Crossing the river brings you to the infotainment part of the expo. Here, the eco Pavilion of Footprint is directly opposite the Oil Pavilion, decorated in blaring blue neon, just like the city's expressways. Elsewhere, there's some adaptive reuse – the Piranesian China Shipping Pavilion is an embellished shipyard, and the Pavilion of Future a decommissioned power station, just like Tate Modern. Here, tomes on the city of the future, from Thomas More to David Harvey, are piled up, with no sense that each was critiquing existing society through their visions of the future. In the next room, the underwater city of the future sits next to a lime-green illuminated model of a petroleum refinery. Any implication that one might lead to the other is wholly unintentional.
Mao Zedong, the face on the banknotes used to purchase the sweatshop-made merchandise, considered contradiction the motive force of the class war. So it's no surprise that all these opposing forces are held in some kind of balance – but how long can it be kept up?
The Queen is on the banknotes with which Hatherley's prose is bought and which he then trades for his sweatshop and conflict marmite and biros, and she has always considered the British Constitution a puzzle. Always was and always will be says the sage lady. More mystery than muddle, happily, and a mystery - like how do Zaha Hadid's forms levitate? whom did Cheney's assassination squads kill? why is Owen Hatherley vending these shallow ressentimental rants of imbecile racist clichés to these venerable old progressive publications? - has a thrilling and intriguing aspect, whereas muddle...esmisss....esmooor....
As everything animal, vegetable and mineral, social, political, historical, architectural and economic, in China is another expression of yin yang, everything about the English nation can be explained in a single idea; taste is a virtue. It is the only virtue. The virtue of the idle rich. The consumer's virtue. The essence of virtuous fanaticism.
They can't make the really good porcelain or weave the really good rugs but those who do don't know what they are doing or what it's worth any more than bees and ants, while the Englishman, any Englishman, or Englishwoman, a fifth rate journalist with a tweflth rate education, can go to these places where the really good porcelain and rugs and silks are made and stand astride the drones like an intellectual colossus, with expertise in sinopop and New Confucianism acquired on a single flight from London without the least knowledge of Chinese language, interpretating at a breathless rate, transforming mere artisan craft into Critique the humanoid occasions of his brilliance will never comprehend, and driving a firm but fair bargain. - How long can it be kept up? The deuce knows. But for now, they calmly carry on.
Arpege, we cannot agree with your assessment of Owen Hatherley's little trip to Shanghai. We do not see anything racist about it. He probably visited Mr. and Mrs. Nick Land there, and became the godfather to their children, but they won't tell you, because Mr. Land won't sign in. However, I've been reading the Urbanatomy bleug by Nick and his other hardtail English expat Shanghainese, and it's all about the same.
ReplyDeleteYou simply read racism into everything. Owen's not being racist, and you ARE being unfair about the English 'not being able to do the real things as good' (where's the bigger-than-white penis joke in the post, plizz...you know I only come here to read the Black Stud Porno by now, and it's pretty reliable). Why, there's English Spode and it's quite as good as Chinese porcelain, and there are lots of English rugs that are considered to be better than some Chinese ones, but not necessarily the Indian ones. and these last were exposed in the NYTimes for really using little boys of 10 and under as slaves to weave carpets for the houses of many high-JAPesses of New York, Paris and Hollywood, like Barbra Streisand!
