Domestic Spaces in Post-Mao China: On Electronic Household Appliances 9780415784856, 9781315228372

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface: the postcolonial and the political in Wang Min’an
1 Washing machine
2 Refrigerator
3 Radio
4 Television
5 Cellphone
6 Computer
7 Electric light
8 Contemporary household spatial production
9 Postscript
References
Index

Citation preview

Domestic Spaces in Post-Mao China

Unconventional, creative, and highly original, Wang Min’an’s work centers on the assemblage of household machines that create the space of contemporary domesticity. It offers pathways to a new understanding of how the sudden commodification of domestic space in China beginning in the late 1980s has transformed Chinese domestic life beyond recognition. In terms of modern urban Chinese family life, people do not just move into new apartments; they move into new modes of living which involve new ways of relating to the world. Wang’s discussion on the reconstitution of Chinese domestic life – its founding moral, aesthetic, and political values – is tremendously useful and enlightening. In these essays, the author stages a Latourian collapse of subject and object in adopting the point of view of both human and non-human actants. This volume brings a new sensibility to bear on objects of modern everyday life. This work is not a “China book,” but rather a work marked profoundly by China. Wang experiments with the applicability of “theory” to what might be thought of as a transcultural common life embedded in mundane technologies. The book is particularly concerned with rescuing everyday materiality and bodily life from the numb obscurity to which things have been relegated by modern consumerism and bourgeois hygiene. This book is not an oddity from the mysterious East; it is a playful experiment in writing from a unique scholar, a leading thinker and theorist in the humanities in China, and will be of interest to scholars and students of East Asian, particularly Chinese, political and domestic studies. Wang Min’an is a Professor in the School of Literature at Capital Normal University, Beijing, China. He is a leading thinker and theorist in the humanities in China.

Postcolonial Politics Edited by Pal Ahluwalia University of South Australia

Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths University of London

Leela Gandhi University of Chicago

Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths University of London For a full list of titles please see: www.routledge.com/Postcolonial-Politics/book-series/PP ‘Postcolonial Politics’ is a series that publishes books that lie at the intersection of politics and postcolonial theory. That point of intersection once barely existed; its recent emergence is enabled, first, because a new form of ‘politics’ is beginning to make its appearance. Intellectual concerns that began life as a (yet unnamed) set of theoretical interventions from scholars largely working within the ‘New Humanities’ have now begun to migrate into the realm of politics. The result is politics with a difference, with a concern for the everyday, the ephemeral, the serendipitous and the unworldly. Second, postcolonial theory has raised a new set of concerns in relation to understandings of the non-West. At first these concerns and these questions found their home in literary studies, but they were also, always, political. Edward Said’s binary of ‘Europe and its other’ introduced us to a ‘style of thought’ that was as much political as it was cultural as much about the politics of knowledge as the production of knowledge, and as much about life on the street as about a philosophy of being, A new, broader and more reflexive understanding of politics, and a new style of thinking about the non-Western world, make it possible to ‘think’ politics through postcolonial theory, and to ‘do’ postcolonial theory in a fashion which picks up on its political implications. Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive practices. The series aims to help us read culture politically, read ‘difference’ concretely, and to problematise our ideas of the modern, the rational and the scientific by working at the margins of a knowledge system that is still logocentric and Eurocentric. This is where a postcolonial politics hopes to offer new and fresh visions of both the postcolonial and the political.

Subseries: Writing Past Colonialism The Institute of Postcolonial Studies (IPCS)

Edited by Phillip Darby University of Melbourne

Writing Past Colonialism is the signature series of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, based in Melbourne, Australia. By postcolonialism we understand modes of writing and artistic production that critically engage with the ideological legacy and continuing practices of colonialism, and provoke debate about the processes of globalisation. The series is committed to publishing works that break fresh ground in postcolonial studies and seek to make a difference both in the academy and outside it. By way of illustration, our schedule includes books that address: • • •

grounded issues such as nature and the environment, activist politics and indigenous peoples’ struggles cultural writing that pays attention to the politics of literary forms experimental approaches that produce new postcolonial imaginaries by bringing together different forms of documentation or combinations of theory, performance and practice 7 From International Relations to Relations International (IPCS) Postcolonial Essays Edited by Phillip Darby 8 Gender, Orientalism, and the ‘War on Terror’ Representation, Discourse, and Intervention in Global Politics Maryam Khalid 9 Multicultural Politics of Recognition and Postcolonial Citizenship Rethinking the Nation Rachel Busbridge

10 Japanese Poetry and its Publics From Colonial Taiwan to 3.11 Dean Anthony Brink 11 Domestic Spaces in Post-Mao China On Electronic Household Appliances Wang Min’an

Domestic Spaces in Post-Mao China On Electronic Household Appliances

Wang Min’an Translated by Shaobo Xie

First published in English 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Wang Min’an Translated by Shaobo Xie Published in Chinese by Henan University Press 2015 The right of Wang Min’an to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wang, Min’an, 1969– author. Title: Domestic spaces in post-Mao China : on electronic household appliances / Min’an Wang ; translated by Shaobo Xie. Other titles: Lun jia yong dian qi. English Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Postcolonial politics | “Published in Chinese by Henan University Press 2015.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017039887 | ISBN 9780415784856 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315228372 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Families—China, | Domestic space—China. | Domestication of technology—China. | Household appliances—Social aspects—China. | China—Social conditions—2000– Classification: LCC HQ684 .W33713 2018 | DDC 306.850951—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039887 ISBN: 978-0-415-78485-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-22837-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Preface: the postcolonial and the political in Wang Min’an by Michael Dutton and Pal Ahluwalia

ix

1

Washing machine

1

2

Refrigerator

13

3

Radio

25

4

Television

35

5

Cellphone

49

6

Computer

57

7

Electric light

71

8

Contemporary household spatial production

82

9

Postscript

92

References Index

95 97

Preface The postcolonial and the political in Wang Min’an1

When this book was first submitted to the Routledge book series, Postcolonial Politics, eyebrows were raised. After all, what could possibly be postcolonial or, indeed, even political, about a book that uses Western postmodern theory to ruminate upon a largely contemporary cultural studies topic – namely, modern household electrical appliances? That postmodernism, cultural studies, and postcolonialism share a close affinity is beyond doubt. Indeed, together (along with gender and queer studies) they aided the “cultural turn” in the “New Humanities,” helped it “jump species” to “infect” a similar turn in the social sciences,2 and extended questions of inequality beyond class into gender, race, language, and power relations. These three fields clearly share common ground. This, however, is insufficient grounds upon which to claim that Wang Min’an’s work, with its cultural studies focus and its postmodern theory, is postcolonial. While this kinship is important, it is the groundedness of this study which makes this postcolonial. It is Wang’s theoretical approach, set to work in a non-Western “site,” that grounds the postcolonial in this work. It is a notion of site specificity or groundedness that is of more importance than merely area or place. Groundedness is not just about location but about the intellectual, cultural, and unconscious baggage that comes with it. It is this particular style of thought that Wang unconsciously carries into his engagement with postmodern and cultural studies theory that propels it into a postcolonial knowledge encounter. If Wang’s close reading of Chinese urban life through a postmodernist lens opens onto a style of thought that tilts Edward Said’s epistemological and ontological divide (“Europe and its other”) eastward, it is his focusing on everyday technologies of the household that leads him to circle around and create the same type of “knowledge effects” Gayatri Spivak says Subaltern Studies scholars produced when they attempted to capture the everyday. Wang’s work, therefore, unconsciously veers in a postcolonial direction, pushing cultural studies and postmodernism toward their logocentric limits. The particular tilt that Wang effects in his approach to Western theoretical approaches comes out of the prose. Without uttering a word, Wang frames postmodern and cultural studies theory through the spirit of a prose style that opens onto the poetic and offers a unique form of rumination upon that demotic “flash of the new” that suddenly appeared in modern Chinese households as they abandoned Maoism and embraced the

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Preface

market. Reflective, creative, opinionated, and humorous, Wang uses the objects within the modern Chinese apartment to fashion his own thoughts and reflections upon the world around him. This style of writing carries within it the spirit of a Chinese literary form known, in Chinese, as xiaopinwen (小品文) or xiaopin literature.3 Xiaopinwen was a form of prose pioneered in the latter part of the Ming dynasty by wealthy literati connoisseurs reflecting upon the way things ought to be.4 Offering commentary and emotion, argument and opinion, xiaopinwen was a style of writing often compared to the European essayist tradition of Michel de Montaigne. With their flights of fancy, their whimsical, imaginative, yet thought provoking prose, their anecdotes and allusions, their free associations and juxtapositions, not to mention their short essay form, these two genres did indeed share much in common. While this might have made both xiaopinwen and Montaigne biographies of the mind,5 they tell of two very differently minded styles of thought at work. Li Shiqiao highlights this difference when he contrasts the introspective personal essays of the Ming dynasty xiaopin writer, Wen Zhenheng, in his (1615–20) Treatise on Superfluous Things (Zhangwuzhi《长物志》) with the very public and highly moralizing tone of the European essayists.6 Introspective and amoral, Wen’s Treatise, much like Wang Min’an’s book, casts no moral judgement upon things but merely assumes or asserts them to be that way; it does not speak Truth, only touches lightly upon it in its moments of reflection. The reflections of both Wen and Wang are guided by the world around them and the material things that order their worlds. For Wen, a wealthy Ming dynasty connoisseur, the world around him was one requiring distinctions to be made in all things. As the arbiter of good taste, his work ordered various aesthetic distinctions to be made in terms of house and dwelling, flowers and trees, water and stone, fish and fowl, chairs, beds, and utensils.7 It was upon these things and their place within his world that Wen’s work unfolds. Wang Min’an’s world is, of course, very different. His is not the world of the connoisseur but that of the technician. His is a world filled with washing machines, refrigerators, cellphones, and computers. It is a world of circuits and charges, of speed and utility, it is of lines of flight that can turn into flights of fancy. It is also a world in which the disciplining of the body takes on a more mechanical form. To steal a line from Michel Foucault, the “axis of individuation” is turned on its head.8 With Wang’s work, the Ming and Qing dynasty era Chinese connoisseur’s reflection upon the vulgarity or purity of things gives way to a set of theoretically charged reflections upon contemporary appliances and how they contour our daily urban existence. Theoretically, it is driven from the shadows by figures from the heterological side of the Western canon – Nietszche, Bataille, Harroway, Butler, Foucault, Benjamin, Deleuze, to name but a few – who are only rarely named. Even more deeply buried is the spirit of xiaopin prose that is more than a style of writing but as we have suggested, a style of thought. It is a style of thought that blends the poetic and the realist, but in Wang’s hands, it threads these themes

Preface xi through postmodern and cultural theory to weave a tapestry of thought on contemporary urban domestic life through the life of the machine. With each chapter, however, one must connect the dots, and as these dots are connected, a picture of China’s urban biopolitical world begins to emerge through the domestic electronic devices that produce sensory and ontological changes in the human subject. Television sets create a static spatial relationship between subject, screen, and couch, while radio allows movement but creates a relationship between ear and sound. Washing machines establish a domestic rhythm while the light bulb directs the glow. In building up these sorts of connections, Wang forces us to focus on these objects, and in so doing, he “reanimates” them. They are brought into focus not as utensils, but as provocations to thought and a question to ourselves. There are no grand truths revealed, no dragons slain, no conclusions drawn, only the continuous self-generated demand to comment upon, to take issue with, or get annoyed by a series of assertions. Slowly, as the work gains momentum, one begins to connect the dots between each essay, to piece together arguments that flow into one another, and to follow Wang’s path into another way of seeing. Slowly, our mind’s-eye turns to view these everyday appliances as microlevel machines enabling a particular form of domestication and the concomitant transformation of everyday life. Through the warp and woof of Wang’s prose, one catches glimpses of the everyday, offered not as dense ethnographic descriptions, but as reflections upon the practices, uses, and relations machines have created between one another and with the human subject. Weaving his way from one household object onto the next, Wang builds up a picture of the way everyday life intersects and interacts with these material objects. Each chapter adds another point of intersection or alignment as each chapter focuses on a different object: the washing machine, the refrigerator, the computer, the air conditioner, and so forth. As these lines of flight build into webs of understanding, an image of Chinese urban domesticity does begin to appear. Wang, however, barely touches upon this, leaving it to what he calls his afterword. It was also only in the afterword that Wang explained why he had come to reflect upon and research everyday domestic appliances. It was quite simple, he tells us, it was because he spent a lot of time at home!9 While working in his contemporary apartment, Wang began to notice the plethora of devices that had come to control the environment around him. Electrical devices now controlled the temperature in each room of his apartment, they refrigerated and thereby elongated the life of the plants and animals he desired to eat, and through a range of communication devices, they networked his domestic life-space, rhizome-like, into the lives of those who lived outside his “world.” His reflections, then, are about the broader “functioning” of these machines in relation to senses of touch, smell, taste, sight, and sound; they are about the way these machines harness, discipline, and orientate the disposition of lives. These are reflections from within a Benjaminesque “shock effect” because for Wang and the Chinese population who lived through the Maoist years and into the rapid and monumental changes that followed, these domestic appliances were, indeed, signs of the shock of the new.

