Another attempt at Lu Xinghua (from The Anthropocene and Platform Cities) / schematic translation - translation as reading guide - (first of series: SMART CITIES or INTELLIGENT CITIES)
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I have been reading Lu Xinghua’s 陆兴华 2021 book,1 The Anthropocene and Platform Cities 人类世与平台城市. It seems worth struggling through. Lu Xinghua, one of China’s most important thinkers, turns from art and design to a wider examination of urban philosophy [chéngshì zhéxué 城市哲学]. He writes in the preface that his goal was to improve the level of discourse on the topic, which means, in my view, taking it out of the hands of the most craven technology evangelists, who tend to monopolize the discourse.
Making my way through the book has been rewarding. I have been inspired to translate some of it, but it has not gone well. By this, I mean that although I’ve enjoyed reading the book via the translation process, it has not produced a legible text.
I would like to try again. If nothing else, I find it rewarding. So, below, I have selected part of a section from the beginning of the book. It is about smart cities. I will get to the other half of the section soon, even if I sense indifference to the project.
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Are they smart cities [zhìhuì chéngshì 智慧城市] or intelligent cities [zhìnéng 智能城市]?2
Speaking at the Making the Future - 2018 Spring conference in Shanghai, Aliyun founder and chief financial officer of Alibaba, Dr. Wang Jian, said:
« « « All of the problems of the city do not develop by themselves, but rather come about by design, because no planner can listen attentively to the voice of every person in the city. » » »
If all the problems of the city come about by design, the implication here is that we do not need designers, but can simply use big data to manage [guǎnlǐ 理城]3 cities. However, the "because" in the next clause is truly baffling: it is "because" the planner cannot listen to "the voice of every person in the city" that all of the problems of the city come about by design. This conclusion is baffling. Who says that a planner must listen to "the voice of every person in the city"? More crucially, is Wang Jian truly interested in urban planning and urban management? Is he prepared to take responsibility? Or does he simply want to sell us Aliyun technology? Does he want us to erupt in cheers and happily agree to adopting it for urban management?
Wang Jian's next lines are even more frightening. He says,
« « « All urban problems can only be solved by human-generated data. » » »
We can't help but respond to this statement by asking: How were urban problems solved in the past? Are you saying that urban problems of the Song dynasty were solved with big data? What about emotional concerns? Pollution? What about the problem of cars destroying public spaces? What is meant by "solved"? "All urban problems"! And they "can only be solved" with data! Does this mean turning everything over to the Aliyun platform? It sounds like a line from an advertising campaign. Wang Jian goes on:
« « « Human data is the city's DNA; data is the only medium [jièzhì 介质] shared by people and the city. » » »
This is not completely wrong, but there's reason to be suspicious, and it seems that the speaker is not quite sure what he is trying to say with the statement. "Human data is the city's DNA"—is this supposed to mean that data about people is the primary structure of the city, or does it mean that data about people is what the city is composed of? And, if "data is the only medium shared by people and the city," then does it mean that data is a medium? Why is it the "only" medium? If data is the only medium shared by people and the city, then can we say that mediation [zhōngjiè 中介] between the city and the people can only be through data?
I am not trying to nitpick. I simply want to figure out what Dr. Wang Jian is attempting to say. I would like to take this as an opportunity to follow his lead and talk about the current data relationship between cities and people. This is an issue that has become quite important.
Today, as the pedestrians [xíngrén 行人]4 choreograph their walks [xíngzǒu 行走] through the city (I am referring to us here, too), everyone’s footsteps and phones leave behind traces of their body and identity, which is captured as data by cloud computing platforms. The cloud platform in turn performs recursive calculations on this data, refining parametric models until it can simulate, forecast, and influence the decisions of an actor. This big data is used to control the behavior and movements of the pedestrian.① In this way, even our selfies are arranged on mobile cloud platforms for AI to offer revision and encouragement, inevitably being pulled into the same frame that ensures to the majority correctness, so that in the end, these selfies have little of ourselves in them. And this is the great virtue of the intelligent city that we keep hearing about? You might think you can use your phone to skate away, but someone is going to capture your movement through your phone and turn it into their fixed capital. Once all of that data is piled up, it can be exploited. Profits can be extracted in perpetuity.