What's da big deal, can't take a criticism of that great humanitarian Chairman Mao. No, you can't. And Zizek's LRB review about Mao was not half-bad either. I can't believe that you think it matters that all the incredible authoritarian RIGHT-WING oppression that has taken place in China JUST IN THIS FUCKING EXPO alone is not a whole lot worse than Owen's so-called racism. Not that I don't think he's something of a prig, of course; in fact, I think of him as a kind of 'little prick' type. But as for 'how long can this balance last', that was just lifted from a NYTimes op-ed, or even just regular news report, because the Chinese do whatever the fuck they want to, and they arrest any and all slight offenders, and slap them with huge sentences. I'm surprised that the English-language guides are even allowed to operate, although they are often badly written. Nick Land's piece for the ExpoGuide Intro was better writing, but it's still just well-written publicity. He thinks the oppression 'works' sort of well, and that 'steaming hot capitalism' ought to be vicarious thrill enough for anybody. How can you hold it against Owen for writing a quasi-Socialist organ's features piece on the Expo and being profound. Oh, put a sock in it about the Queen, I've had it with people bugging me about her. You and Owen ought to have something in common there, both know that you oughtn't to have the 'taste' to like this exquisitely appointed mo-nah-ch.. I bet Dominic doesn't even understand how to appreciate the genius of the queen, but that's just because he's been made to feel guilty by all of these awful English Socialists like Owen, who didn't get to go to Oxford and end up in thrilling software careers!
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ReplyDeleteI think Owen and ZizneyCorp have a lot of work to do to make the US' aggression against China palatable to their progressive/left audiences. It helps of course if a billion and a half people are portrayed as robotic and mindless, a population over which the Guardian columnist who would be king will be king, ant-like "unintentional" "primitive" incapable of understanding the books they handle as fetishes and tokens, never earning the benefit of the doubt for subversive ironies or any self-awareness whatsoever, so bad off now it won't matter what the US imperial policy does to them. As one of the commenters at CiF pointed out, while Hatherley is depicting, po-faced, China as this apocalyptic inferno of environmental destruction, he, the Englishman, is more destructive - a greedier consumer of the planet's resources - than ten Chinese people.
ReplyDeleteStill he seethes with resentment -and this seething is his bread and butter, he is making a product that is the performance of his "anger", overwhelming everything else to the point where his apreciative readers even say they don't really care what he's saying, or even understand why he thinks what he thinks, but are lapping up his passionate declarations of "loves" and "hates", his "attacks" and "defences against attack", his furious venting of TASTE which is fanatical conviction wihtout cause, like a reality tv presenter, lawrence lewellyn bowen, branding branding branding (like Missy Power, saying basically nothing except "this is me, I'm like this, I'm angry and cute, I like animals and travel...")
Anyway as I was saying, he seethes with fury at their existence, these no longer subordinate regions of the earth, these no longer subject populattions....he seethes over their numbers, their indifference to his views, their lack of British virtues which make Britain and the English especially worthy of any comforts and aesthetic pleasures they desire, including the sometimes funny but usually awful, derivative, tedious patrician tantrums of his favourite authors whinging about bitches, whores and n---s, and cocaculture leading to this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20005157-504083.html
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ReplyDeletefor some reason i can't open any of those links
ReplyDeleteabout the godawful genyuine zizz in the lrb, right on is catmint here:
ReplyDeletehttp://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2010/10/in-time-of-lobsters.html
nothing new for the zizz to dispense his knowledge of ancient chinaman mind.
it's just so childish and stoopid, anybody can copy it, powdered critique of all things and folks chinese, just add water; as we see with Owen.