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Preface

One may not always agree with Wang Min’an’s readings, his flights of fancy, or his opinions. Nevertheless, what can be said is that in the particular way he redirects the gaze toward the subject-machine relation, he offers a freshness and novelty to the topic that cannot be ignored. Who would have thought, for instance, of freezer storage being like a dam of water, in so far as it stores and elongates the life of meat and vegetables? Who would have thought of washing machines through their very utility actually carving onto the surface of everyday life their own patterning or rhythm; that the theatre of clothes, from dirty to clean, would take place on a stage behind the glass door of the front-end loader. Here are just some of the reflections from left field, enabled partly, I suspect, because they come out of the field of China. Any book, Paul de Man once said, is always in part autobiographical,10 and while Wang Min’an does not mention this, he lived through the tumultuous 80s and 90s of the economic reform period in China. In this period in China’s large cities, household appliances began appearing almost overnight in shops that were themselves becoming malls. In terms of modern urban Chinese family life, people didn’t just move into new apartments, they moved into a new mode of life that involved satiating new material desires. People’s attitude to “things” was changing. In the early 80s, Chinese people would speak of their desire for the “three wheels” or sanlun (三轮) – to own a bicycle, a sewing machine, and a watch. By the end of the 80s, the expression of such modest desires had become a joke, and by the 90s, commodity desire had pretty much saturated all aspects of life. This social change goes largely assumed in Wang’s text, for he does not explain how this transformation took place, nor offer the detail of an historical explanation. Instead, what this text offers is something far more imaginative, creative, and theoretically interesting. He offers pathways to a new understanding of the relationship between household goods and the disciplining of the body. Here, one can note a Foucauldian influence in Wang’s work, but this is not the Foucault who traces the management of populations into liberal and neoliberal governmentality but the Foucault who follows a line of flight from the disciplining of bodies into the biopolitical technologies of the everyday. It is a reading of Foucault inflected by Deleuzian control society, and a Benjaminesque moment of awakening. It is in that moment of awakening that the aura of the appliances Wang examines seems to glow ever more brightly. This is because Wang, who lived through the transition from Maoism to market, knows all too well just how magical these machines were in transforming everyday life in China. To jump, in just over a decade, from calculations undertaken on an abacus to the use of the computer, from exerting labor on a washer board over a basin to pressing a button on an automatic front-end loader, or to pick up a cellphone rather than struggle on a public landline system that didn’t properly work, is to jump worlds. Little wonder then, that these sort of transformations of domestic space had a profound effect upon urban Chinese family values. The domestic space, writes Wang, has always been a precondition of family life in any understanding of family ethics, yet it has, historically, however, only ever been considered a “subsidiary framework.” Not anymore! From the early

Preface xiii 1990s onwards, as the boom in big city development gained white hot momentum, domestic space was suddenly transformed into commercialized space. As Wang puts it, space became a commodity that individuals could actually occupy. It was a space that was no longer a subsidiary framework to domestic familial ethical production, but rather a “space” that produced its own ethical comportment. With the structural relations between domestic space and family ethics turned on its head, new types of relations came to dominate the home. The old blood-based ethical relations that had once monopolized the family household domain gave way to the effects of new technology, which, Wang argues, became “the biggest consideration of family and life” (189). As passwords replaced watchwords; as mechanical items were replaced by digital ones; as a coded set of movements, buttons, instructions, rhythms, sounds, and visions became the habits of the everyday, they reinforced daily, hourly, and by the minute the remorseless use of appliances within a new modern form of family “enclosure.” This then, is not a “China book,” but rather a work marked by China but drawn on a broader canvas. It is site-specific rather than area studies, it is a work of postcolonial politics, not a book about postcolonial politics. It brings to existing Western debates new ways of seeing and knowing. It speaks to debates about material objects that in social theory can be traced through Ernst Simmel to Siegfried Kracauer, and on to Bruno Latour’s Actor network theory, (ANT) and to Graham Harman and OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology). It speaks to certain art practices too. Critical spatial practice, for example, requires process-based, site-specific approaches that also struggle to define subject object relations. It speaks to semiotics – from Barthes to Baudrillard – but most importantly, it speaks to all these debates in a foreign tongue. In other words, this is a book of postcolonial politics that speaks to postmodern and cultural studies theory in a new, different, and refreshing way. It is a work that speaks of the Chinese world but not to it. It speaks of that world in a way that allows us to catch a glimpse of our (Western, or Western-trained) selves. This is because the technological transformation of the Chinese urban space is not dissimilar to that which took place in the West, it is just that in China, it was done in the blink of an eye. What, then, is not postcolonial or political about a book that offers a radically different reading on the everyday based on a radically different way of interpolating Western theory? What is not postcolonial about a work that takes theories drawn from the (anti-canonical parts of the) Western canon, forms them through an engagement with non-Western modes of writing, and then delivers reflections on our state of being in the transition into the modern? Michael Dutton and Pal Ahluwalia

Notes 1 We would like to thank Professors Li Shiqiao and Professor Judith Farquhar for sharing their thoughts on Wang Min’an’s work with us. 2 In terms of the social sciences, think of the so-called “aesthetic turn” in International Relations theory (Bleiker), or the “Legal Orientalism” buried within legal transfer

xiv

3 4 5

6

7 8 9

10

Preface theory (Ruscola), or even this series (Postcolonial Politics) as evidence of the spread of these questions of a “cultural turn” beyond the borders of the humanities. On the aesthetic turn, see Roland Bleiker (2001), “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” Millennium, Journal of International Studies, December, 509–533. On Legal Orientalism, see Teemu Ruscola (2013), Legal Orientalism, Harvard University Press. On the cover of the Chinese edition of this book, the publishers classified this as being suibisanwen (随笔散文), which is an informal style of writing that falls within xiaoping literature. Craig Clunas (1991), Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China, Politics Press, Cambridge, 53. Clunas’ work is the seminal English language work on this ancient tome. Jane Kramer says this about Montaigne, but the argument can equally be extended to the xiaopin literary tradition. See Jane Kramer (2009) “Me, Myself, and I: What made Michel de Montaigne the first modern man.” The New Yorker. September 7, @ http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/me-myself-and-i 14 August, 2017. Li accounts for this by contrasting the manners promoted by the Europeans in the cultivation of social status with the social status the Chinese elite gained through the imperial examination system. Where one demanded public and performative acts, Li says, the other was scholarly and private. See Li Shiqiao (2014), Understanding the Chinese City, Sage, London, 61–2. These themes constitute some of the key chapters in his book Treatise on Superfluous Things Zhangwuzhi《长物志》. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979), especially pp. 192–93. Basically it was because, like Wen Zhenheng, Wang Min’an spent a lot of time at home. As a member of the scholar gentry class with significant wealth, Wen could afford to stay at home. To write about the things around him, therefore, meant to itemize things in an elite home. For details of his life, see Craig Clunas (1992?), 20–5. For his part, Wang Min’an claims it was the exploitation of one of the key privileges of academic life that led him to material objects. “Actually, the reason I wrote this little book is very simple: I spend most of my time at home (this is an advantage of being a university professor).” 132. Paul de Man (1984), The Rhetoric of Romanticism, Columbia University Press, New York, 1984, 70.

1

Washing machine

1 There are a variety of modes of circulation and reproduction in a domestic space. New things are constantly brought in while unneeded articles are regularly taken away. A home’s interior is constantly redecorated, rearranged, and recoded. Fresh air keeps coming in to replace stale air. To keep a household in good condition, it is necessary to ensure that things are stable and clean, hence the need for constant recycling and circulation, which explains why the home space can always look new and orderly. One fundamental difference between the modern and the ancient domestic space is that the rate of circulation in the modern home is much faster, due to the considerably increased capacity of a family to produce waste, so it is an increasingly important part of housekeeping to efficiently remove garbage. The law of circulation in the domestic space applies not only to material objects and air, but to family members as well: after the husband or wife leaves the family, a new husband or wife will appear in its midst; when an elderly person dies, leaving his or her dear ones in deep sorrow, a baby is born into the family, greeted with joy and thankfulness. A household unable to maintain its stability would fail to function well. This is one major reason for ensuring good domestic circulation. The structure of the modern home is characterized by an increasing diversity of circulation technology and methods. Apart from the doors and windows, it has plenty of pipes installed in it, which connect the inside with the outside. Unlike its ancient counterparts, the modern home is full of holes, increasingly resembling a “broken” home, an open place, one with penetrated walls. These holes lead to the channels running from one home to another to pass out their waste. Nowadays garbage is no longer carried out through doors but through these hidden pipes, and this is how the garbage of a household miraculously becomes invisible. Moreover, modern homes are closely interconnected and serve as one another’s passageways. With more entrances and exits than in ancient times, the modern home is maintained by more advanced exchange and circulation technology. It has flues and water pipes as well as toilet drain pipes and air-conditioning ducts. Of course there are water inlet and outlet pipes for the washing machine as well. Families living in high rises are strangers to one another, but they are mysteriously integrated into a whole from top to bottom, connected by water passing

2

Washing machine

every home through drainage pipes, and by their shared drainage passageways. In this sense, these families are not unrelated though they never meet. The concept of neighbor has been rewritten, for what makes people recognize each other as neighbors are no longer familiar faces, but those interconnecting pipes and passageways. Neighbors become aware of one another’s presence only when their shared pipes are clogged. This is how modern families become an interconnected whole through their shared invisible pipes, which echo the symphony of everyday life in the high rises. A washing machine, surrounded by these pipes, depends on them to do its work. Cleaning is an ancient method of circulation, but the washing machine assembled with pipes pushes the technology of domestic cleaning – or the technology of circulation – to a new stage. Now laundry cleaning can be completed in the laundry room at home with no external aid. A family needs to do cleaning on a regular basis, for it is an important part of domestic reproduction. Actually, every area of a home, every part that contributes to its overall spatial arrangement, needs regular cleaning. The floors, the furniture, the clothes, and the people themselves ought to be constantly cleaned – this is an important part of modern society’s consensus based on its knowledge of bacteria and their devastating effects. Ventilation and cleaning are two primary ways to keep the home environment healthy and hygienic. In a sense, a home can be taken as a circulatory cleaning machine. The washing machine aims to guarantee the efficiency of home cleaning. Every day, large amounts of water flow in and out of every home through those crisscross pipes, flushing out all the bacteria, viruses, and all forms of dirt. Cleaning seeks to ensure purity. A household engages in regular cleaning over and over again, and in the name of hygiene makes an effort to purge itself of dirt, just as efforts have been made, in the name of class struggle, or for the sake of racial purity, to purge a nation of its unneeded elements; though what is used in this kind of purging is not water but a butcher’s knife. These two otherwise different kinds of purge serve the same purpose: they are both intended to eliminate dirt or viruses to safeguard cleanness, be it of a home or a nation. If cleaning is an ancient function of water, then cleaning by way of pipes is a modern method of circulation. Structurally speaking, the washing machine is an essential element of the modern family. Modern residential designing always imagines the washing machine as a spatial object, which occurs in the mind of an architect as a small square box. Furthermore, it adds to the social meaning of the modern home: like the refrigerator and television, the washing machine used to be regarded as one of the central necessities for the home of a newly married couple – a home without a washing machine is incomplete or considered to be less than perfect and normal. However, in spite of such importance, the washing machine never attracts as much attention as the TV, and unlike the latter, it is usually placed in an inconspicuous corner in the home, as if it did not exist at all. As compared with other domestic appliances, the washing machine has no demand for its location and always allows itself to be spatially marginalized. People do not like putting the washing machine in a prominent place, and always hide it as much as they can, setting it up in a corner of the hometo ensure every space in it is maximized.

Washing machine

3

The washing machine is not an object rich in symbolic value. The size of a television and the capacity of a refrigerator are both an index of their functions and a pointer to their sign value. Or, we can say, their use value is reflected through their sign value. The quality of a washing machine, however, is hard to determine by the eyes. It arouses no desires for sign value in the eyes. People do not care about its sign value – instead, they only care about its functions, or about whether it is of the single cylinder or double cylinder type, whether it is automatic, or whether it has a drying function, whether it is able to get rid of germs, or whether it saves on electricity – in a word, efficiency is the only consideration in selecting a washing machine. As the washing machine is devoid of sign value, its appearance never strikes people as a concern (generally, household appliances do not have much sign value), and therefore the only requirement for its placement is a spot in the home where it can be assembled with a special type of pipe. Unlike other domestic facilities which only need to be connected to the power supply, the washing machine needs to be installed with a pipe as well, which, hidden in the wall, seems to be of an infinitely prolonged length. The pipe is not external to the washing machine, but an integral part of it. One can also say that the washing machine is grafted onto the pipe. In this sense it does not constitute a complete system until it is connected to a passageway. This is how its placement is both flexible and rigid, both casual and strict. The television is located in the living room; the refrigerator is placed in or close to the kitchen; the air conditioner is always mounted on the wall. All of them follow their own spatial order. But the washing machine, on the contrary, can be placed in any hidden corner as long as it is easy to connect it to a pipe. Its location is not determined by the user’s sense of convenience, but by the household’s spatial structure. It only follows the grammar of assemblage, and has no need for the grammar of spatial configuration. Indeed, there is no rule on where to place the washing machine (it can be located in the balcony, in the kitchen, or in the washing room, or even in the living room), such that an intruder in a stranger’s home cannot easily find it. The washing machine is so unworthy of attention, but nonetheless it is regarded as indispensable to every home.

2 People never show any interest in their washing machine at all. It never comes into their view when it is not operating. A mere working apparatus, the washing machine has an even frequency rate of work, and follows its own stable rhythm. People select their preferred TV channels in accord with the program timetable, their own mood, and their daily schedule. As for the air conditioner and electrical fans, whether or when they are used depends on seasons and temperatures. The washing machine, however, does its job continuously at regular intervals regardless of people’s rhythm of life. Our varying rhythm of life makes it necessary for us to make choices. We may give up cooking or television, but we cannot afford not to wash clothes. So the washing machine, following its own autonomous rhythm of work, discloses a stable aspect of life – it never ceases to work on a regular basis, not even in a time of political unrest.

