly out of a sense of gratitude to the place I have lived almost ten years now, partly because I worry that I lack the expertise, and partly because nobody wants to read about it. On that last count, Japan is, I would argue, since it is a Western ally, and nobody needs to be informed about local politics here, except on a superficial level, that Japan is even more unknown than China. Even if it is for the wrong reasons, people know something about China, and China watcher journalism does inform on a basic level. Writing about Japan requires an incredible amount of explanation. ▣ I took a trip to the assassination site before I wrote this. I went all over Nara, looking for traces of Yamagami Tetsuya. I had an idea in my head that seemed to run against popular English-language coverage. And so, I was trying to do a few things here… The first was to argue that the assassination of Abe Shinzo should not be seen as a political act in the sense that killings of the previous century were political. It was an act of violence that had more in common with any from the long list of revenge-against-society attacks by lonely, disenfranchised single men—the 2008 Akihabara attack, video store arson in Osaka, Sagamihara mass killing, Kawasaki in 2019, numerous subway acid attacks, etc. The target was impressive but not particularly important to the killer, who had a long list of possibilities. And the second was to argue that, counter an idea that went viral on social media, it was, if we can assign some grander motive, not particularly successful, resulting in cosmetic legal changes and personnel shifts in the ruling party. And the third was to suggest that cult politics, rather than anti-cult action, might be the way to break through the current political stagnation. ▣ The final assessment is: I was heartened to see some of my ideas here get picked up in a mainstream English-language outlet months later (I forget which one), in a piece that, as I did, tried to figure out Yamagami, his home life, etc. I think I was on to something here. ✸✸✸✸
▧ "Madame Mao’s Nietzschean Revolution" ▣ This is a piece of writing that comes from spending most of the second half of the year before watching Cultural Revolution cinema and ballets and operas. I had in my mind a question, which was what are the aesthetic or intellectual sources of the Cultural Revolution? I was sure avant-garde art from the 1930s in China and the Soviet Union was part of it. And Nietzsche was crucial to both of those scenes, broadly speaking. In a way, this was an expansion of arguments made by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal and other writers about Bolshevism and Nietzscheanism, combined with a reckoning with Nietzsche’s influence on Chinese left-wing artists, including, most significantly, Lu Xun. I was also thinking about the fact that the Gang of Four were tarred precisely as Nietzschean fascists. But I won’t lay the argument out again. And whether it’s solid or not, it allows me to break new ground in looking at the Cultural Revolution, as well as, more importantly, make certain arguments applicable to culture at present, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu on Nietzsche and the terrifying prospect of the “sociologically mutilated being” as a model of human excellence. ▣ The final assessment is: Good. God bless the editors at Palladium for entertaining ideas like this. I received feedback on this from many Chinese readers, who praised its inventiveness, while concluding that I was completely wrong; I thought the opposite was true. ✸✸✸✸
▧ "China’s war on drugs: From incarceration to rehabilitation" ▣ In a way, like the Yamagami piece, this is an attempt to refute viral opinion. The secret of China winning its war on drugs is not killing a lot of people but compassion and legal tolerance (they execute plenty of people, let me admit, but the system does not work as some might imagine, with scores of dealers dumped on the conveyor belt to capital punishment). ▣ The final assessment is: Satisfactory. But a piece like this, which tosses out the premise of debate—American tolerance versus Chinese intolerance—receives few responses. This also needed more journalist legwork and quotes, I believe. ✸✸✸
▧ "The next world war will be economic — even if the weapons don’t work" ▣ This was from an idea that one of the China Project editors suggested, which was gaming out full-on sanctions against China. My conclusion remains that it’s all a sham. Sanctions don’t work. There’s plenty of literature on this subject, making that argument. I was also inspired by Tanner Greer’s essay, "Of Sanctions and Strategic Bombers." ▣ The first draft of this was basically a piece of fiction, depicting scenes of China under complete Western sanctions, interspersed with sections that made it into the published version. I loved it, but I should have known that it was inappropriate. ▣ The final assessment is: I was impressed with the argument, but it’s calling for something that nobody is planning for, which is neither a preservation of the status quo, a return to an earlier state of relations, nor an intensification. It is trying to start a conversation that nobody is interested in having. ✸✸✸
▧ "A Brief History of Chinese Cybernetics" ▣ This will be a chapter in Cybernetics for the 21st Century, Vol. 1: Epistemological Reconstruction, edited by Yuk Hui. It might not be out by the end of the year, but I will include it, as it is done and proofread and edited and ready, and it occupied much of this half of the year. It is adapted to some extent from an earlier article for Palladium—“The Genealogy of Chinese Cybernetics”—but goes deeper into the philosophical contribution of Qian Xuesen 钱学森, as well as his interest in extrasensory perception and telepathy. This topic interests me, but I have run out of outlets to talk about it. I think this will be my last attempt. ▣ The final assessment is: Satisfactory. My lack of depth means that I can write a competent survey without being overwhelmed by detail. I was too shy to flaunt any philosophical pretensions, which is what keeps it readable. ✸✸✸ ▣