In other words, people or consumers leave a digital trace behind on cloud platforms. They are picked up by the mobile platform and then parameterized and used to control the pedestrian's next behavior and actions.② The patterns of the majority are imposed upon the individual. It is then necessary for us to behave as much as possible like the majority, which is a process of synchronization [gòngshíhuà 共时化], homogenization [yúnzhìhuà 匀质化], and standardization [zhōngrénhuà 中人化]. We become adhered to big data, so that more and more we unconsciously begin to do as others do [cóngzhòng 从众]; we are more and more controlled [bèi cāozòng 被操纵] and dictated to [(bèi) bǎibu (被)摆布]. This is the basic set of tricks [tàolù 套路; or “techniques,” even] upon which big data urban management works, and it is the only possible outcome. It inevitably leads to individual behavior following the dictates of the crowd [cóngzhòng 从众], the loss of sovereignty, and automation. A "smart city" [zhìhuì chéngshì 智慧城市] managed with Alibaba cloud platform technology inevitably becomes an automated city [zìdòng chéngshì 自动城市]. A smart city is nothing more than a city that has been automated.③
The data that Wang Jian is talking about is what Alibaba captures from the digital trail of people moving through the city, which becomes the fixed capital used by cloud platforms to generate a profit. In exchange for this data, Alibaba is willing to provide generous subsidies, which are like bait to get us to take the hook. We urgently hand over our own user information and consumer behavior data. And the data we are talking about originally comes in other forms: the data that each of us manipulates or produces while moving through our own cultural setting [wénhuà huánjìng 文化环境], and there is also the city's data, produced through urban planning, architectural conditions, our imagination of the city as data, the city's own history as data, as well as the works [zuòpǐn 作品]5 we leave behind as we plan our urban experience like film directors, which might even be works of art.④ We must emphasize that every pedestrian is like a dancer, leaving behind their works as they move through urban spaces. Even if it's merely a stroll through the city, your walk will extend the city's data tree [shùjùshù 数据树]. Just as Michel de Certeau says, the person walking on the street is a Sphinx, ascending or descending, adding further mystery [shénmì 神秘]; they shatter the data structure [shùjù jiégòu 数据结构] and injecting new mystery [shénmì 神秘] into the urban space.⑤
But, at present, the history of the city, and even its physical reality, is being converted into data. The city is already inside of our phones. The entire city has disappeared into an active data swarm, while at the same time being constantly edited [gǎixiě 改写] by the phones in the hands of pedestrians. Everyone is engaged in rewriting [chóngxiě 重写] and editing [gǎixiě 改写] the city. Alibaba, however, comes in like a subletting landlord to coldly tell us that they can use big data to govern [guǎnzhì 管治; "administer" or, again, "manage," perhaps] the city. They tell us: This must be left to us, since we have the best big data technology, have collected the most data so far, and will maintain a stranglehold on data in the future. And Wang Jian has said that big data is the only way to plan and govern the city. There is no other solution. We must let Aliyun do what they want. It appears that we have already become so many stacks of flesh on Alibaba's cutting board. He tells: The city can be planned and managed [guǎnlǐ 管理] with the Alibaba database, and you won't have to do anything. All we need to do is wait for the omnipotent Aliyun platform. If this is what Alibaba has imagined for the future of our cities, what can we say about it?
At the same time, from the perspectives of design and anti-design, the platform remains a heterotopia, and, ultimately, a whole that has been stitched together with great difficulty. The Anthropocene urban society that relies on this will also therefore be a utopia capable of being repeatedly re-designed and revised, and even upgraded in real time, but the latter will remain nothing more than a platform. All previous utopias will become tools [dàojù 道具] to be repeatedly improved [diāozhuó 雕琢; and this is an abstract, tenuous interpretation of the word] and put to use, becoming, in the Anthropocene, one of many options in the methodological toolbox.