4

Washing machine

The washing machine has its own unique style of operation. Repetition is the law governing all domestic appliances. The refrigerator maintains an unchanging temperature, and, when exceeding the set temperature, it will bounce back to its regular temperature. Air conditioners and electrical fans will keep blowing air back and forth rhythmically. But the way the washing machine operates points to a complicated narrative: it has a beginning, a development, a climax, and a conclusion. That is, its process of operation is one of variations and differences. Like a story, it has ups and downs, its sound varying in rhythm: it alternates between the lilting sound of water flowing, the intermittent buzzing noise, and the quickly reverberating rumbling sound until finally there comes a sudden halt with a warning signal. These sounds not only keep changing but also occur at regular intervals – they are by no means monotonous, and can even be categorized as music. Every kind of sound signals a different development of the narrative – the influx of water, washing, rinsing, and spinning, and again, the influx of water, washing, rinsing, and spinning, and then drying, as if the varying sounds have been telling a legend of a destiny, and as if there were a drama going on in the square box. Of course, the box closely guards the ups and downs of the narrative process of washing. The drama is not to be watched but heard.1 The sounds expressively represent what is going on in the box, externalizing the internal narrative. This is a perfect phonetic combination of sound and signification, an exemplary case of appearance matched by meaning. Of course, people are not interested in the internal movement of the washing machine, nor do they bother about how it operates. They only care to throw clothes into it, press buttons, and wait till the job is done to get a shapeless mass of clothes out of the box. Ironically, the washing machine’s entire working process is ignored, as if the process did not exist, as if the clothes became cleaned by themselves, although the machine’s noisy sounds have been energetically telling its story of labor, speaking loudly of its own existence. The washing machine’s working process is none of its owner’s concerns; actually they find its noise irritating and always keep a distance from it, trying to shut it out with a closed door. What the washing machine does and what human beings do belong to two entirely different domains of work; the farther they stay from each other, the better. The washing machine is a mere working apparatus. Of the different types of machines that humankind has invented, some are used to handle things, some to handle people. Washing machine and refrigerator are used to deal with people’s daily’s needs and are therefore working machines; television and radio are employed to deal with people and are therefore counted as entertainment machines. There is another kind of machine which is used to serve people by way of dealing with things. Air conditioners and electrical fans belong to this category. They handle the air to satisfy people’s needs. Machines that deal with people require people’s presence and their investment of time; as for machines that deal with things, some need people’s presence and their investment of time (like a vacuum cleaner), and some don’t. Machines that work of their own accord requiring no human assistance testify to the rule of automatism. As an automatic apparatus, the washing machine not only drives people out of its own territory, but pushes them completely out

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of this ancient domain of daily activity. More exactly, washing machines relieved women from the painful task of washing clothes by hand.

3 Almost everyone believes that the invention of the washing machine signals an important aspect of women’s liberation. It spells women’s release from a major part of domestic drudgery, removing the necessary connection between women and laundry washing, freeing them from the habitual posture of bending their bodies low to wash. Just as Donna Haraway has noted, “Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions” (2004: 38). One can say that the washing machine has destroyed the conventional image of the female, and washing clothes is no longer connected with a fixed image, or is no longer associated with a certain female posture. Gone forever is the portrait of a woman who, sitting on a low stool in front of a wooden basin filled with water and a load of clothes, her head bent low, keeps rubbing clothes hard with both hands, her back moving up and down. This is not only a picture of a toiling woman, but also a classic cultural image of womanhood. A series of metaphoric implications are inscribed in this image: women are deeply involved in domestic tasks, doing tedious and repetitive jobs, their bodies continuously bent, hands perpetually engaged in manual labor, day in and day out, tolerant and uncomplaining. The washing machine abolishes the association between clothes and female labor, eliminating the identity-related symbolic significance implied in the connection. The advent of the washing machine eventually severs women from the cultural memory of female suffering and suppression. Actually clothes are always associated with women, which is not only manifested in the labor process of laundry cleaning, but also finds expression in clothes shopping as well as in clothes exhibitions. Clothes constitute the core of many women’s pleasure, while washing clothes ruins such pleasure. Clothes shopping and clothes washing are two opposed forms of experience, but the washing machine breaks down the opposition, rendering clothes a pure, unalloyed, uncompromised pleasure. It enables women to fully enjoy wearing clothes without having to wash them by hand. Nothing is as closely gender-related for women as clothes washing. It seems to be part of what women are born for.2 There is certainly a historical reason for it: women have for centuries been assigned to engage in all forms of domestic tasks and the tradition of women looking after laundry is a continuation of the ancient male and female division of labor. The job of washing clothes, which is done in the home, demanding more patience and carefulness than physical strength, has been assigned to women, just like outdoor tasks, violent and risky, fall on the shoulders of men. Nowadays, many traditional forms of indoor labor are being taken over by men, or, shared between men and women, such that gender and spatial boundaries of labor are disappearing – men are found working in kitchens which were previously women’s exclusive territory. But prior to the invention of the washing machine, washing laundry (even folding, ironing, and packing up

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Washing machine

laundry) has been a persistently closed domain, to which no man was admitted. Why? Perhaps it is because clothes from the very beginning were culturally coded as gendered articles – it is not only a matter of gendered differences between male and female clothes; actually, one can say that, in a sense, all clothes are conceptualized as feminine. Clothes seem to be intrinsically feminine, as if they possess a woman’s character traits. The reason clothes have been historically regarded as feminine was because they, ornamental in nature, are objects for caressing, touching, and watching; they are tender, light, and soft things, fetish objects. Isn’t there a correspondence between clothes’ warm softness and women’s warm softness? The clothes’ softness seems to be an invitation to women and is incompatible with men: should a man be allowed to touch and rub feminine soft clothes with his coarse hands? Only women are to be trusted with clothes (including men’s clothes). Moreover, clothes and the human body make up a perfect assemblage. They exist for each other and are interdependent. They are so closely related, such that clothes, particularly underwear, are regarded as part of the body, or imagined as its skin, as if anything that has been worn by a person carries his or her personal smell. Female clothes are derivative marks of the female body instead of mere textile commodities – even the piece of underwear which, displayed in the shop window, has had no intimate contact with any female body is no exception. Besides, clothes carry the smell of the body’s excretions (which is the reason they need cleaning), hence accentuating the connection between clothes and the human body. The uncleanness of clothes is equivalent to the uncleanness of the body wearing them. Our traditional culture has developed a set of taboos on the female body, which is protected from exposure. As the derivative marks or symbols of the female body, female clothes are naturally guarded from men’s prying eyes and rough hands; they have to be handled by women themselves. Indoor cleaning in general has long been de-gendered, but laundry washing had persistently stayed within women’s sphere of work till the advent of the washing machine. Moreover, due to the peculiarly intimate relationship between clothes and the body, laundry cleaning is the last to have been commercialized, and many people today still refuse to allow their own clothes to be handled by anyone outside the family. Even prior to the invention of the washing machine, laundry cleaning was never really commercialized in China. Clothes were only to be handled within the household. Despite the fact that washing clothes is so cumbersome, and so much of it is pure drudgery, it has always been a task limited to the family; to the female members of the family (or the housemaids). The advent and spread of washing machines makes people even more reluctant to allow laundry cleaning to be commercialized. Ironically, the expanding market of washing machines only manages to prevent laundry cleaning from being commercialized (clothes sent to commercial public laundries remain limited in amount and kind). While making and selling clothes has always been a major part of commercial business, washing clothes remains largely a domestic task and has little to do with commercial business. The washing machine works efficiently in the home and what it cleans is no more than one family’s laundry. It does its job following a regular schedule.

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The way machines handle clothes and the way women handle them are entirely different. A woman, before methodically and patiently washing a piece of clothing, will search it, look it over, determine its category, find out its dirty spots, and look into every detail of it. To wash a piece of clothing is to explore every part of it. Clothes reveal their secrets not when they are being worn but when they are being washed: their pockets are pulled out to be inspected – many secrets of the pockets are divulged when being washed. This is how an elaborate taxonomy of clothes is developed and practiced in the process of washing clothes: which are classified in terms of inside and outside, part in comparison with part, outer clothes and underwear, jackets and pants, men’s wear and women’s wear, children’s wear and adults’ wear, different family members’ wear, etc. Laundry washing is a moment of reviewing and sorting a family’s clothes. Only the woman in charge of a household’s laundry is able to acquire the total knowledge of a family’s clothing, and only she is able to tell each piece’s history and destiny. A woman’s spectrum of affectionate feelings for her family is registered by her experience of their clothes. When rubbing and washing her family members’ clothes, she seems to be touching and caressing their bodies, hence her varying emotional investment in washing each particular piece of clothing. To be sure, the act of washing clothes is highly mechanical, but that does not mean the washer undergoes no subtle and intriguing psychological change – when her hands move from her mother-in-law’s clothes to her children’s clothes, she undergoes an emotional change from resentment to love. Clothes are hierarchized not only when they are being worn, but when they are being washed as well. In a woman’s view, the household’s laundry cleaning has to follow her own coded language, her own order, and her own nuanced emotional experience. Of course, the washing machine has its own grammar as well, but it is neutral and shows no emotions for neutral clothes. The process of laundry washing is a process of depersonalization. The grammar of the washing machine has nothing to do with its objects, and it never collapses the boundary between its objects and itself. Rather, it obeys its given grammar of assemblage, ignoring the difference of clothes: once put into the washing machine, all kinds of clothes are equal in front of it and are treated indifferently, regardless of distinctions in price, identity, and gender, and regardless of whether they be worn inside or outside. When thrown into the washing machine, all the clothes are stirred into an indifferent mass of matter, rejecting any claim on privilege. The status of the wearers of the clothes, the sense of propriety, dignity, and ornamental value attached to them, as well as the sign value of the brand names, all these are ruthlessly shattered by the washing machine. This is the dark underside of clothes.

4 Washing clothes and cooking are usually the two most important types of manual labor in the home. But then why is it that laundry washing can be done by machines while cooking cannot? Though it is done manually, laundry washing, unlike other forms of physical work, has never been looked upon as a form of craftsmanship. It does not belong to the category of art. Few people would say

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Washing machine

they enjoy doing laundry, or they have expertise in washing clothes. Actually the practice of washing clothes does not even count as an occupational field. Nor have we ever heard of anything like masters of laundry washing. As long as what the hand does requires no artistic skills, it can be performed by the machine. One can say that machines hold sway where art is absent. What laundry washing involves is a pair of hands continuously rubbing clothes, reaching into the depths of their interiority, violently ravaging them. It is certainly not intended to destroy them but to give them a new look. It may serve to give vent to resentment, or may involve a moderate degree of violence, or a subtle emotional release, but it demands no skills and what is required of it is nothing but patient labor of hands. As such, the task of laundry washing can be easily taken over by the machine. Our hands are capable of performing various kinds of jobs, and laundry washing is the least creative and most unskilled task. What the hands do at this moment, having nothing to do with the brain, is only a result of mechanical reflex responses. As a matter of fact, whatever involves exquisite and dexterous handwork, and whatever requires creativity, can be conceptualized as an artistic activity. The defining feature of art is none other than creativity – here arises the distinction between machine performance and artistic activity. Of the two primary domestic domains of manual labor previously mentioned, laundry washing falls more on the side of mechanical performance, whereas cooking is more of an artistic practice. Expertise in cooking has to be achieved through training, and that is why there are numerous culinary schools in the world. Apart from professional cooks known as chefs, there are a large number of online or TV cooking courses as well. Culinary art seems to abound in unfathomable secrets, and is an infinite field of experience, knowledge, and potential worth continuously exploring. Not everyone finds it easy to command the art. As a specialized field of work performed by using the tongue and hands, cooking brings the pleasure of creativity. It follows no unchanging grammar, offering people enough space for fully exercising their creative imagination, rewarding them with a sense of fulfillment. This is why many people have a passion for culinary art. During the entire process of cooking a meal, people use all kinds of machines such as rice cookers and microwave ovens, but some core elements of the process are beyond any machine’s capacity to handle, for they exclusively depend on talent and creative ingenuity, the hand’s intuitive ability to determine the perfect amounts of ingredients, and the sensitivity of the tip of the tongue to slight nuances in food. The practice of laundry washing is an entirely different story. It has never been an art, and what it requires is simply physical labor. It has no rule to follow, or, more precisely, it only needs to follow some rigid rule, the rule of repeatedly applying cleaning chemicals onto clothes, which involves no knowledge and skills. There have never been training courses on laundry washing – people need to take no training to be able to do it. With no requirement for imagination and creativity, the task of laundering clothes can be easily done by machines. True, machines are gradually replacing human hands in the field of labor, but what is actually replaced are the functions the hands are reluctant to perform. The hands have the will to act or not to act. They are involved in so many fields

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of work. They are not only the primary human organs for touching the external world, but the only ones that are able to reach every part of the human body itself. Highly sensitive, the hand is at once a tool for tedious labor and a source of pleasure. Its movement is both an instinctual, passive mechanical response and an act of active creativity. In some situations it integrates labor with pleasure, seeking pleasure through labor. Sometimes the hand is full of desire; sometimes it is seized by fear, and sometimes it is extremely excited or completely tired out. Only when the hand has no desire, or when it is fatigued, or when what it does is a mere passive response, can machines be used as a substitute for it. On the one hand, machines are standardized and capable of achieving the level of precision that the hand is unable to reach no matter how hard it tries; on the other, machines are extremely mechanical and rigid, unable to display even the minimal degree of dexterity and creativity of the hand. The machines have no end of stamina, way more than the hand does, but they are neutral and can never have the hand’s exquisite sensitivity – this is one of their fundamental differences, which can be best illustrated by the example of the washing machine. In the process of laundering clothes, the hand is not required to be creative and only needs to have stamina; it is weary and bored. The fatigued hand calls to be replaced by the machine. The washing machine was invented to provide the kind of standardization, endurable labor power, and neutrality that the hand is never able to achieve, to deliver the hand from what it is reluctant to do. The birth of innumerable machines leads to the liberation of the hand. However, the distinction between machine and hand does not mean that they cannot approach each other; rather, it spells a special relationship between them. Machines’ relationshipwith hands as their replacement attests to their separation, a distance maintained between them as strangers. Actually there is a more extensive connection between them, for they may form a close relationship of assemblage, or of complementarity. They are inseparable from each other – this is a major form of their relationship. Machine and hand rely on one another, and neither is complete without the other. When hands are assembled with automobiles, electrical drills, lathes, cellphones, or with vacuum cleaners, such an assemblage does not mean the increased power of hands or machines, but the emergence of something new and difficult to define, the emergence of a new ability, a novel thing called hand-machine. Moreover, hands are associated with action, and work is the raison d’être for the existence of hands (people always say, “work with your hands”). If our hands constitute the condition of possibility of our action, if our action is usually the action of our hands, then either as a replacement of hands, or as an assemblage with them, the acting machine always treats the hands as its object of imagination, and is always born in their view. In the case of the washing machine, hands are almost the only object of the machine’s imagination: the washing machine exists to replace hands; it is not a hand, but at the same time, what it does is no more than what a pair of hands do – washing clothes (only the artist has the ability to change its function – one of Huang Yongping’s classic artworks changes the washing machine into an instrument for cleaning books instead of clothes). In this sense, a machine is not an object external to human beings,

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or something irrelevant to them; rather, to borrow terms from Bruno Latour, the machine is a “quasi-object,” or a “quasi-subject,” which deconstructs the binary opposition between subject and object.