it's racist (as ever) as an effect and epiphenomenon of the self aggrandisement and the necessary pose of condescension to all objects, position as items for consumption by the self iulluystrating and self celebrating consumer. Because the only content here is about Hatherley - or Zizz, or Wendy Brown, or nina power or whichever - these performances are not about China or "democracy" or the occupation of Iraq (one really doesn't pause for laughs about this, but Brown pauses for laughs because the content is herself, and we are to appreciate her wit, how witty she is about genocidal imperial plunder and destruction); similarly Hatherley's writing is about illustrating brand Hatherley, and telling of his encounter with China and how it affected him; it is "Hatherley in China" like Samantha, Charlotte, Miranda and Carrie In the Desert. This reflects media genre wherein everyone behaves as though s/he were a celebrity, in whose little ways and feelings an audience is interested not for what it says about the favourite shirts but for how it increases the feeling of intimacy with the celebrity. I think the assumption - probably correct - is if you simply insist on behaving this way you will be treated as a celebrity. (Like Nina Power publishing her personal reflections about "what feminism could do better". That she knows nothing about what feminism does, and has no way of judging, and makes only vague remarks and groundless imputations by insinuation, is no matter, since the whole purpose is only to display herself and advertise herself and rebrand as not that viciously anti-LGBT as she seems etc in response to criticism of her loathesome book.) This is one very strong contrast between hatherley's writing about cities and architecture and Harvey's, Sennett's, Tafuri's or Pevsner's - his own personality is the principle content, and everything is in the service of displaying it. Even when writing a review of Bourriaud and Altermodern his own feelings about modernism - which are aspy obsessive and capricious, full of factoids and trivia and absolutely destitute of analysis or understanding of any depth or synthesis - are central and organise and account for the whole piece and its attitudes and postures. The piece is the infliction on an object seen superficially of Hatherley's personality and malice - he is impervious to that object as expressive and active, as human creativity; he doesn't see or hear he only gives verdicts and he is willing to fabricate evidence against (the ludicrous antiSemitic innuendo about the Gulbenkian, the clumsy substitution of ridiculous gibberish text for the actual meaningful text it superficially resembles to facilitate ridicule otherwise too obviously unjust and off the wall)
ReplyDeleteThe fashion is for this whole flock - and there are masses and masses - of "pop culture critics" to brand brand brand. They are basically beavises and buttheads - they are people commenting on what they watch on teevee. Nina Power thus names her venting her feelings whime watching Girls Gone Wild and Sex and the City and flipping through vogue as "a critique of feminism"; she complains about not seeing enough on Sex and the City about feminists "on the ground" in "other countries" and issues her memo to feminists in the air to pay more attention to those on the ground.
ReplyDeleteThis is the extreme case but its a fashion - for culture worker ants to illustrate themselves with their opinions and loves and hates and likes and fanactical devotion to's, to try to make themselves loveable and recogniseable, and so the only expertise they require for this production is in themselves. Hatherley knows more than enough about Hatherley to write Hatherley in China. China is a cardboard pagoda, wonton soup, Mao, confucius and contradiction.
Now this means an unabashed opining from ignorance about everything, but the racism comes in with the division of the automatic worthy of worship judgement from ignorance (Beckett say) and that which one can dismiss without any pretence of specificity or knowledge.
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ReplyDeleteSpectacle has been granted a special place in Chinese culture since the distant dawn of its recorded history. While contemporary architects and designers pursue the essence of ‘Chinese style’ into the nooks and crannies of specific construction techniques, its most significant and influential trait is a commitment to the production of psychological effect on a massive scale. China’s great philosopher of war Sun Tzu exemplifies this continuous line of spectacular tradition, when he argues that the aim of the general is less to kill than to create an overwhelming impression on the enemy. The same thread passes through the invention of fireworks and the layout of the Forbidden City (constructed as a succession of theatrical gateways) to the glittering East Asian cityscapes of today, built almost as stage props for epic dramas of development, and painting vast panoramas in artificial light. This tradition of all-enveloping theater and aesthetic staging, vividly exhibited at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 60th anniversary of the New China in 2009, is naturally predisposed to affinity with the World Expo, an event whose very name calls for a spectacle of planetary dimensions.
ReplyDeleteEgad. It's unbelievable really. It's like these guys have just failed to notice three decades of cultural politics. Hatherley and this guy have exactly the same Orientalist project - to describe the Other today as an expression of the Other's ancient essence.
I got no further. I just hate these fasho pundits, they are above all incredibly tiresome. The same loop of cliché, decade after decade. They tell us Beckett is 'so modern' and an innovator (which would seem to be the case to anyone who had never seen a play before) and like him every fifteen minutes they believe they are the first to discover that people age and die .... They're like the 13 year olds who are always inventing the tuna melt.