In the history of discourse around utopias, at least speaking of contemporary man, utopias are concerned with the future, while what we are facing now is a future that seems inconvenient: the Anthropocene. Do we really know what this means? There is no future in the Anthropocene. We must realize that today, the many fundamentalist utopias are still conceived of in the future-past tense [wèilái-guòqùshì 未来—过去式], like the Islamic State for example. Utopian concepts popularly circulating at present are also in the future-present tense [wèilái-dāngqiánshì 未来—当前式], in that they are elevated versions of the present. The former contains a messianic promise, while the latter does not. But the modernist utopia can continue to be created [xūgòu 虚构; "fictionalized," "made up"]. And this creation is designing things that are neither real nor unreal. Modern design and modern urban planning have been exerting great effort on this creation. Aren't modern cities the result of this endless planning of the neither real or unreal? We might say it is all unreal, which it is, or we might say it is real, in which case it might become as durable as reinforced concrete.
① Using big data to train artificial intelligence, collecting personal data, and circulating it at the speed of light, it is possible to spatialize psychosocial temporalities, and therefore control the behavior of the individual (Bernard Stiegler, Nanjing Lectures, op. cit., p. 34).6
② Deleuze's control is more useful than Foucault's discipline to describe our current situation on these urban platforms. Can the individual in the control scoiety immediately reverse their situation?
③ Decisions are devolved to algorithms. Consumerism [xiāofèi quánlì 消费权力], instead of capturing our unconscious minds through advertisements and television, uses big data to manipulate [cāozòng 操纵] the unconscious mind (Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, op. cit., p. 214).7 So, intelligence [zhìhuì 智慧, and he puts "smart" in brackets here, although it's hard to fit into the English sentence] is the ability [nénglì 能力] of optimized prediction and anticipation [yùzhī hé qīdài 预知和期待], belonging to the intelligence [zhìnéng 智能: please note the difference, despite my lazily using the same word in English] of a closed cybernetic loop.
④ For Lefebvre, cities and towns are works of arts left to us from the past and they deserve to be treated as masterpieces. And within the city are sheltered the works of groups and individuals. The street, the square, the palace, the monument, these are all works left from ancient times, and they also become our collective works (Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op. cit., p. 278).8 But even if they are no longer treated as the center of the Cosmos, they require our lived experience to be combined into our present montage.
⑤ There is a famous text by Barthes, written in the 1970s, called "Leaving the Movie Theater." In it, he says that after watching a movie, he is the night itself. Before seeing the movie, it was bright outside, giving a feeling as if placed under a lamp. After seeing the movie, the richness of imagination and reflection caused me also to become the night. [A link to a Chinese version of the essay on Douban appears here.]9 Walking in the city causes us to become the city. The city is written out by our footsteps.
Walking on the street is what turns us into Sphinxes. It is not that the streets are so enchanting [mírén 迷人], but rather that, by walking in the city, we become enchanting and obscure [fèijiě 费解]. We merely think that Manhattan mysterious [shénmì 神秘; or “mythic,” perhaps, after the way Michel de Certeau uses it], but, in fact, once we begin walking in it, we become mysterious ourselves, so it is the pedestrian that gives Manhattan its mystery and allure [mèilì 魅力]. Our movement [xíngzǒu 行走, translated so far "walking"] through the city is like a dance, opening ourselves up like spirits to the onrushing (Michel de Certeau, op. cit., p. 37).10 The streets needs the individual to illuminate it, or else it is no different from any other of the city's instruments [dàojù 道具]. This is the very encouraging affirmation we receive about our urban experience from the films of Rivette. His films are based on our experiences of moving about aimlessly [huàngdang 晃荡], and encourage us to open ourselves up within the city, open up our living spaces, and become epic characters. At the beginning of his films, we find the streets of Paris to be uninteresting. It is the movement [zǒudòng 走动] of the actors that provide the streets with a story. It is with their rehearsal [páiliàn 排练; it might be more helpfully glossed as "performance"] that Rivette and the actors transform in our imagination the streets of Paris into the streets of Athens, Carthage, Istanbul, and Atlantis, and then into ongoing stories. Urban spaces need rehearsal, like Rivette's films, to activate them. His films allow us to feel that the city is there for us to plan our own performance. But, now, the city remains nothing more than a pile of garbage. Even if it's sorted as carefully as a middle-aged woman's sewing kit, it's useless. Urban spaces lack our rehearsal, but films, compared to drama, are rehearsals that are more infinite, more immediate, more montage, more reiterative, more complete, and can carry us out into the Cosmos.