5 The washing machine’s rumbling noise can turn the home into a workshop. There are many ways of classifying different types of labor: there are, for instance, domestic labor and labor outside the home. The latter has always been regarded as of decisive importance, for it is more productive (the progress and operation of a society seems to depend on it), more formal (there are restrictions, regulations, and rituals for it), more socialized (collaboration among members of a large group), and more necessary – it is a family’s important financial support. Wages are measures of labor outside the home as well as the solid, palpable fruits it bears. Therefore labor has been conventionally thought of as what is done outside the home, whereas the labor done in the home has been overlooked, for it has none of these features and benefits. The home has always been imagined as a place of dreams, warmth, relaxation, and rest, a closed, autonomous space that has nothing to do with labor. The paradox of the modern home is that, in order to turn it into a non-labor place, it has to be a site of productive labor in the first place. Domestic labor is intended to give the home an atmosphere of restfulness. As the modern home constantly expands its housing area, constantly replenishes its stock of material things, and constantly makes the best use of space, it becomes a site of productive activity. The greater demand a family has for domestic space, the more it needs to engage in spatial production. A modern home is not only a place of rest and recuperation, but a site of production as well. Repetitive domestic labor transforms the home into a factory, a residential factory. People work hard in this factory to make it more fit to live in. There always has to be someone engaged in domestic production. People either retire from labor in the public space to fully engage in domestic labor in the home space, or hire someone else to do domestic tasks for them to ensure that they have time and energy for work outside the home, or, they divide their time between labor at home and outside, ceaselessly shuttling between the domestic and the outside space. What the home stages is not a fixed opposition between the space of rest and that of labor, but their dialectical exchange. It is to serve the needs of these two types of spaces that various kinds of domestic appliances have been invented. What the TV and air conditioner create is a space of rest; what is created by the washing machine and vacuum cleaner is a space of labor; as for the refrigerator and microwave oven, their job is to bridge the two opposed spaces. The washing machine is an instrument of production in this new factory of a home. It closely resembles the production machine in the classical sense of the term. It produces noise, efficiently operating and slightly shaking in a domestic corner. All this turns the home into a traditional workshop. As the home is an autonomous space, domestic labor, apparently, is nothing compulsory. Rather, it is highly flexible, and what determines its intensity and

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efficiency are the will and habit of the subject of production instead of institutional regulations. Besides, every family member is potentially a subject of domestic labor. Unlike factory labor, there is no standard for domestic labor, nor is it definitely rewarded or recognized. As a result, there is always war at home, always someone complaining or bargaining. Domestic tasks are always the cause of quarrels in the family, and the home as a workshop or a zone of production is a site of crisis caused by labor division. Strangely, however, of all forms of domestic labor, the least controversial is laundry washing, which is regarded as what women are destined for. Therefore the invention as well as the improvement of washing machines is good news to women. Today, it is impossible for women to imagine a life without washing machines. Though it was only a few decades ago that washing machines began to make their way into modern homes, their emergence quickly delinked laundry washing from women. However, women’s emancipation from the task of washing clothes by hand does not afford them time for rest or recreation. The time women previously spent laundering clothes is now used for other types of domestic labor. Indeed, the increasing presence of machines in our life does not bring us more time on our hands. Our home is saturated with all kinds of machines, but that does not in the least relieve us of any domestic labor. Perhaps the truth is that machines create more work for us to do instead of less. Today, the production, consumption, and operation of machinery leave the world exhausted with work. Machines are doing a great deal of work for mankind, but it has to be carefully attended to. The birth and disappearance of machines never happens suddenly and quietly like a ghost. Every machine’s invention, production, and demise involve tens of thousands of people. Every machine ushers in a large, long chain of production. Women no longer need to use their hands to wash clothes, but they have to use them to take care of the washing machine. Machines are autonomous and decide on their own speed, keeping people running desperately after them. Fundamentally speaking, machines do not liberate our hands; rather, they control them, create new jobs for them – except for their basic autonomous behavior, our hands are assigned to a new task: they have to follow the machines’ action and rhythm of movement. With automobiles, we no longer need to walk as much but we have to use our hands much more strenuously. Machines do not reduce our working time, but require us to turn out more products of labor. What is gone following the invention of the washing machine is not only the taxing tedium of laundering clothes by hand, but also the pleasure it used to bring to women. Decades ago, prior to the advent of washing machines, washing clothes was women’s major way of socialization, and this was especially true of rural women. Every day, women walked out and met at the same place at the same time (usually at the lakeside or riverside) to wash clothes. Clothes floating, flapping, and tumbling in the water, the merry noises of women’s chattering and giggling happily joined with the noise of the water. This was the moment when a world of freedom and autonomy was born for women, freed from their family and men. This world holds the secrets that are only shared among women. Here and now washing clothes is not their real concern; what matters is the pleasure of meeting

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and chatting, which relieves them of the tedium of domestic drudgery. This was a beautiful cleaning moment, a moment shared among the women obliviously enjoying themselves. Perhaps, in a certain situation, or during a certain dark phase of her life, for a woman to get up in the early morning, walking out to the riverside to share her innermost fears and worries with other women was her heart’s only ray of hope for the day.

Notes 1 There are two types of washing machines manufactured in China today: the pulsator washing machine and the tumbling-box washing machine. The top-loading pulsator washing machine was used in most of the Chinese households in the twentieth century. It has no glass door and its inside cannot be seen from outside. It is only recently that the tumbling-box washing machine with a glass door has started becoming popular in China. 2 Prior to the invention of the washing machine, there were almost no men doing clothes washing in China.

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Refrigerator

1 The refrigerator is a spatial machine. Its interior space and space allocation, its division and organization, and the amount of space it takes in a home, these are major considerations for purchasing this domestic machine. The price of a refrigerator is determined by its physical size. This is because it is first of all a storage machine, one for storing food – or we say, it is first of all a storage space. It has a particular demand on storage capacity, and on the size of the interior space of the home. Conversely speaking, the interior area of a home determines the choice of a refrigerator. This is a point easy to see when we compare the refrigerator with a computer or air conditioner: a computer does not take up much space; an air conditioner demands even less space, for it is located on a wall, practically occupying no actual space. When purchasing these machines, the size of the domestic area is almost of no concern to people. But the refrigerator is different, for its selection has much to do with the size of domestic space: the amount of space it takes has to match the size of the room where it is placed. Therefore, when buying a refrigerator, as when buying a large piece of furniture, people need to measure the floor space of their home. Besides, the refrigerator has to be placed in the kitchen as it is part of it; if the kitchen is too small, the fridge needs to be put just outside its door. To reduce the distance between the kitchen and the ingredients, ensuring the efficiency of cooking, the refrigerator has to be close to the kitchen. It is inconceivable to leave the refrigerator in a bedroom. That is to say, the refrigerator not only takes a specifically allocated space, but has a demand on its location in the home. This is why the placement of a refrigerator is always a problem or burden to a family living in a tiny domestic space. Like the washing machine, the refrigerator remains fixed where it is put, becoming a structural part of the homemachine, remaining fixed where it is located as a piece of permanent furniture in the household. As a storage machine, the refrigerator is more of a piece of furniture than a domestic appliance. It resembles a wardrobe. Actually it is a wardrobe proper, except that it is used for storing food. A household has various cabinets such as those used for placing clothes or shoes, for containing books, for keeping money or jewelry, or for collecting miscellaneous objects. All these are closed spaces, spaces within spaces, used spaces in the home. The size of the floor space of a

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home is an important measure of its value (people always put down the payment for a house or an apartment suite according to its physical size). A home is the sum or configuration of various spaces. It is where different spaces are at play. The domestic space is partitioned into different sections each having its own function: kitchen, bedrooms, living room, bathroom(s), or study, etc. They can be closed or opened, dividing residential life into separate portions. These spaces are further subdivided. A closed bedroom may have a wardrobe in it, which may have closed drawers within it. These spaces constitute the grammar of a family. On the one hand they serve to encode different forms of human behavior (for instance, people are to read in their studies, and eat in the dining room); on the other they put various kinds of articles into coded categories (books should be placed in book cabinets, while clothes need to be put in wardrobes). Such spaces have a strong capacity for hiding things, keeping all kinds of trivial items out of sight to give the home an orderly look. For only by collecting and hiding away these items can the domestic space look more open and tidy – the perpetual task of housekeeping is to keep things where they belong and out of sight. Just as everyone has their own home, so every thing has its home, its residence, as well. It is precisely in this sense that the refrigerator is a house, a residence, for things. It is food’s home or place to live. Like all other cabinets, the refrigerator is a closed mini “house,” one that is located in the closed space of a home. Interestingly, this white mini “house” has its own grammar of spatial organization as well, like every other kind of space. Its spatial configuration is an imitation of the supermarket’s spatial configuration. That is, the refrigerator is a reduced version of a food supermarket shipped into a private home, the arrangement of its inside being similar to that of the supermarket. Despite its small size, its interior space is carefully organized, partitioned into different sections with shelves and drawers, which can be readjusted or reassembled if need be. Like a residential place, the inside of a refrigerator is divided up into different parts and levels, each of them playing a specific role. It has to imagine all kinds of foods as well as their qualities, shapes (e.g. the shape of an egg), and temperature tolerance, and meet their different requirements, designing its own spatial structure and regulating its temperatures accordingly. The storage space of a refrigerator is fixed but its inner organization is always open to change to suit different items varying in shape and size, thus maximizing its utilization. There are different temperature zones in it to meet different needs of foods, which can be frozen or kept in low temperatures. In this sense, the refrigerator is foods’ air conditioner as well as their dwelling place. It is necessary to keep food rightly placed and preserved in appropriate temperatures. In short, it is necessary to ensure that food lives there in a comfortable manner. These are two necessary conditions for the refrigerator, which unfolds its spatial narrative alongside these two dimensions. As a building within a building, a closed space in it, the refrigerator becomes an enclaved space in the home, a dark forbidden zone separated from all other domestic spaces. This is how the refrigerator has the capacity to keep things from being noticed. What is purchased in the supermarket or grocery store is carried home to be put in the refrigerator. The reason foods must be put in the refrigerator is of course

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to properly store them, but more importantly, it is to keep them from being seen. Almost all kinds of food, especially raw food, are a cause of visual discomfort. People hate to face raw food, be it meat or vegetable. All ingredients look unpleasant, or more precisely, all raw ingredients look repulsive. Vegetables, when they are growing in the soil, look vigorous, abundantly leafy, and deliciously beautiful, but as soon as they are pulled out from the soil, changed from plants to ingredients to be cooked, they are dead or withering. The moment they reach the vegetable market or people’s home, they show all the signs of decaying. Unlike flowers, which, growing in the flowerpots, fill a home with liveliness and delight of life, vegetables, though nonetheless belonging to the category of plants, are treated like remainders, which, lying on the floor languid and withering, ruining the tidy look and aesthetic atmosphere of the home, are quickly stored off into the refrigerator, not only to keep them fresh, but to let them disappear from the clean and neat domestic environment. Every time food ingredients are carried home, they are quickly stored into the refrigerator, in order not to be seen in their raw state, avoiding turning the home into a littered market. The refrigerator stores and hides foods in the same way a wardrobe stores and hides clothes, to keep the home tidy and clean – raw foods are incompatible with a healthy environment. They are driven out of sight when stored in the refrigerator. No matter how repulsive the inside of a refrigerator looks, and no matter what is stuffed into it, its outside always looks clean and pleasant. It stands there looking well-shaped and pure, snow-white and spotless, as if its dark and chaotic inside didn’t exist. Actually, all kinds of food, as much as vegetables, have the look of a dead body when they are stored in the refrigerator. This is especially true of meat. Food is a means of maintaining life, but to maintain a life, other lives have to be killed. “The death of the one being is correlated with the birth of the other, heralding it and making it possible. Life is always a product of the decomposition of life. Life first pays its tribute to death which disappears, then to corruption following on death and bringing back into the cycle of change the matter necessary for the ceaseless arrival of new beings into the world” (Bataille 1986: 55). The death of a pig enables a human being to survive. All kinds of food have a prehistory as different forms of life. Both animals and vegetables, when they are targeted as food, will eventually be killed and brutally deprived of their lives. People do not eat anything live, but when live things are dead, they will rot. There is a transition from when things are killed to when they rot, and the function of the refrigerator is to prolong this transition as much as possible. It preserves foods in a special state of being: they are neither live and fresh nor rotten and ruined. Food in the fridge exists in such an in-between state of being. When a pig is butchered, it does not disappear into the world of nature, but remains in human society, quietly lying in the refrigerator as people’s object of desire. Thanks to the advent of the refrigerator, food lasts much longer in its after-life state instead of disappearing altogether – it can be said that it survives in the form of something dead. This makes it possible to regulate the supply of food. Actually it is very difficult to determine the demand for food for a certain period of time, or to tell how

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much pork is needed to meet the market demand of a day. An oversupply of pork would cause some of it to be rotten and wasted; an undersupply would cause a market shortage. The advent of the refrigerator solves all such problems, offering a means to store up the unconsumed meat, preventing the unsold food in the market from rotting. Actually almost all refrigerators contain meat that does not need to be consumed right away. Refrigerators have the capacity to swallow up excessive amounts of meat, reducing large quantities that come directly from the slaughterhouse to small portions to be distributed. That is how huge supplies of meat provided by the slaughterhouse manage to be distributed to every household. Perhaps it is the imagination towards the refrigerator that opens up the possibilities of butchering animals in huge numbers, and of the emergence of all kinds of large slaughterhouses, as well as the existence of the modern poultry and livestock farming industry. Hence the passage of meat from farms to refrigerators instead of directly to stoves. Refrigerators, like the dam controlling the flow of a river, can adjust the supply of meat, making possible large-scale livestock farming and butchering and preventing meat shortage or waste. They are mini meat warehouses. It goes without saying that, since the invention of the refrigerator, meat production and consumption have been steadily increasing and every family is able to eat meat every day.