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ReplyDeletespeaking of which - get out to see this
ReplyDeletehttp://www.laweekly.com/2010-11-04/stage/time-travelers/
Steppling's play is a hit. Looks very good.
http://oldhickorysweblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/jerry-browns-demographics.html
ReplyDeletehttp://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2010/11/non-white-less-affluent-voters.html
you can win elections in America with an unabashed progressive programme and a real progressive record of action in office.
Interesting though the press treats this backing as a kind of smear, like Zizz seeming to praise Chavez and Aristide for "mobilising the slum-dwellers"
"speaking of which - get out to see this"
ReplyDeleteI'll be going after Xmas this year, most likely. But the write-up was very good, as well as some of Steppling-related articles.
"Egad. It's unbelievable really. It's like these guys have just failed to notice three decades of cultural politics. Hatherley and this guy have exactly the same Orientalist project - to describe the Other today as an expression of the Other's ancient essence.
I got no further. I just hate these fasho pundits, they are above all incredibly tiresome. The same loop of cliché, decade after decade. They tell us Beckett is 'so modern' and an innovator (which would seem to be the case to anyone who had never seen a play before) and like him every fifteen minutes they believe they are the first to discover that people age and die .... They're like the 13 year olds who are always inventing the tuna melt."
Absolutely do not buy it, and as we say on the ballet board, we'll just have to agree to disagree. I don't think your point is important at all, and I really don't find anything offensive about Owen's piece, but it's just not nearly as interesting writing as Nick's. But you are not going to see that. I tell you something: I'm no different from them, essentially. What I don't like about Nick's piece on Shanghai Expo is merely that, since he's there, he does give more credit to China than it deserves, which apparently is completely lost on you. Owen doesn't really give a shit, and wants to get back to East Ham projects or whatever. 'Fasho pundit' my ass. Well, that's what I am, baby, if you can read that into that one paragraph, which I consider to be VERY GOOD.
There. I'll admit I didn't think you'd like it, but I didn't know you'd be so obtuse as to not even see the difference in a rhapsodic enjoyment of something and a typically constipated bleug-post, which Owen writes by now, because he doesn't know that he writes way too many, and that descriptions of architectural projects of lower-income Brits doesn't come across very well on bleugposts. The French 'Architectures' TV series, which had about 6 buildings per film (about 10, I can't remember, I watched most of them, and they were all very good), is the way to see a good amount of architecture and keep it interesting.
But none of what you call 'fasho pundit' and 'unbelievably tiresome' applies to this: "The same thread passes through the invention of fireworks and the layout of the Forbidden City (constructed as a succession of theatrical gateways) to the glittering East Asian cityscapes of today, built almost as stage props for epic dramas of development, and painting vast panoramas in artificial light. This tradition of all-enveloping theater and aesthetic staging, vividly exhibited at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 60th anniversary of the New China in 2009,"
It's fine writing, and you should have been able to see that. Well, YOU can go back to your 'legendary' leninino, who reads YOUR beads ever-more-frequently. That's probably the part you like, madam!
it's good writing, yes.
ReplyDeletei'm sure we don't need ancient chinese essence to explain spectacle in the 21st century.
pageantry and spectacle...what did pre-Colombia empires use gold for? What is a monstrance? In the early days of european orientalism, the Sultan was thought to put on an even better show than the immbile empire...
Lord McCartney got his mission from George III booted out of China because he wouldn't kowtow. Why not? He said it was not commensurate with the dignity of the King of whom he was the embodiment in situ to put his head on the ground. Of course every region has its theatrical styles and machines but this mythology of the east as all show, a sort of mere curtain of spleandor rather than real wealth and power - drained of humanity and social relations and history...it's an ancient cliché, a bore, piffle and crap.