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Lu Xinghua was born in 1964. He received a master's degree from Nanjing University in 1990. He writes about contemporary art and philosophy. He is currently a professor at Tongji University in Shanghai. He has appeared in translation here before, actually, with his “Elegy for my Osama” 我的本拉登挽歌.
My notes will go down here. Lu Xinghua’s lengthy notes will be in the main body as end notes.
Please forgive this translation of the section title. He will quite quickly get into an explanation of his use of these terms.
I rarely translate this way—leaving in the original text—but this is standard operating procedure for this kind of work. It allows me to poke some holes through the medium, so you can see a bit of what’s below. The word choice is important, and I would like to make clear where a term is being repeated, even if doing so would make it even less readable. Here, for example, I note guǎnlǐ 理城 because I translate another term as “manage” later on. It is also to call attention to the fact that he later switches to guǎnzhì 管治—“govern”—as the verb used to describe what Alibaba would like their platform to accomplish. Also, I would like to make my errors easier to spot. In this text, there are common translations from French and English terms, which I might not catch.
This could be any number of words. “Stroller,” for example, would work, as would “walker.”
In the previous section, there is discussion about and lengthy note that refers to Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community and the idea of the unworking of works. That’s not quite what he’s getting at here, but I think it might be useful to refer back to.
Stiegler’s Nanjing Lectures, translated by Daniel Ross, are available to download at: Open Humanities Press.
Since I don’t have to worry about word count, I might as well insert the key lines he is referring to from Yuk Hui:
A consumerism that was based on the manipulation of psycho-power, as Stiegler has described, is stretching to calculation based on data. It seems that marketing based on psycho-power (or even psychoanalysis) is losing its central role in the current form of consumerism (even if it remains fundamental), as marketing strategies move from the manipulation of the unconscious to the analysis of big data: that is to say, the manipulation of consciousness (as we are already witnessing, for example, in the Cambridge Analytics affair). It is also the question of protention that confronts us with the question of freedom.
Again, since I’ve gone to the trouble of tracking down this reference, I might as well share it with you:
It was now that the town recognized itself and found its image. It no longer ascribed a metaphysical character to itself as imago mundi, centre and epitome of the Cosmos. Instead, it assumed its own identity, and began to represent itself graphically; as already noted, plans proliferated, plans which as yet had no reductive function, which visualized urban reality without suppressing the third — the divine — dimension. These were true tableaux, bird's-eye views; the town was putting itself in perspective, like a battlefield, and indeed a siege in progress was often depicted, for war often raged around the towns, and they were forever being taken, violated and despoiled. The towns were the location of wealth, at once threatening (and threatened) 'objects' and 'subjects' of accumulation - and hence too 'subjects' of history.
Throughout these conflicts, despite and because of them, the towns achieved a dazzling splendour. As the reign of the product began, the work reached the pinnacle of its achievement. These towns were in effect works of art themselves, subsuming a multitude of particular works: not only paintings, sculptures and tapestries, but also streets, squares, palaces, monuments — in short, architecture.
I will move it down here. I don’t know how long the link will remain active: https://www.douban.com/group/topic/84445098/?_i=0250029xr_6FU0. An English translation can be found here: https://eurofilmnyu.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/barthes-leaving-the-movie-theater.pdf.
Here, the translation is particularly rough. I think the reference might have a typo, too (I have corrected already the misspelling of “Michel” as “Michelle” in this particular note). It’s likely pointing to The Practice of Everyday Life, and perhaps the page number is wrong, since the section on walking, which Lu Xinghua is almost certainly referring to, since it also contains the riffing on ascent and descent and Sphinxes, starts on page 97.