2 The refrigerator is an intermediary between food supplier and stove. Actually it is more than a mere intermediary, for it significantly changes the shape of food. What is stored in the refrigerator is no longer what it has been in look, and this is particularly true of meat. Meat enters the refrigerator as what comes from a dead animal, but the fridge seems to hide this fact. A pig or cow being butchered undergoes a great deal of pains; their butchering is a moment of terror. Their meat, cut to pieces, with all its softness, bloodstain, and helplessness, never ceases to show signs of life – as long as meat retains the shape of meat, it is always unbearable to look at. Strangely, however, after meat, sliced or cut up, is put into the refrigerator, it no longer seems to have anything to do with their prehistory, or bear any relationship with a pig or cow. The refrigerator alters the shape of meat, making it look as hard as a stone, as if it were an inorganic object, a thing without breath or pulse. The refrigerator covers up any trace of death or killing. When a piece of meat is taken out of a fridge, it takes a while to soften, to return to its previous softness, but people seldom bother about its prehistory, as if its stony hardness is natural, and as if the refrigerator were its birthplace or it had been created by it. There is no sense of terror or eeriness associated with it. The refrigerator as an intermediary not only changes the shape of food, but also removes regional restrictions on food. While regulating their supply, it also reconfigures the geographical relationships of foods. Easy transportation and use of refrigeration to preserve food facilitate the widespread circulation of foods, enabling them to travel freely across barriers to reach their ultimate destinations. Without the refrigerator the travel of food, particularly of meat, would be

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drastically affected. The refrigerator together with fast means of transportation enables efficient circulation and preservation of foods despite geographical distances, such that they can overcome their intrinsic limitations as well as restrictions of time and space. The globalization of foods largely depends on the use of refrigerators. A domestic refrigerator in Sichuan may store salmon from Japan. Refrigerators are an invisible link in the chain of food transportation, and of course the last link. This is how deterritorialized food consumption or eating styles are likely to emerge. Foods used to be place-specific. In the early phases of human history “[man’s diet] was already a link in the food chains of local ecosystems. When cultivated plants and domesticated animals began to provide the bulk of the foodstuff among many peoples, the local pattern of food habits became increasingly pronounced because the first plants and the first animals that were placed under domestic use could only be those that were naturally grown in or readily adaptable to specific regions” (Chang 1977: 6). Human labor at the very beginning of history was focused on producing food, its products being nothing but food. Humans produced the kinds of food that their local soils and climates allowed to grow. There was a direct relationship between early humans and their diets: they grew what they were able to grow, and ate what they grew, becoming what they ate. In this sense food and humans are engaged in an isomorphic relationship, sharing the same natural environment. But now food and its producer are separated, and even those who grow food eat what is reaped from elsewhere. Nowadays the majority of the world’s people no longer participate in the production of food, though food is their central object of desire and goal of life, and their very existence depends on it. Today people say that to live better is to eat better, but most of them acquire food by way of staying away from food. City people have no knowledge about cooking, the food market, or crops, but they are dedicated to work only for the sake of eating better. Foods, like all commodities, have undergone a process of radical marketization. It is no longer necessary to take part in an agricultural business to obtain food; instead, people get food through an intermediary, the food supermarket. Nowadays the refrigerator functions as a second type of intermediary. It facilitates the circulation of food, expediting its deterritorialization. The fridge makes it possible to preserve the original freshness of food imported from elsewhere. The freshness of fridge-stored food is totally different from the freshness of food that has been chemically processed. For the latter has been changed in nature and has been altered in its chemical composition due to the use of additives. Fridge-preserved food also tastes different from marinated food, which, soaked in salt, vinegar, and spices, has become something other than itself. A quick look at marinated fish will convince you that it seems to have nothing to do with fresh fish. Today people no longer subscribe to the idea that Sichuan food can only be eaten in Sichuan, or Shandong cuisine is to be found only in Shandong. The fact is that Sichuan food is available all over the world and one does not have to go out of Sichuan province to eat all kinds of ethnic food from all over the world. Ironically, there is no typical Sichuan food any more, it has been constantly modified,

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Refrigerator

and its recipes use ingredients from across the globe. This is a consequence of the traveling of food – its translocal and transcontinental transportation. A city made of cement and concrete does not produce any food, but it is never short of abundant food supplies. The average urban home’s fridge is filled with foods from different parts of the world. One can eat at home what comes from the rest of the world, and can mix up or reconfigure different ethnic foods. Sichuan chilies, for instance, can be cooked with shrimps from Japan. Food is being hybridized; food diversification is delocalizing diets everywhere, removing geographically or seasonally varied features of foods. There is no longer a signature style of cooking. What people traveling from one place to another witness is the deterritorialization of food as well as the disappearance of the aesthetics of food. On the contrary, the practice of making food is increasingly standardized. What is eaten in different restaurants tastes more or less the same. By virtue of their rich and diverse sources, fridge-stored foods often look mysterious. There is no telling where they are from; despite the prevalent practice of putting labels and manufacturers’ addresses on the products, many food products still carry no specific information about the producer or supplier, and it is almost impossible to identify the sources of vegetables, fruits, and meat. It looks like they all come from some unidentifiable dark zone. One can clearly visualize the existence of pork in the fridge, but it is impossible to imagine the look of the pig that is its source. In ancient times, people were able to eat pork and have empirical knowledge of pigs; they ate eggs and saw the hens. Decades ago people in the same village shared the meat from the same pig, whereas today the residents in the same apartment building may eat meat coming from different countries. They have a large variety of choices, and the decisions they make are hugely divergent from one another, their styles of cooking very dissimilar. Urban life is eradicating what is called regional cuisines and even the same classic recipe is subject to different reconfigurations. Kung Pao Chicken, for example, is nowadays made up of ingredients from diverse sources: chicken from different farms, peanuts from different crop fields, and chilies that have been picked from different plants. Such heterogeneity comes from the diversity of sources. To a great extent, the food we eat every day owes its variety and source diversity to the capacity of the fridge. Massive transportation of food and ingredients as well as the food industry certainly do not owe their beginnings to refrigerators, but it is the popularization of refrigerators that considerably accelerates the growth of these enterprises. Paradoxically, the refrigerator as the terminal link in the food industry chain is becoming an important engine for the food industry.

3 Food circulation depends on refrigerators as its terminal point owing to their storage capacity. Even the manufacture and marketing of food products are fridgeoriented, just as the design and making of fridges is food-oriented. The refrigerator and food serve as each other’s objects of imagination. The way people make food has much to do with the functions of the fridge. It is due to its freezing capacity

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that ice cream and yogurt (as well as frozen dumplings) are being produced in huge quantities. The advent of fridges also sees the emergence of all kinds of ready-to-eat food and half-cooked food (e.g., packaged ingredients ready for cooking); food packing is also fridge-oriented: milk or beverages, for example, are contained in big boxes such that they can be stored in the fridge if not finished and remain fresh for a while. In a sense, the production of many kinds of food is aimed to have the refrigerator, instead of the stove, as its point of arrival. One can say that the fridge is the potential author of food. The refrigerator is also a mode of food processing. Much of what we eat needs to be heated and changed in shape to be ready to eat. In other words, the procedure of food processing requires that food be taken out of the fridge, and put into the hot pot or wok. There is, however, another way of processing food: to make it delicious to eat, food is put into the fridge to become cold or frozen, which is especially common in summer weather. On hot days, it is a great delight to have cold beverages, fruits, ice cream, or desert taken out of the fridge to get rid of summer heat. Just as the hot pot serves to keep food hot in winter, the fridge functions to clear summer heat. When used as a food-making device, the fridge follows a reverse procedure: food is cooked and then stored in the fridge before it becomes ready to eat. Green bean soup, for example, is well-cooked before it is placed in the fridge. It has to reach a certain low temperature to be taken out to eat. This is how, in many cases, food has to pass from the fridge to the stove, then endure the double torture of fire and ice to be perfect for the palate. It is common to put the remainders of a cooked meal into the fridge to be finished later, and many people like to eat cold leftovers, particularly cold fish jelly and meat jelly. The fridge offers us a pleasant, desirable coldness, sending it into our body with food. The invention of the refrigerator has enabled the unprecedented manufacture of cold drinks, which have directly affected and modified the function of the human stomach to the extent to which heated or cooked food has altered its digestive function. The discovery of fire triggered a radical change in the history of human eating habits; the invention of the refrigerator, again and in a reverse manner, has reformed humans’ eating and drinking habits as well as the human body. Obviously, humans have undergone physiological changes due to the changes of their food and eating habits: at the very beginning, they ate raw food, what nature offered; later they started growing food, raising livestock, and ate what they produced on their own; eventually, they began to eat the food produced by others, what was made elsewhere, and then the food that was manufactured by modern machines. Here is the itinerary of the evolution of human food: raw food, cooked food, fridge-processed food, and food that takes both fire and ice to produce. People are eating both artificially heated and artificially cooled food. The fridge has other functions as well. On top of processing food, it classifies and organizes foods in the home. In order to fit the partitioned spaces in the fridge, what is purchased from the market or grocery store, such as meat, has to be cut into pieces. The fridge has therefore extended its adaptability. Actually, to put food into the fridge is to have it initially processed, for what is stored in it has to

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be packed into a plastic bag in the first place. Therefore the use of the refrigerator gives rise to a food taxonomy, one that concerns food locations, food features, and food knowledge. It is also responsible for the rise of new knowledge about food: what kinds of food can be put in the freezer? What kinds of food are fit to be stored in the fridge? What kinds should stay out of the fridge? What kinds can be put together? What is the maximum length of time for food to stay in the fridge? What is the distinction between people’s habit of treating meat and that of treating vegetables? How do people deal with cooked food and raw food? The refrigerator handles food in line with our knowledge of food, and is itself our first tool for understanding food. It is perfectly all right, for example, to cook meat and vegetables together on the stove, but they have to be separated to be stored in the fridge. Food is cooked after it is processed in the refrigerator. Apart from changing the way food is made, the refrigerator also changes the way it is sold. The domestic refrigerator is connected with supermarket refrigerators, for they relate to one another as twins. The supermarket refrigerator is food’s transitory home before it makes its way into the domestic refrigerator. Actually the domestic refrigerator functions as the destination not only for food kept in the supermarket refrigerators, but for food in other sections of the supermarket as well. Regardless of whether it is stored in domestic or supermarket refrigerators, food is always arranged in similar ways. It is placed in different spaces and on different levels. Food in the domestic refrigerator can be regarded as supermarket food transplanted. The number of domestic refrigerators in a city determines the city’s number of supermarkets. Thousands of domestic fridges share one supermarket. People frequent supermarkets primarily in order to fill their fridges. Obviously, food is the central priority of our shopping. Unlike other goods, food is what we have to consume every day. In other words, food is the most needed and most important commodity. One can wait to consume other commodities, but food consumption allows no delay at all. The advent of refrigerators changes people’s shopping schedule radically. They no longer need to do grocery shopping every day, for their refrigerators can store large amounts of food, which usually can last a whole week for a whole family. Owing to the existence of refrigerators, moderns can schedule their shopping activities in accord with the rhythm of their work and life. They only need to shop on a weekly basis and on Sundays. In modern society, Sunday is a day not for rest, but for housekeeping, for general cleaning and shopping, for replenishing the refrigerator with daily needs. For the majority of urban people, every Sunday is a day of fridge replenishment. On weekdays when people are working, they keep consuming what is stored in the fridge; on Sundays they bring things home from the supermarket to fill their fridge. This is the weekly cycle of life triggered by the refrigerator. A whole week’s worth of food is acquired on Sunday so that people are freed from the tedious everyday grocery shopping and are able to concentrate on doing their work for the rest of the week. The refrigerator also contributes to reducing cooking time. Three meals a day are the iron law of life and it is humans’ basic instinct to follow this law, which keeps them busy all year round. The primordial purpose of work is to secure

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good food, but today people are working so hard at the cost of the pleasure of food. They spend little time on meals so that they can be more devoted to work. For many people, to eat is to accomplish a task; eating is merely necessary for the continuance of work. People are eating their meals in an increasingly perfunctory manner, and they seldom eat at home. Hence the quick rise of fast food restaurants. The increasing demand for dedication to work requires a new manner of eating and food-making, and at the core of the new requirement are simplicity, quick delivery, and efficiency. As food-making is an onerous task, it would be a huge challenge to every family if someone was not there to take charge of it full-time. There arises an urgent need to simplify the process of making food at home. Although there are still three meals a day (this is an unchanging fact, which certainly poses a big problem to the person who cooks meals in a household), people are making and eating their meals faster and faster, what they eat becoming increasingly simpler. Ready-to-eat or half-cooked food is available in large quantities. The refrigerator is playing a big role in all this, for much of the fast or cooked food is fridge-oriented. It is the refrigerator which provides storage space for cooked food and keeps it fresh for a certain length of time. The cooked food is easy to heat and prepare. Dumplings, for example, can be quickly boiled, and sausages quickly fried. As for the more complex dishes such as Kong Pao Chicken or beef steak, which, neatly packaged, are available in the supermarket, they can be quickly processed in the wok. Sometimes people cook a great deal of food (such as soup) at one time and keep it in the fridge to be consumed later on, each time taking a portion of it from the fridge to heat and eat. This is homemade fast food. There is no doubt that fast and cooked food owes its popularity to domestic refrigerators. Refrigerators preserve food by way of storage. On the other hand, however, they also cause damage to food. Those fresh and newly purchased things, such as meat, vegetables, and fruits, will gradually lose their spirit once stored in the fridge. People are increasingly dependent on the refrigerator, or are increasingly forced to depend on it (and would feel lost if deprived of it), such that most of what they eat is processed by the fridge before it is brought to the table. However, the fridge always changes the food it preserves. People keep saying that what has been put in the fridge no longer tastes fresh, for the exquisite essence of food disappears unnoticeably in the fridge. It is easy for anyone to tell the difference of taste between fish newly cut and fresh from the store and fish that has been kept in the freezer. This is a fridge-caused difference. The beauty of food in most cases consists in its freshness, in the spirit it retains when it is newly obtained from the soil or trees. The refrigerator was invented in part to keep the spirit of food, but, ironically, it only manages to remove it. The fridge prevents food from rotting, but it destroys its soul as well. This is a modern tragedy: genuine delicacies are disappearing. Nowadays what we eat is not only artificially processed but has lost the original flavor of natural growth. Worse still, the fridge divests food of its native spirit. Today, people no longer bother to access the truth of food, but instead use all kinds of additives and spices to create an image of it. Their taste buds are no longer able to identify the exquisiteness of food.