And fifteen years ago, editors would have laughed themselves silly over Owen's childish essay on Chineseness, and this. As someone pointed out to me recently, Angry Arab blogger (As'ad Abukhalil) writes now and then this kind of utter infantile baby Hegel white supremacist shit makes him feel a nostalgia for the old pro orientalists like Massignon, who at least gathered some erudition and were trying to know as well as to dominate. Hatherley and land are just trying to caricature-and-commodify-for-sale. Producing images and opinionettes as simplistic and stupid and familiar as possible, instantly recognised and digested. Pomofasho
So hackneyed:
ReplyDeleteIt’s a game of tropes – child=”Negro”, youth=Chinese, Man=European, the former two concocted as images of inferior stages of the latter: “Consequently”, i.e., because Hegel begins history with China, and because “the Chinese does not lose his equanimity”, “Stirner” transforms mankind into a person who “mounts the first rung of the ladder of culture” and indeed does so “by means of custom”, because China has no other meaning for Stirner than that of being the embodiment of “custom”.
- The German Ideology 1845-46
That's old, and it was already being criticised as hackneyed then.
This tradition of all-enveloping theater and aesthetic staging
ReplyDeleteSun King anyone? If the Pompidou Center were in China, every pundit would be saying it was an expression of this ancient chinese essence of spectacle. But it's in France. You could say it's an expression of ancient French or Frankish essence of spectacle, with all kinds of "evidence" to assemble, from coronations of the rancid butter headed barbarians to Versailles to the Opera to the Parapluies de Cherbourg except no one would. It's blabber. What is interesting is change and specificity, not finding the eternal ethno-racial-national essence in every moment.
it's one thing to trace the thread of tradition historically (maybe peter ackroyd is a fine example of this done compellingly and informatively), and it's one thing to look for a zeitgeist (a good example of legit version of this is no logo and shock doctrine) but what Land and Hatherley are up to is not that - they are just fashioning some Oriental figures for a disneyfied pageant...
ReplyDeleteWhat are you on, honey...
ReplyDeleteI just took a five-minute nap, and up myself only to find that the new versions of Il Trovatore in modern-dress with the White Male Supremacist Praxis in PAIDPORNACTRESSBOOBJOBS weren't phoning in their parts to Shanghai Op-e-la...now that would have been VERY specific, esp. since, as we ALL know, and literally everybody has seen 'Farewell, My Concubine', that men sometimes sang the ancient Italianate arias in Peking O-pe-la, and they wore the Schoolgirl Ruffles that some White Male Supremacist Praxis Types pay the great Writer Anodyne Lite to produce and re-produce ad infinitum, since she is unable to tell you how much she rilly likes that one episode of 'Mad Men' where she's been PAID to go to the PIERRE and tells ME and JACK and CHRISTIAN that 'if we don't discuss WORLD RAPE NOW, then when'.
That is what Hatherley needed at the Expo, and Land needed many things (but believed in self-sacrifice, so did some exercises in self-deprivation...)
'opinionettes' Where's the 'Like" button?
ReplyDeletethere is a like button!
ReplyDeleteseriously patrick - just consider this term "sinopop" that he uses. It's a belittling term that is just a little capsule of white contempt and orientalism. It has no meaning, it only is a way for him to come as close to a rude ethnic name as possible and still be printed.
It's not actually descriptive - he is unable to recognise that melody of the song he so designates is Japanese evidently- but it masquerades as such, as a sign of his knowingness and mastery of this object that is trivial and derivative of the real pop, of us. But only as the thinnest thinnest front for his display of superiority. "sinopop" is like "typiocal artspeak" in his other piece - like an opportunity to catch the eye of others like him in the audience and roll eyes and suck teeth.
Just seriously consider it there, the nuance and effects in the piece that it has. It suggests their imitation - a theme of the piece is their mindless uncomprehending aping of "us" and their incapacity for ironies and inability to attain any of the sophisticated and advanced intellectual and aesthetic levels we proceed with normally. It also suggests inauthenticity as pop, because they're not up to it - it's inferior. And "sino" is not a slur exactly but we know that words that are not slurs can be slurs - Jew for example, or, in one of the comments here he deleted "Bobby Sands". (His take being that it's just contemptible and funny that anyone would have feelings about Bobby Sands...it's so ridiculous, mourning "Irishpoliprisoner" would be like grooving to "sinopop".)
