Age of Anxiety
Currently reading: The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek; The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss; articles by Giovanni Arrighi, Bin Wong, Kenneth Pomeranz.
Shanghai is an anxious city. You wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking around: towers of unimaginable height continue to rise everywhere you turn; all manner of luxury cars glide past you on the street; high-end malls dot the landscape, filled to the brim with shoppers and lookers-on. But when you talk to people, you (unsurprisingly, maybe) get a very different picture. The anxiety expressed to me by residents of the city isn’t quite the anxiety I expected to find; it’s more complicated, with deeper roots. It’s connected to and finds expression in worries about the current global recession, but it isn’t encapsulated therein. Most interesting, this anxiety isn’t only about Shanghai; it’s about China, too. Or I should say, it’s about China through Shanghai, Shanghai as the laboratory of and metaphor for China.
Maybe the concept of anxiety and the different forms and directions it takes is a good lens through which to think about the present moments in Shanghai and New York City. Insofar as it makes any sense or does anything productive to speak of whole cities as anxious, let alone internally coherent entities with specific character traits, this descriptor applies particularly well to Shanghai and New York. Like the former with regard to China, New York historically had the peculiar ability to be both anomalous to the rest of America and oddly synecdochic for it. This is not only because of its economic and cultural preeminence among American cities, but also its historical status as “melting pot” of America (a faulty metaphor that implies the dissolution of the pluralities that characterize the city), where you can find traces of every other part of the country (and the world). Similarly, Shanghai, the saying goes, is nobody’s “lao jia” (“old home,” or hometown, place of origin, referring not so much to where you were born, but to where your grand- or great grandparents were from). This isn’t quite true, of course, but for the most part I’ve met very few people who can claim to have family connections to Shanghai stretching back more than a couple generations. Most people I meet either came to Shanghai on their own or on the backs of their parents and grandparents. This is reflected most dynamically in the incredible diversity of food in Shanghai: if you know where to look, you can find just about every variety of Chinese food here, cooked and served by people who grew up in the home region of that food and who came to Shanghai for the same basic reason (the same reason people went to and in some cases still go to New York). Historically speaking, that reason is often violence of one form or another: poverty, exploitation, sometimes war. Shanghai and New York similarly owe their existence to the long history of violence and the desire to escape it.
Today, Shanghai and New York City strike me as equally anxious cities, and their anxiety is no doubt directly related to that of the other, but the historical situation and complex of feelings collected in the word “anxious” are very different, even diametrically opposed, for each. A helpful visual: New York and Shanghai are two cones connected at the tip by the feeling of anxiety. They may share this tip, but from there their situations shoot in radically different directions. To put it bluntly, New York’s (and America’s) anxiety is that of waning hegemony or global preeminence. Shanghai’s (and China’s) is that of the possible but by no means guaranteed (re)emergence of China as a globally hegemonic or central force. New York is not only a city that in one century has accrued more power than most nation-states (its operating budget is 3rd largest in the United States, behind California -the 9th largest in the world- and New York State, of which it constitutes over 90%), but one which for at least a half-century has (rightly) considered itself and been considered the center of the world, the symbol for and driving force behind America’s 20th century emergence. Today, New York is ossifying. Though it clings to its political-economic preeminence, the city is not and cannot be what it was, as can be read in any number of articles in the New York Times and New Yorker lamenting the city’s loss of character and growing homogeneity (code for the expulsion of the poor to the outer-reaches of the city). It will never die in the way of cities like Detroit, but it will and in large part has grown to resemble (so I hear) cities like Paris, London and other capitals of the “old world”. In other words, New York is on the threshold of the end of its moment and “it” knows it.
Shanghai, I think, is a significantly more complex case, and has a lot to do with aspects of Chinese history I don’t yet fully understand (and certainly don’t have an immanent connection to). Maybe a good metaphor for the situation in Shanghai can be found in Harold Bloom’s concept of “the anxiety of influence,” in which poets are both inspired and hindered by reading their precursors, caught between the twin desires to emulate what came before and to strike out on an original path (that would in turn guarantee their name to posterity, perpetuating the cycle). A visit to the Shanghai Urban Planning Center exemplifies this: several large displays on the top floor show iconic images of other great world cities receding into the darkness in order of relative importance, with Shanghai, embodied in the Pearl Orient Tower, standing front and center in the spotlight. It’s no coincidence that the two cities closest behind Shanghai are New York and Paris, respective cultural capitals of the 20th and 19th centuries. But despite the energetic displays of Shanghai’s new and growing status as the city of the future, I sense a palpable if sublated uncertainty of the city’s future. It’s almost as if the glamorous projections of the World Expo site that have become ubiquitous in the city serve not only to advertise the coming event, but to convince the city that “it’s really going to happen!”, that is, that Shanghai and China’s time really has finally come, that the era of “American Imperialism” that more than a few Chinese friends have complained to me about is finally over, that the modern legacy of embarrassment at the hands of foreign powers has closed. This is particularly striking considering that the Chinese revolutionary legacy, which seems to have been disavowed in all but name, also built its support on the idea of ending a century of Chinese embarrassment at foreign hands.
To stick to the original theme: I detect in what many residents of Shanghai tell me a certain disbelief that things will happen quite as they’re told, that Shanghai (again, as a proxy for China) has what it takes to fully take over where New York and America leave off. The reason this causes anxiety, I think, has something to do with the historical inferiority complex developed (mainly by intellectuals and political leaders) in 19th and 20th century China and apparently not entirely or perfectly resolved by the Chinese communist revolution and its legacy. Why this complex will only dissipate if and when China can indisputably consider itself the economic and cultural center of the world again is both entirely clear and fabulously mystifying. Clear when you consider the self-conception of China for most of the world’s history. Mystifying when you begin to think about the ways in which care (or anxiety) for the nation becomes a personally, individually felt situation. Even more mystifying (clearly mystifying or mystifyingly clear, not sure which) when you think about the sheer magnitude of intellectual and ideological work that goes into the production of world and national history as one of progress and increasing global integration. No doubt China’s history (as the double whammy of the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai World Expo clearly illustrate) is inextricable from an emerging global history into which China hopes to write its ultimate redemption and return to a “rightful” place at the center of the world, and indeed as far as trans-historical narratives go, this is a pretty solid one. But that doesn’t make it real. It’s still a production, a spectacle just like the fictions of “manifest destiny” or the now-debunk “New American Century,” and one whose intellectual framework, no matter how tempting, needs to be criticized.
If modernization can be thought of as a process of translation, broadly conceived, then what we must do in our considerations of Shanghai today is look for that kernel of pure language, to take from Benjamin, which subtends this process. Translation is to Pure Language as the Symbolic is to the Real or as Capitalism is to the Proletariat. What we need to do is return to that constitutive contradiction that both drives the incredible productive output (on material and intellectual fronts) of contemporary China and continually threatens to destabilize its ideological foundations, and to use that root contradiction to criticize not the Chinese government or any specific entity, not even China itself, but the contemporary global situation that produces the kinds of narratives described above. To me the urgency of this task derives not from the political heights these narratives reach, but from the fact that they reify themselves in the minds and desires of all of us.