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In this sense, eating in modern times is anything but an enjoyment. Daily meals today no longer have anything to do with food connoisseurship. Only on some rare occasions or important holidays do people bother to take some time to cook a delicious meal and enjoy it. More and more food is pre-made and available as a commodity. People are cooking less and less at home. What is ubiquitously encountered are ready-made foods (just look at those biscuits and breads available everywhere!), and it is even difficult to tell what ingredients they are made of, nor can we identify the composition of those biscuits, or tell the original shape of the food we eat. What we eat is what we never see. There is a food alienation happening – what we eat no longer comes from natural growth; it is artificial food, food that has been processed by the food industry. What we do to it at home is to process the already artificially processed food one more time. It is a long and protracted journey for food to come to our table from its home. It has to endure all kinds of tear and torture to ultimately meet us. We no longer directly cook what is fresh or with an earthy smell, and there is always an intermediary between us and natural food. Less and less do we see the natural shape of the food we eat. In premodern agricultural society, people worked hard in order to secure food, raise livestock, and grow plants; every day they brought home what they reaped from the soil, animals that had been running about in the forest, and plants that had been growing in the field – all was live and fresh. The objective of their labor is food itself. But today we go out to work hard and always come home empty-handed, for there seems to be no direct connection between what we do to make a living and what we eat. Our food is not to be found in office buildings, nor in any other working environment. It is invariably housed in the supermarket or the free market, as well as domestic fridges. There is an autonomous spatial food chain and an autonomous chain of food production and sale. Most people are freed from the food production line. Food has its own domain, deliberately keeping distance from our domain of work. It seems that our job and food are two parallel tracks. This is a significant result of the division of labor. Food is no longer our targeted object, nor does it seem to be the reason we work. Manufactured and commodified, food is easy to acquire, ready to cook or eat. Fast food and cooked food are dominating contemporary markets and homes. The various types of cooked or partially cooked food are all refrigerator-oriented; their emergence attests to the increasingly rapid pace of contemporary life. As a result of the complicity between food industry and refrigerator, fast food not only coincides with the fast pace of our contemporary life, but plays a role in speeding up the rhythm of our life as well. Quietly standing in a corner of the home, the refrigerator does not know that it is becoming one of the fast turning wheels of our society.

4 The kitchen is a place of drudgery. A big enough kitchen usually has a refrigerator placed in it. The kitchen is a domestic factory in the real sense, for it is surrounded by machines and crowded with all kinds of domestic appliances such as a gas stove, microwave oven, kitchen ventilator, various types of electrical cookers, and

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a refrigerator. When people are cooking, the noise of the ventilator, ingredients crackling in the wok, and the hissing gas on the stove, all these turn the kitchen into a dreadful space, a seething workshop, a workshop of extreme danger, of burning restlessness, a mini chemical plant saturated with assorted smells. It is a place where one has to be intensely focused and patient, the most dangerous place in the home – it is commonplace to accidentally get injured in the kitchen, either a cut on the finger or burnt by the heat (children are not allowed to be playing in the kitchen). Of all the machines installed in the kitchen, only the fridge stands there calm and safe. It is diametrically different from all other machines: while the other domestic appliances are used mostly to heat things, the fridge works to make things cold or frozen; while the majority of other machines are noisy, the fridge sits there still and quiet. Despite this disparity, the refrigerator merges with them to make up an interrelated, coordinated domestic system of machines, each playing its own role to ensure the normal operation of this total kitchen system. In a sense, the fridge serves as the starting point of the system, its engine. The kitchen factory starts working with the fridge. An empty fridge is like a kitchen without cooking oil and ingredients. Only when we have taken ingredients out of the fridge and got them ready for cooking do we turn on other machines to cook them. The gas stove or microwave oven or electrical cookers are all interfaced with the refrigerator, functioning as its terminals. Whatever has been heated and unfinished can go back to the fridge to be heated again later on. In this sense, foods alternate between freezing cold and burning heat, seldom staying in a moderate temperature. The fridge and cooking utensils constitute the two opposed yet connected ends of the kitchen machine system. As already mentioned, the refrigerator is a cabinet for storing foods. It retains certain features of furniture. Unlike other machines, it stands there still and quiet, seemingly attempting to hide its own features as a machine. It looks like a dead machine. For other machines need to be constantly operated, or, as we say, they need to be constantly turned on and off, whereas the fridge is different and once installed will keep working. It is not involved in a start-finish procedure of a machine (unlike air conditioner, television, washing machine, gas stove, microwave oven, etc., which need to be turned on to start working and turned off to stop working). People treat refrigerators the same way they treat a wardrobe or a book cabinet. They open the book cabinet or wardrobe to get a book or a piece of clothing, and open the fridge to get food. The fridge is to be opened or closed, not to be turned on and off. It is used like a piece of furniture, not like a machine. It takes only one second to set the refrigerator in its working mode, which does not follow a step-by-step procedure like a washing machine. It works in an invisible manner, or we say, in a covert manner. People do not see how the fridge works, though it has been working ceaselessly, year in and year out, permanently, in the home. This is one of its major differences from other machines. With other machines there is a repeated start-and-finish cycle, but the operation of a fridge is a totally different story: we only open and close its door, but never need to turn on and off its electronic system. Moreover, people often have no clear idea what is contained in the fridge. They keep stuffing things into it, but often forget what they have put in it. Nor do they

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remember what has been taken out of it. It would be even worse if there is more than one person doing grocery shopping in the family. Not everyone in the family is equally familiar with every aspect of housekeeping, for they each are assigned a specific task: one person looks after the bank account, another does laundry, another does cleaning or is responsible for checking the fridge or cooking meals. There is a division of labor in the domestic sphere of life as well. Although there is no end to housekeeping and there are always jobs to do at home, no one claims to be professionally trained in housekeeping: the person looking after household spending and saving will never claim to be an accountant or cashier; the person doing daily cooking does not consider him or herself to be a chef. However, there must be someone in each family whose job it is to check the fridge and replenish it with daily needs. It is this person who makes decisions about what the family eats every day. If much of the family’s pleasure comes from the dining table, then the person doing cooking is the source of the pleasure or displeasure. S/he uses the fridge and cooks food every day. This job is so important that it can count as the soul of housekeeping. However, the person in charge of cooking is mostly involved in domestic tasks and sometimes is not the central figure of the family. The person who plays a central role in a household is usually the one busily engaged in the public space. Obviously only the person who uses, checks, and cleans the fridge every day knows what there is in it while the others have no idea at all. They will just rush to the fridge, open it, and search in it for a bite of food when hungry or thirsty. Sometimes they find nothing they want in it; sometimes they get little treats and feel so happy. All this depends on the person who looks after the fridge. Actually, even this person would have blind spots with regards to the contents of the fridge. For he or she may have forgotten what has been stored in it. Ironically, much of the food in the home becomes rotten under the protection of the fridge, and perhaps there is much more food rotting within the fridge than outside it. For while things kept outside the fridge are more visible and will be noticed when rotting, things stored inside the fridge often become rotten unnoticed. It is only when the family are cleaning the fridge that they look closely into every corner and find out what has gone bad. To clean the refrigerator is to get rid of a great deal of moldy or rotten stuff. In this sense the fridge not only helps to save money on food, but causes food waste as well. People trust the capacity of the fridge to preserve food, but oftentimes it is a trust abused. All this has to do with the fact that the refrigerator conceals what it stores: its white and clean exterior look is set over against its dark interior reality. Of course, it has a significant visibility: people often put all kinds of decoration magnets on the fridge’s door, giving its monotonous outside a lively look. Those variously shaped magnets seem to be talking to the cold, lifeless machine, to those who constantly use it, and to the lonely foods which are locked in its dark inside.

3

Radio

1 The radio has no peculiar demand on the human body – it maintains a loose and flexible relationship with it. Herein lies a sharp contrast between radio and television, for the television not only damages people’s eyes but causes their bodies to recline long hours on the sofa and therefore become increasingly lazy and resistant to activity. Moreover, as the television is always coupled with a sofa facing it, maintaining a measured distance with it, the two things and the human body combine to form a trinity characteristic of the modern domestic space. This trinity starts to work when evening arrives. While watching TV, we have to be in the right state of mind, quiet and relaxed, rightly seated at an appropriate angle, in an appropriate place, maintaining an appropriate posture – sometimes cracking melon seeds, sometimes holding a cup of tea ready to drink. The television is usually located at the center of the home, a huge black box placed in a conspicuous domestic space. Watching television is part of the ritual of the daily routine, central to which is the machine itself. While we are watching TV, our bodies are always passively engaged. The television aggressively asserts its material existence as the fixed domestic center, requiring our bodies to adjust themselves to fit it, to form a regular spatial relationship with it, to directly face it, to form an assemblage with it, and to be tied to it. That is, our bodies have to adapt to and follow the machine: their location is determined by the location of the TV. However, our relationship with the radio is an entirely different story. Not only where we should be seated is not affected at all by the location of the radio, but also the distance we maintain from it is totally flexible. The radio does not require that we remain fixed where we are; on the contrary, we can keep moving it from place to place to make it suit our needs. It may be placed anywhere (sometimes we even forget where we have left it); it may be put in our pocket, belted to our waist, attached to our ear, or made to sit on the top of the headboard. The radio is so light and handy, and so mobile, that it is often accidentally dropped to the floor and broken (actually this is how many radios meet their demise). Our body is completely independent of it. We can engage ourselves in cooking or walking while listening to it. We can carry it even when we are running from place to place. In other words, we can control the body of the radio instead of letting

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it control our bodies. In this sense, the radio is an accessory, a plaything, which obeys us, submitting to our body, something that is not autonomous or independent. What obtains between the radio and the human body is a temporary, shifting relationship. No wonder watching TV, different than listening to the radio, somewhat resembles a specialized job, for it demands exclusively focused attention, our body submitting to the TV screen, like workers submitting to machines. True, watching television is a form of diversion,but as it requires riveting focused attention on the machine and passively submitting to it, watching television is not much different from operating a machine in a factory: like the worker’s hands are tied to the production assembly line, your eyes are controlled by the television, except that watching television is a type of visual labor which bears a resemblance to entertainment. In actuality, much of contemporary machine-related entertainment is procured by way of labor and physical energy consumption (among the exemplary cases is playing computer games). Listening to the radio, however, does not require the human body’s total dedication, nor any ritual of entertainment, or any bit of physical labor. That is, of all kinds of entertainment machines, the radio is the least demanding either in terms of how we should look or in terms of what our body needs to do. The radio is the healthiest machine; it does not affect or cause any trouble to our body, nor does it cause any disease. Rather than relating to our body as something inseparable, the radio serves to provide a background for its free and relaxed activity. What it demands of us is our sense of hearing and it only has responsibility for the ear. The ear is so quick and sensitive, and so cunning and secretive; it effortlessly captures all sounds coming from all directions despite distances. That is to say, unlike other human organs such as the eyes, hands, and feet, the ear does not set any demand on the machine. The radio also allows our ears to be freed from our total social image. Under many circumstances, our ears function as the sliest stage props – in a sense, they are the most performative human organs: expressionless, voiceless, and motionless, they seem to be insensitive, deaf, or “ears of the deaf.” The ear is less an organ of the body than something attached to the body. Its role is not to communicate meaning (though in some cases the size or shape of one’s ear is believed to be symptomatic of their fate). It is almost impossible to determine by the ear itself whether it is intently listening; actually to decide whether someone is listening, we only need to look at their eyes. It is precisely due to its inexpressiveness that the ear has a powerful capacity to camouflage its intention: sometimes it deliberately refuses to listen; sometimes it willfully eavesdrops on people’s conversations; at other times it pretends to listen while in actuality it is listening but paying no attention to what is heard – as the saying goes, “what is heard goes in at one ear and out at the other.” All this is impossible to tell by the mere appearance of the ear. It is due to the ear’s capacity for such faking that the world of communication is so dramatic. People are often seen talking passionately to unlistening ears (just look at those party bureaucrats and their unrequited efforts to talk to impress their audiences!), and every day the world produces so many unconsumed utterances

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and so many meaningless words. There is perhaps no waste more devastating than unheard words. Also, there is a great deal of incomprehensible utterances, which remain pure sounds, mere noises, which, no matter how hard the ear is strained to listen, no matter how painstakingly it attempts to capture, cannot be converted into definite meaning, or fail to be converted into meaning by the ear. These utterances constitute another type of nonsense, or, another type of noise, or very brilliant gibberish. Still, there is another kind of sound that has no way of finding an understanding ear: singular, unfamiliar, and bizarre, it weaves its own abysmal meaning, such that it defeats any ear’s effort to decipher. Thus, in a face-to-face conversation, what is spoken to the ear often has no way of entering it. Sometimes the sound loses its way to the ear – this is a fatal tragedy for human sounds. Conversely, however, there are times when the ear cannot find appropriate sounds, and this is the ear’s tragedy. The ear is always filled with noise and nonsense. Unlistening does not equal unhearing – part of the ear’s tragedy consists in that it can always hear sounds, sounds that it hates to hear. Unlike the eye, which can decide when not to see, or when to turn its attention away, shifting to other objects, the ear is unable to close itself off from surrounding sounds, making it impossible to avoid hearing. Sometimes it is simply saturated with noises from morning till night. The ear is more passive than the eye; what it encounters everywhere can only be nonsensical noise if it is impossible to decipher. “[I]s it because the ear is always open and offered to provocation, more passive than sight? One can more naturally close one’s eyes or distract his glance than avoid listening” (Derrida 1976: 235–236). In this sense, the ear is the most tragic organ, for daily anxiety and restlessness in the human world mostly comes through the ear instead of the eye.