One of the commenters heard that sneer there, and understood it is passing under this thin veil offered by the Chinese government, like that of the Emirates, as legit targets of disgust and his signature "rage", and mass culture etc.. That's the game tile out of mind - it's not the Chinese at which Hatherley is sneering, it's at their evil despotic rulers. Hatherley wants to save them, like Zizek does, from their life of shallow imitation, mere form without content, spectacle without substance, custom without relation, their "sinopop" and "sinocapitalism" with the "asian knout", and along with Mr Geithner ZizneyCorp will save them no doubt any moment now.
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ReplyDeletemy point was to be as pig ignorant as the object of my parody.
ReplyDeleteyes, there is very good english porcelain! and i have not doubt that people who designed the expo exhibits have "some sense" after all that there were critiques of contemporary society in these books; at the same time I wonder if Owen Hatherley ever read Thomas More (not i think) and what he actually knows about his contemporary society (bupkus my guess)
"I do agree, however, that Mr. Hatherley does not know shit about what he is talking about, and should have had to pay his way for this fucking trip. "
ReplyDeletehe didn't need to go; he wrote what he knew he would write before he left. he didn't need to stand in the expo.
the writing is confusing but he is saying that oil refineries mean greenhouse gas emissions mean sealevels rising mean cities under water. He gets this connection between the flanked exhibits - refinery, atlantis - but he is quite sure that the drones who made the exhibit - this never occured to them. Chinamen!
He should have kept the dough and stayed in England.
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ReplyDelete"Apart from an increasingly rabid - yet tiresome - obsession with Zizek, and righteous attacks on a small coiterie of barely published British bloggers, do you actually have anything to 'say'? "
ReplyDeleteSure.
"apart from the posters, do you encounter black people much?"
Very much.
"Your frequent sneering attacks on other people's level of education belies how expensive your own was, princess. "
does it belie that? are you sure? perhaps rather it "betrays"?
"They're usually cyanide to any actual 'struggle' because they manage to alienate large chunks of the campaign with their oh-so-righteous 'j'accuse' of perceived racism, sexism, homophobia etc. etc. "
Can you give me the contact details of some of these people?
"Of course, prince/princess j'accuse compensate for political failure with reassuring myths of how few could match their exacting standards of misty-eyed righteousness."
Yes, while the "large chunks" of the unidentified "campaigns" they've alienated are steamrolling from political success to political success.
small coiterie
ReplyDeleteFreudian typo?
The deleted comment:
ReplyDeleteWayne Kasper said...
Apart from an increasingly rabid - yet tiresome - obsession with Zizek, and righteous attacks on a small coiterie of barely published British bloggers, do you actually have anything to 'say'?
Sanctimonious 'domestic orientalism' (romantic imagery of black/gay/feminist 'struggle') does not a standpoint make. Your 'blacker than though' pose is particularly nauseating (apart from the posters, do you encounter black people much?).
Your frequent sneering attacks on other people's level of education belies how expensive your own was, princess.
The way you write reminds me of a lot of (expensively-educated) 'resistance pornographers' I've met. They're usually cyanide to any actual 'struggle' because they manage to alienate large chunks of the campaign with their oh-so-righteous 'j'accuse' of perceived racism, sexism, homophobia etc. etc. Of course, prince/princess j'accuse compensate for political failure with reassuring myths of how few could match their exacting standards of misty-eyed righteousness.
"Domestic orientalism"? "Resistance pornographers"? Alienation of...whom?
ReplyDeleteShorter Wayne Kaspar: "Your education cost a lot! Therefore, um, ... yeah... other feminists and socialist don't like you! So there."
How much would I bet that Wayne Kaspar's education didn't come cheap and this is some kind of inverted tu quoque?