Re: <nettime> Ascension

[Dan S Wang <danswang@protonmail.com>]

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Greetings, Brian and all,

I haven’t been to China for a long time, either. Well, six years, and now I’m not sure when I’ll ever go again. China’s travelers quarantine is 14 days from the airport and for most of the major cities an additional mandatory 7-day at-home lockdown after connecting. The transpacific crossing was never casual; now with permanently differing pandemic strategies, the traffic is greatly reduced and the gulf between the people of China and the US is growing. This makes the film all the more important.

While future trips are uncertain I am grateful for all the times I went before the pandemic. I am also grateful for having my father and step-mother, both of whom consume a lot of Chinese-language media. US media coverage of China is pathetic. Print is better than broadcast and cable coverage (which is near non-existent), but is still thin and predictably scripted according to US-obsessed storylines of either A) human rights and censorship issues, or B) trade, currency valuation, and intellectual property issues. Long form journalism provides welcome nuance but only a handful of reporters have that platform. When I visit my dad we chat while watching Chinese and Taiwanese news, Chinese newspapers on the coffee table, he filling in the gaps for me. And my step-mom, a native of Chongqing who once worked for the local Public Security Bureau, ie the cops, and later lived in Taiwan for fifteen years, plus is Weibo saavy, adds her analysis to the conversation. Without these kinds of conduits of family and friends, China is largely opaque to Americans without Chinese literacy.

When the anti-Beijing protests reached fever pitch in HK, of course I asked them what they were seeing in Chinese media. Not much, was the answer. And not necessarily because of censorship. According to them, the reasons for the relative indifference were A) a matter of scale, and B) that the vast majority of people in China are simply trying to survive, that knee-jerk nationalism aside, they have no headspace to worry about what HK people are demanding.

Both of these points color my reading of Ascension.

The spatial scale of the Chinese economy is difficult to grasp. If you sat through the film credits, you saw the locations. All those vignettes were filmed across about ten cities. Keep in mind that similar trends could have been documented in Dalian, Qingdao, Zhengzhou, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Xi’an, Changsha, Fuzhou, Kunming, Jinan, Harbin, Tianjin, Wuhan, Xiamen, Shenyang, Chongqing, Baotou, Ningbo, Wenzhou, Hefei, and a hundred other cities—in versions maybe bigger, more disturbing, and more funny. What we get in Ascension is a whiff.

Also, what Americans cannot wrap their heads around, anyway those who have not lived or traveled in China outside of foreign tourist bubbles, is just how big the population is. The tendency is to reduce the number 1.4 billion to a manageable notion of not only homogeneity but perfect conformity; that the population of China—helped along by every spectacularized performance of Chinese collectivity ever seen in the West, from the Olympics opening ceremony to the teeming Mao-era streets of bicycling ‘masses’—is not made up of individuals but rather exists as an undifferentiated social body.

What I saw in Ascension is the contrary reality, ie the tension between people’s emerging selfhood and the necessary standardization of labor. Trainees yawn, fidget, nap, express half-assed enthusiasm… and in a few witnessed moments, simply fail and don’t make the grade—and don’t seem to care too much. That is who these people in Ascension are—persons each with their own story, their own desires, their own talents, discontents, and limitations. The striving of individuals in China is proof that social engineering, for whatever its draconian measures and/or successfully produced outcomes, will always contend with the indeterminacy of the individuals who make up the collective.

I think it is useful to turn the Western view on its head: that the totalitarian efforts and mechanisms of the Chinese government are not a reflection of the uniform social body, but rather a response to the incredible ungovernability of the Chinese population. This has been the case since long before Mao. From the worm’s eye view, the kinetic unruliness of China’s massive population of ordinary people is obvious to most people who have spent anytime in China at street level. The organized chaos of everyday life is something of a joke to many of my friends in China; navigating it all is the real mark of fluency, whether expat or native.

On the second point, the matter of survival, the key is to interpret the film in the context of a hypercompetitive economy. Thus I differ from your description, Brian, where you seem to emphasize the passive:

> You see workers being trained to paint the nipple on a sex doll, salespeople being trained to prey on their peers, and servants being trained to lick the boots of the oligarchy, who are themselves trained to drink French wine and the like.

I don’t see the ‘being trained’ as much as I see people who have sought out the training. They’re seeking competitive advantage. Whether by innovating or copy-catting, whichever works, and probably both, they're doing it. Even at the level of the opening scenes: informal labor recruiting right in front of the train stations. Those fresh arrivals are looking for better paid and less physically taxing work than what they can find in their villages. In the ‘higher’ service training—the butler training, the business etiquette classes—as the filmmakers say in this Time to Say Goodbye interview, many of those filmed are actually entrepreneurs themselves, people who plan on taking the training back to their third-tier cities to open their own schools.

https://goodbye.substack.com/p/ascension-and-the-chinese-dream-with?utm_source=url

Is it neoliberal ideology at work? To me, not in a sense that a US or European context would have it. I guess I’d describe it as neoliberal embourgeoisification, ie the process of embourgeoisification familiar from twentieth century examples of national modernization, but now happening under the auspices of neoliberalism, ie capital unbounded from the twentieth-century regulatory state. As with so many trends in reform-era China, the mixture and confusion of developmental stages is what fascinates me, the Great Leap-frogging Forward. As shown both at the beginning and end of the film, the title ‘Ascension’ is taken from a line written by Jessica Kingdon’s great-grandfather in 1912, only months after the fall of the Qing, ending a dynastic system some 2500 years old. Appropriating the word from a poem composed in that world-shaking moment may seem overly dramatic; understanding the ruptures and contingencies from then to now, however, makes her choice quite appropriate.