2 The displacement, disparity, and discord between the ear and noise constitute one of the radio’s points of departure. The entire mission of the radio is to find the appropriate sounds for the ear. The ear that does not hear is useless; the sounds that are not heard are meaningless. What usually happens is that the ear and the sounds it is pleased to hear miss each other. This contradiction becomes resolved thanks to the advent of the radio. Radio broadcasting makes it possible for the ear and desirable sounds to come together. The ear is thereby granted the right to choose sounds it likes. It is no longer a passive organ; rather, it is now able to cope, as it pleases, with sounds in such a manner. With radio audiences, the ear is at once the hearer of the sound and, in a sense, its adjuster. It can make the sound emerge or disappear, render it stronger or weaker, shifting from male voice to female voice, from talking to singing, from human noise to music, and from buzzing noise to pleasant sound until at last it comes across something endearing and likeable. Then something mysterious happens: the sound heard comes from a little machine, but, paradoxically, it sounds like it comes from yourself, as if the sound were produced by you yourself, something you can play with, caress, and engage

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in conversation. To be sure, the sound of the radio does not issue from within yourself, but it gives you the feeling that you are listening to your own voice. Ordinarily, the sound heard no doubt comes from outside yourself, it intrudes upon your ear, unpredictable, unstoppable, unpreventable. The sound of the radio, however, is different and can be controlled. Just like your tongue can control your enunciation, you can control the radio’s sound. In this sense, you are the source of the radio’s sound. You are listening to an other and your self at the same time. Listening is the play between yourself and the other as well as between you and yourself. Thanks to the invention of the radio, the ear for the first time becomes the master of the sound it hears, while maintaining its independence and freedom from it at the same time. When listening to yourself, when it is no longer talking to someone else face to face, when you are faced only with the radio, then the ear dismisses its performative tendency: it no longer needs to feign listening in front of the speaking machine. There occurs a natural manner of listening: it is no longer necessary to listen to please others, to listen in an exaggerative manner to impress people, or to listen impatiently. In a word one does not have to listen by staring intently at the person speaking, or by making other organs work in collaboration with the ear; instead, one can listen with one’s eyes closed, in a relaxed manner, keeping everything off their mind. The ear upholds its own sovereignty, accepting sounds in accord with its own will – this is the sound and the ear meeting unhindered and there is no interference between them. Exercising its listening capacity this way the ear acquires a high degree of autonomy. It becomes a pure hearing organ with the radio. When the ear is entirely focused on what it hears, we will find that, to our great surprise, the radio as a medium has disappeared, the materiality of the machine is dissolved, the sound heard seems to come from a void or a hushed space. The sound is the specter of the hushed space, deepening its quietness, filling this hushed space and every object in it with an intense silence, wrapping the radio in denser silence. A wondrous sound sensation is asserting itself: the sound seems to issue from the machine, from a speaking subject, coming round like a spectral spinning dancer, from an ethereal non-subject, from a void of silence. The radio declares its own death the moment it generates sounds, which render the surroundings silent and dead – this is what distinguishes radio from TV, for the latter persistently asserts its presence, and we know for sure that it is the television that is speaking. With our eyes fixed upon what is shown on the TV, its black framework obstinately underlines its material existence. Thanks to its pronounced visual characteristics, the TV confronts us with its conspicuous presence, the sounds heard coming from where the flickering brightness is located. The radio, as compared with the TV, seems to be casually placed there, inconspicuous and marginal, with an unattractive, ordinary look, as if it were not as capable of talking indefatigably, with no strong evidence to prove its speaking capacity. Indeed, the radio is nothing sensual and looks so lifeless, and we could even say there is nothing sexual about it; it has to humbly hide itself from being noticed, lying in the midst of a heap of miscellaneous objects. Obviously it is impossible to derive

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sensual pleasure from it. The radio is a concealed medium, a restrained speaking machine – when we hear a sound passing over from a corner of a room, it is at times difficult to ascertain whether it is a machine or a human being speaking. As a matter of fact, it is more accurate to say that what is heard from the radio is produced by the radio-human assemblage instead of a pure human voice. The human voice is transmitted by the machine, but the machine is not a neutral channel or a pure medium of sounds. Is the sound transmitted by the machine really speaking to human beings? Isn’t it intended for the machine itself? Perhaps the sound is produced for the radio at the very beginning, or we say, it is intended for the machine in the first place. Its first listener is the machine which is its primary target. It has to fit in with the machine. On the other hand, this small machine of a radio is a new vocal organ like the tongue, lips, nostrils, throat. While the sound is generated by the assemblage of these vocal organs, the machine, in company with the human vocal organs, changes the quality and meaning of the sound. The machine, the artificial vocal organ external to the human body, alters the sound issuing from it. Therefore what is transmitted by the radio is a machine-modified human voice. It is precisely such a machine-modified feature of the human voice, the machine-touched quality of the human sound, that renders it solemn, firm, authoritative, with the metallic rhythm of a machine, and with an aura of “truth.” At a time when the radio was dedicated to serving political power (such as during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966), the sounds of the radio (usually publicly broadcast) were totally divested of the contingency and privacy of the human voice, even emptied of its desire and gender identity. It is encoded and generated by the machine using a certain combination of parts. This is a form of assemblage of machine and human sound, which is not an unmediated human speech nor a complete machine speech. It is a human-machine chorus. This is why the individual announcers are insignificant, because their pronunciations, which are normalized and homogenized after being revised, exhibit a shared metallic quality and tone. Processed by this new vocal organ, the human sound can be transmitted to greater distances, simultaneously reaching audiences in different places. This new vocal organ renders the sound capable of being endlessly relayed, liberating it from limitations of the human body, endowing it with a capacity for infinite dissemination regardless of distances and locations. For the first time, a type of semantically rich sound is heard traveling all over the globe, finding its way into the ears of various groups of people. It cannot but be a common speech – it has to be universal, standardizing its pronunciations, so that the largest majority of the people can understand. Therefore it is of necessity to remove local dialects and linguistic regionalisms, so that different communities and different places can be united in the common speech. Actually, such common speech has a huge capacity for education, and, exemplary in nature, can be imitated by people to replace their dialects, thereby enabling them to communicate with others across the nation. The radio unites different dialect-communities by way of a “national language,” facilitating the construction of a speech community, which is no doubt the condition of possibility for a certain political community. For the first time in human history, the radio powerfully destroys local dialects.

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3 The radio creates a pure form of phonetic communication, removing all the auxiliary organs that have been used to facilitate communication, just as it has eliminated all the dialects. This is a complete phonetic system – that is to say, with the radio it suffices to use sounds to express meaning. Actually there is no harmony between sound and meaning – in face-to-face communication the sounds do not need full articulation, or one can say, sound is not the only means of communication. For meaning can sometimes be communicated by gestures or through the posture of the body. Just as Derrida has noted, “Gesture is here an adjunct of speech, but this adjunct is not a supplementing by artifice, it is a re-course to a more natural, more expressive, more immediate sign. . . . This structure of supplementarity, reflexive, mutual, speculative, infinite, alone permits an explanation of the fact that the language of space, sight, and muteness . . . sometimes takes the place of speech when the latter is attended by a greater threat of absence and cuts into life’s energy. In that case, the language of visible gestures is more alive” (1976: 235–236). However, the radio gives rise to an autonomous, adequate system of significations weaved by pure sounds, which is a complete text without elisions, without gaps, without ambiguities, and without double-binds or abysses of meaning. In other words, here in the world of radio communications, there is perfect correspondence between sound and meaning, allowing no ruptures or absences. Sounds exist only to convey meaning, and meaning can only achieve its fullness by virtue of sounds. Also, the world of radio communications also requires a universal grammar, which can only be metonymic, for it has to eliminate metaphors and symbols in writing as much as possible, removing all indirect, obscure, and intriguing rhetoric, as well as jargon and obscene words. In general, it is neither highly formal nor highly colloquial – the formal written style sounds too standard, rendering sound and meaning stilted and exaggerative; the colloquial style sounds too casual, undermining the austerity of the machine, and leaving the system of sound and meaning filled with gaps. The radio language stands between written and oral styles, and can be taken as slightly formal or slightly colloquial. To sum up, the sound of radio can neither afford to be going its own way at will nor to be speaking like a philosophy book. On the contrary, it is open and straightforward, transparent, simple and concrete, healthy. This is a pure form of phonocentrism encountered in communications. The sound and the ear are coupled to make up a pair. Though both generated by machines, the sound of radio and the sound of television are very dissimilar. In the case of television, the sound is sometimes of an auxiliary nature, for television tells stories directly through sights and images, its sound merely adding explanations and notes to what is seen on the screen. When facing the TV, people need to mobilize different organs, eyesight usually dominating hearing (there are always complaints that sports commentators spoil the fun of watching the games on TV). The radio, on the other hand, is all narration. While the sound of television can be interrupted and can be followed by temporary silences, the sound of radio cannot afford to be interrupted; it has to keep talking, allowing not a single moment of

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silence, for all the meaning resides in the sound, the semantic chain depending on the phonetic chain. The radio brings sounds into an uninterrupted flowing chain, and it can be said that to invent the radio is to invent an infinite chain of sounds and to have a broken chain of sounds is to have a malfunctioning radio. It is in this sense that music and radio are engaged in a special relationship. The radio needs to recruit large quantities of music – when there is nothing further to say, or when the human voice is to be dispensed with, or at a moment when the transition from one program to another sounds abrupt, music comes in to cover up silence or embarrassment. Therefore, music is produced not merely to be heard, not only to express its intrinsic function and value (people listen to music out of various considerations), it is also used to fill gaps in the chain of human sounds, to fix the problem of the radio – people even find out that in the world of radio mainly human sound and music are meaningful and it seems they are the only sounds that the ear can absorb. The radio becomes the guarantee of incessant variations of music and human sound. Music so perfectly fits radio that there are music radio hours now. Of course listening to music on the radio and listening to music on the gramophone are entirely different, for the latter follows an unchanging pattern, and there is a procedure or structure for it. Listening to the record player makes it possible to rehearse the same piece of music over and over again. But the music from the radio is unpredictable, for there is always something new about it. Regardless of its generic difference, and regardless of whether it is beautiful, there is no doubt that what is heard from the radio is launched onto all time tracks, the current of sound/meaning coinciding with the current of time. Television, however, has no strict demand for the chain of sound, for what it prioritizes is immediate “presentation,” its visual narratives impressing the audiences as more “objective” and “real.” While the television sports commentator, for example, is not required to keep talking, and instead only needs to make comments, the radio sports commentator has to cover the entire course of the game, capturing every moment of it, keeping the total scene in view. This accounts for why the early radio sports commentators all spoke extremely fast – they had to “represent” what was seen on the scene as much as possible. No wonder the speech rate was doubly fast. Sound is the radio’s mode of existence and is necessarily varied. Once freed from domineering power, it flowers into all kinds of performances. As the radio provides the stage for sound performances, sounds as signifiers achieve their autonomy. The radio broadcast’s sounds not only constitute a linguistic tool for national communication, but also give rise to a whole set of pronunciation techniques and various phonetic styles of signification. Pitch variations, speech rate, modulations in tone, intonations, and sound quality itself, all these material features of sound constitute a special vocal aesthetics for radio broadcast. It is those who were eloquent instead of good at acting, those who had a beautiful voice instead of those who had a beautiful face, or those who had vocal skills and not those who had acting skills, who were stars and celebrities during the times dominated by radio. Moreover, as the style of pronunciation is historically varied, vocal aesthetics is a rich documentation of power change and social

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transformations. Speech is part of the state ideological apparatus; apart from contributing to shaping the national language, it also reinvents the pronunciation style of a nation. In all public spaces including the classroom and stage, everyone, be it a government official or a child, imitates radio pronunciations and intonations in their own speeches. Radio pronunciations become exemplary practices for public speeches, as if only such machine-generated sounds are fit for discoursing on truth. To understand the aesthetics of such machine-generated enunciations is to understand the politics surrounding them. The world knows well the fundamental changes the voice style of the media machine has undergone in China in the short span of a few decades as well as their political implications.1 Over the past thirty years or so, the Chinese radio broadcast has changed from its erstwhile adherence to gender-neutral harsh tones and rigid manners to the present practice of daily flirtations between male and female announcers.

4 No matter what voice style the radio announcers follow, they somewhat figure as an absent presence, present and invisible at the same time, or we say, with no definite features. Perhaps we can tell where they are from, their names, and, in some cases, even know their identities and backgrounds; or, just the opposite, we know nothing about the voices we happen to hear, and what flows into our ears are pure, contingent sounds – no matter what, these sources of speech always impress us as mysterious. Such mysterious image of the radio announcer holds the secret of the radio, and endows it with a form of inner density. It looks like the speaker is lurking somewhere at the heart of the machine, responsible for its depth. People try to reach into the radio’s interiority through this sound channel to capture the announcer’s appearance. This is a secret desire among all listeners, who are always tempted to identify the voices with the announcers, but unfortunately the latter are never present. Or, more properly speaking, the image of the announcer cannot but be amorphous, they are ethereal; the speaking mouth we attempt to visualize is a huge gaping void, a space of eternal silence, or nothing but a mini speaker of the radio. This portrays a fascinating relationship between speaking and listening: an invisible speaker addressing an invisible other, a concealed voice speaking to a concealed ear. This seems to be something amounting to story-telling between blind people. Thus the radio, apparently, has erected an impassable wall between narrators and audiences. Furthermore, those voices speak every day, but what they say never concerns themselves; those audiences listen to them every day, but what they hear has nothing to do with themselves. So the two sides are imperviously dark to each other, and what brings them together are voices external and alien to themselves. The mysterious speaker manages to conceal themselves through their manner of speaking. It seems that someone’s voice is all he or she is, their entire existence, in which case the face is the voice, the singular tongue. Audiences are so familiar with the voice and can identify the person through the voice. Then something strange happens: what one is fascinated with is no longer a human body, but a

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voice, a voice with a personality. This mysterious speaker, with his or her voice, is a familiar stranger to the audiences of another world. If the two sides brought together by the transmitted voice are aliens to each other, then what motivates the speaker to speak, and what motivates the listener to listen? Do they come together only to ensure or promote the transmission and acquisition of public information? Since the speaker receives no actual invitation to talk, nor is there an innermost urge to do so (how tiresome it is to talk ceaselessly!), does the speaker speak in order to be heard? Actually in the speaker’s view, the listeners are also anonymous and outright strangers. Then why does he speak to them at all? Is it because he believes that he has audiences listening to him? Why do people listen to the radio? To access some truth of the world? To acquire useful and interesting knowledge? Or out of some innermost desire to dispel some sad feelings from their hearts? Or merely for the sake of hastening the passage of time when bored? Or, to let some sound (particularly music from the radio) break the repressive, vast, quiet stillness engulfing them? True, but in regard to both speaker and listener in this situation, the targeted object is the machine itself, by means of which the two are bonded together. The speaker is not only an absent figure, but also a necessary part of the machine. Since the invention of the radio, the speaker with their voice has allowed themselves to become part of the machine. It is not in the metaphorical but literal sense that the speaker is assembled into the radio and has therefore become one of its necessary structural components to ensure its normal operation. The listener, on the other hand, is the radio’s receiving part, what is external to itself. Speaker, listener, and radio, the three constitute a listener-speaker assemblage – they are closely tied together; any one of them missing will cause the collapse of the assemblage. So the speaking-listening relationship is an invention of the machine as well as its inherent requirement and imperative; it is an indispensable part and function of the machine. This relationship took place at a certain historical moment, so the speaker and listener were integrated into the machine assemblage of the radio, at the same time bringing into being an unprecedented listening-speaking mechanism, which functions as a bridge between strangers. This listening-speaking mechanism has nothing to do with dialogue or exchange; it requires no response, no dispute, no conversation or interrogation. For the radio is a pure listening machine, a talking machine, which takes two parties but allows no space for argument. Both listening and speaking in this context are intended for the machine. After the listening-speaking machine is assembled, it can be said, the speaking is intended for the audience, and the listening intended for the moment of loneliness. Listening and speaking constitute two aspects of the machine’s interiority. To invent the radio is to invent the listening-speaking mechanism. The radio came into the world as a new-born baby, and will, of course, depart from the world like a person of old age. Birth is of necessity followed by death. What is surprising, however, is that the radio meets its demise sooner than expected. It is being replaced by other types of machines. Television and computer, for example, can and do perform the radio’s speaking-listening functions. They simply internalize most of its capacities into themselves – machines change very fast, such that the radio has to be reassembled with other types of machines

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to survive. As we already see, the radio can only survive by playing its role where television and computer prove to be unfit and forms a new assemblage with other machines and new groups of people: it is inserted into automobiles to enable them to speak. It seems that the radio nowadays is only heard speaking when it is running from place to place, when it is outdoors, when it is located in a special corner of the city (such as the gatekeeper’s office in a workplace), or when it is encountered in the wilderness. It not only generates new spaces, but creates new audiences: taxi drivers, old people, as well as all those who are rejected by modern facilities such as computer and television. In a certain sense, the new audiences the radio creates today are among the unwanted members of the society: loners, wanderers, people who are unemployed, who live in the dark corners of a city, or who are found writhing sleepless in bed at night. Today, people who listen to the radio are none other than those whose voices are never heard.