What we don’t see in the film is the richness of Chinese social life. This undocumented element is significant because social life in China is the single most available factor that keeps the society humane and livable. I am reminded of what you said once, Brian, when we were in China together in 2011. By our third evening in Beijing, you remarked on the nightly flood of Chinese social life, that it was ten times the intensity of what we had in Chicago—every night by 8pm the whole of Beijing seemed to be out, little groups filling every available spatial niche in the summer warmth. Not only the eateries and sidewalk markets, but the landings of the apartment stairwells, the traffic islands, the spaces below overpasses. People laughing, arguing, playing cards, showing each other videos, flirting, boasting, texting, drinking, reminiscing… again, multiply by a thousand cities.

Looking forward to the next time either of us get to satisfy our curiosities about China, not through film but on the ground. Whenever that may be.

All best,

Dan

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Resident Artist, 18th Street Arts Center
@type_rounds_1968
@nowtime_asianamerica
danswang.xyz

------- Original Message -------

On Tuesday, February 15th, 2022 at 6:33 PM, Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com wrote:

> Thanks for this - I am totally curious about Chinese society and haven't been there for a long time. Actually, more recommendations would be cool.
>
> The film Ascension is sometimes beautiful, but at all times devastating. All the reviewers picked up the connection to Koyaanisqatsi which is there in the first part; but they missed the one to Frederick Wiseman, who devoted his films to the relentless analysis of people's behavior within institutional constraints. Throughout Ascension, the institution that's analyzed is neoliberal pedagogy - training people to perform for the corporation and to bear up to corporate cynicism. You see workers being trained to paint the nipple on a sex doll, salespeople being trained to prey on their peers, and servants being trained to lick the boots of the oligarchy, who are themselves trained to drink French wine and the like.
>
> This is a polemical film, relieved a bit by the filmmaker's inside knowledge of Chinese society and baffling capacity to get into, well, some of the most banal industrial, commercial and business settings you can imagine. Surely she told them she was making a film to glorify the rise of the new superpower. But it's basically showing an entire country being pushed into neoliberal ideology - or at least, submission - in order to produce floods of meaningless crap for the West and a gigantic high-end consuming class for China.
>
> Too bad those are the only ideas. If you're really into cinema, you might give it a pass. If you're really curious about China, check it out.
>
> Brian
>
> On Sat, Feb 12, 2022 at 9:15 AM J Drew john.p.drew@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > I haven’t had a chance to see it yet but the reviews suggest #ascension may be worth seeing in light of David’s analysis of Xi Jinping’s Hobbesian Chinese state.
> >
> > Official trailer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ojRgr6h68IQ
> >
> > > On Feb 12, 2022, at 6:00 AM, nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org wrote:
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> > > 1.  Re: The Meaning of Boris Johnson (David Garcia)
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> > > Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2022 10:26:56 +0000
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> > > From: David Garcia d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk
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> > > To: patrice riemens patrice@xs4all.nl,
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> > > Subject: Re: <nettime> The Meaning of Boris Johnson
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> > > BA51FE5F-9329-4300-A9D5-53A985F3104F@new-tactical-research.co.uk
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> > > Many thanks Brian and Patrice? When Johnson came on TV as head of state and did not advise but ?instructed? me, my family and the rest of the country to ?lock down? I experienced the actual fact and reality of state power as never before. Much as I despise Johnson and all his works I supported this use of state power as a uniquely powerful means of supporting the value of mutual dependency over the value of individual freedom, (this was very difficult for Johnson as a libertarian Tory as we now realise in the wake of partygate). A new and intense awareness of mutual dependency and the collective agency of which we are capable was the great revelation of the pandemic and our only hope of survival.
> > >
> > > But the debate over state power and where we might seek to draw the line goes well beyond traji/comic Johnson sideshow. Anyone claiming, as Patrice, does that the state is merely an impotent ?conveyer belt? steered by corporate forces has to explain the effectiveness of Xi Jinping?s Hobbesian Chinese state in reigning in their own corporate giants. The last 18 months has seen Xi cracking the whip and imprisoning (and doing anything else required) to re-assert state sovereignty over corporate hubris. This even extends to legislating time allowed to kids for gaming not to mention tinkering with the education policy as Xi has decided that the tech and finance sectors are sucking too many talented graduates away from more tangible forms of manufacturing.
> >
> > > Some European/western political actors are looking with envy at the perceived effectiveness of the Chinese (and other proactive Sth East Asian states) in their forthright nation-wide actions in containing Covid. The likelihood is that this is just a foretaste of an increasingly loud debate over the limits and role state power will play as the climate crunch really starts to bite. This is when we will return to the earlier postings on this thread that spoke about the science wars.
> > >
> > > David Garcia
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