Note 1 See Zhang Hong, “The Modern State’s Myth of Sound and Its Decline,” 2005 (张闳， 《现 代国家的声音神话及其没落》).

4

Television

1 The moment you turn on your TV, your room is quickly transformed. The sound the TV makes, the moving pictures it produces, and the light, all these constitute a shifting focus. There may be several machines simultaneously operating in your house, such as a refrigerator, an air conditioner, washing machine, and microwave oven, but all these work on their own, devotedly doing their jobs like a slave, independently of you, unassertively, claiming no attention. The quieter they are, the less you are aware of their existence in the home, the better for you. But the TV is, on the contrary, put there deliberately to attract your attention, to engage your eyes, and this is what makes it different from other domestic electronic appliances: the TV is incomplete without human participants, for it needs to form a particular assemblage, a watcher-watched relationship, with them, and cannot afford to be without them. True, the TV, like other household electronic appliances, is no more than a machine with a set of specific functions, but it is a machine made for the senses. Every household is saturated with a variety of machines, which can be largely grouped into two categories: those dealing with things and those dealing with people. What we want to say here is: TV and computer are apparatuses that deal with people, offering them company, service, information, and entertainment. As a TV provides service for every member of the family and is a shared entertainment machine, it is deservedly granted a conspicuous space in the home. If all the other domestic machines willingly accept their neglected existence and allow themselves to be assigned to a corner where they are covered up, the TV stands out as the opposite: it claims to be conspicuous, to be seen, to attract attention from everyone in the family. This is the only object that may be watched over and over again. There is nothing spectacular to see in the domestic space, and all that meets the eye there looks so blandly familiar. To a person who stays at home every day, where can they turn to keep their eyes engaged if they are not to watch TV? The walls keep all that exists in the outside world beyond their view; the TV becomes the only object for their focused attention. In this sense, the TV is the focal point of the domestic geometrical space, a focal point of the modern home that is created by the TV – indeed, the hub of the home is where the TV is placed. As modern domestic spaces are reproductions manufactured by means of industrial technology, they are cut and pasted one after another within high rises.

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These spaces are products of capitalist industrial machines, made up of entirely naturalized inorganic materials like cement and steel beams, therefore no longer bearing any symbolic meaning. People no longer bother to inspect their residences in accord with their fengshui knowledge; they have expelled cultural and mythological meaning from such manufactured domestic spaces, reducing them to neutral, cold machines. Then how can people place various forms of meaning in such mechanized spaces? How to put these spaces back into a symbolic order? This is how cultural products are brought home, where old-fashioned furniture, paintings, and artifacts all begin to have an assigned place. People decorate their rooms with cultural products, so as to add a sense of taste and humanity to the cold, geometrical structure of the domestic space. However, all these cultural objects are of an auxiliary nature, and, being placed in the periphery of the domestic space, as quietly hanging or placed ornaments, can never become the domestic cornerstone attracting prolonged attention. Actually, they are not necessities for many families. The only indispensible thing for the modern family is the television – this can even count as one of the fundamental differences between modern and pre-modern families. This is how the domestic space has been radically changed. The TV is granted spatial centrality in the modern home. It replaces the erstwhile shrine, and becomes a new fetish. It reorganizes the structure of domestic space, thus sofas, dining table, cabinet, and ornaments on the wall are all connected to the TV as their center in an organized manner. Every time a family is making a decision as to how to organize its domestic space, it has to, in the first place, determine the location of the TV, so that all other furniture and objects can enter into a specific spatial configuration with it. Watching TV is a most ordinary yet most significant functional activity, and all the domestic spaces and their arrangement have to match and fit in with it. Of all spatial arrangements, the relationship between the sofa and TV is the most intimate, as if each were simply made for the other. They seem to constitute an inseparable assemblage to enable a reciprocal gaze. They become an empty space, with no obstacle standing in between them, hence the most tension-laden and most stable space in the house. It dominates all other spaces and objects, which serve to set off and depend on it. The TV is certainly the center of the home space, its placement or replacement determining the entire spatial arrangement of the furniture and the structural configuration of the home. In every household, the place where every member of the family feels comfortable sitting for long stretches of time is where TV can be watched (it is true that many families have moved their TVs to their bedrooms or kitchens). This is how every home has an invisible, ubiquitous angle for watching TV, which offers a square or irregular domestic space a focal point. Suddenly a cold geometrical space begins to have a support and center. Of course, the larger the domestic space, the greater likelihood there will be a TV set for every spatial fragment, so as to ensure a few different hubs in this large space, which means that television can be watched any time, anywhere in the house. As Roger Silverstone has noted in Television and Everyday Life, “Television spawned supporting technologies and created new spaces: TV dinners, the TV lounge, the open plan itself, labour-saving household technologies, all were designed in one way or another

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to integrate television into the spaces and times of the household . . . and to turn it into a decorative object” (1994: 100). Inlaid in the domestic space, the TV becomes an important part of the domestic machine system. Before the television’s entry into the household, the domestic spatial arrangement was normally centered around the dining table, for the latter was then an important public space in the household, the tie that bound family members closely together. At the dinner table, the family sat close together, sharing the same food, and chatting with one another – silence at dinner was embarrassing and terrible. Chatting over dinner is different from talking at other times, for it is relaxing and pleasurable. Eating itself is an enjoyable activity, which brings the family intimately together, and conversation over eating is a by-product. It does not convey any substantial message, nor is it a discussion of any significant matter – significant matters have to be discussed more formally at a time specially reserved for it. Dinner conversation used to be able to determine the atmosphere of a household, for dinnertime was the most quotidian yet the most beautiful moment of the day for the family. However, once televisions started entering the home space in large numbers, the time for chatting at the dinner table began to dwindle. In many homes, dining and watching TV go hand in hand. The placement of the television determines the position of the dining table, which has to guarantee that everyone in the family can watch television from where they sit. Families with a spacious dining room would put a television there. The arrival of the television dissolved the twin relationship between eating and chatting at dinnertime, directing the family’s attention to things beyond the dinner table. Eating no longer goes hand in hand with chatting; instead it is accompanied by watching. Or, eating, watching, and chatting happen simultaneously – television also changes the topics of dinner conversations. What people talk about is decided by what they see on television, and it no longer concerns themselves or their routine life, nor is it relevant to the detail of family business. Dinner conversations are closely centered around an outside world that is brought to them by the TV screen. This is how television takes people out of their homes. Even when tied to their homestead, people can still travel their eyes beyond the home space, reaching any place in the world. If the telephone has reinforced people’s hearing beyond any limit, then the television reinforces and extends their sight, enabling them to see any remote and strange place on the earth, as if they were wearing a pair of magic glasses. It seems that not only their walls were cut through, but there is a strange temporal-spatial conflation: for, as any event is to happen in a specific time and place, watching television at home transports people to another temporal-spatial environment, as if they were placed at the site of the televised event. When watching a soccer game video at home, for example, people feel as if they were traveling through a time tunnel to the past, to a noisy stadium. Watching TV gives people a sense of being simultaneously in two time-spaces: the now of the home and the now of the televised event. There is a conflation of the temporal-spatial specificity of the televised event and the temporal-spatial specificity of the audience. Television puts people in a split time-space: they feel both in and outside of the home, and both present in and absent from the site of the event.

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Live televised events disturb the quiet of the home, rupturing the stability of the domestic space. It is not only a question of some irrelevant external business intruding upon the family, but a matter of some moving noisy televised scene destroying the peace in the home. The home is reverberating with sounds, full of life and light, but at the same time it is torn apart by conflicts. Television often causes quarrels at home: conflict over which channel to select (the feminist always complains that access to the remote control reflects patriarchy); conflict over the right to watch television (parents are angry with children wasting time watching TV); conflict over when to watch (those retiring to bed or preferring to read hate the sound of television); and conflict of views (even the announcer’s hairstyle would cause a verbal fight in the family). Television is a means of relaxation and entertainment, but often ignites domestic wars.

2 In what situation do people turn on the TV? Some people always keep their TV on when staying at home, or start watching as soon as they get back from outside. This is especially true with many of those living by themselves. It does not mean that they are actually watching. For a lot of people, television only exists as a background of sound and image and what they need is one or two casual glances at the TV, as if they were afraid to miss some special scene while, in actuality, their gaze is not fixed on the screen at all. In such situations, television seems to be a member of the family and claims attention for its presence. It is a friend, a companion, dependent on the family. It transmits human voices to them from all walks of life. As such, its sounds are totally different from those of other domestic electronic appliances, and this is also why it is often kept on while no one is watching. The person speaking on TV, the figure seen on the screen, certainly cannot walk out of it, but it is an existing person with a real name and history; this person is right here with you, in your home, though beyond your reach. We can clearly see the person, hear him/her, a person in real life, right beside you. The figure seen on TV is both real and fictitious, at once in your vicinity and far away. Situated in such a context, television is not intended for watching, nor for listening to; it no longer functions as a visual-audial machine. Here the TV serves only to produce a scene of hustle and bustle, to drive away solitude with sounds. As the contemporary family is diminishing in size, the space for socialization is also decreasing. With the number of family members drastically shrinking, and the home becoming increasingly quieter and emptier, television is, more than ever, playing the role of a companion able to utter sounds in a household, a companion expected only to make indistinct sounds (this is especially true with senior people). The TV that has been turned on may have no audience, or may be casually watched. People may engage themselves with domestic tasks while watching TV; they may frequently rise and leave for a while; they may also be talking with one another while watching TV, may stop for moment, and may even be sleeping in front of the TV (some people use it as a sleep stimulator). People have the freedom to decide what to do while sitting in front of a TV, and there is no mechanism

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binding them to it. They may quickly throw themselves into various televised scenes, and may quickly pull themselves out of them – they can even keep alternating between the televised world and the real world. With the television broadcasting news, everyone in the family may be doing their own thing; watching TV, or reading a book, or staying in the kitchen, or lying in bed. No one is bothering anyone else. Someone is fully involved in watching TV, while others are intent on doing household chores, or engaging themselves with other things. Television certainly can keep the family together, but it can also divide them, creating a gap in the home. People may turn on the TV anytime they like; they may simply cast one or two glances at what is shown on TV, or may spend a whole day watching. It is all flexible. There is a fundamental difference between watching TV at home and watching a movie in the movie theatre. While in the home, one does not have to keep fixing one’s eyes on the screen for a certain period of time; it is all up to him or her to decide when to watch and how. Watching a movie or a play in the theatre, however, is an event, for you have to make a decision and carefully plan your time. It requires that you leave home at a specific moment, heading for a specific place, in a special mood fitting the occasion. This is an extraordinary moment of our everyday life. Watching television, however, is too commonplace, nothing to be excited about. Rather, it signals the dissolution of the watching ritual, despite the fact that it is also a matter of fixing one’s eyes on the screen. In the movie theatre, everyone, quietly immersed in the darkness and thinking of nothing else, is totally carried away by what is shown on the screen. They willingly let the darkness hide their faces, their eyes closely following the shifting images on the screen, which seems to have a hidden magic power, inducing quasi-mechanical reactions in the audience as if they were a group of trained puppets. The entire theatre wrapped up in an intense ritual atmosphere, a dark mass of people gazing upon the screen, the real-life world is completely cast out. Here, the audience follows a given set of tacit rules: they are each seated in their selected spots, making no movement or noise, losing themselves in anonymity. Movie-watching is a disciplinary moment to audiences: anyone making noises or exiting the theatre before the end of the show risks becoming the target of their neighbors’ suspicious or contemptuous looks. In this sense, one does not feel completely relaxed in the movie theatre. Obviously, one is much more at ease watching television at home: there is no cinema rule, no risk of becoming the target of others’ disturbing or contemptuous attention, no constraint on one’s freedom to make a spiteful expression or gesture to what is seen. There is another difference. The cinema screen is the only light in the dark theatre. It is a kind of black hole tyrannically sucking all the attention of the audience into itself. Watching television at home is totally different and requires no audience immersed in darkness. The lights are kept on at night and all surrounding the TV are as visible as TV images. What is clearly seen are moving images framed within the black box, which separates two different worlds, one of which being real yet far off, the other real and close by. While what is showing within the framed box keeps changing and making sounds, all that is outside it, be it the

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wall which holds the TV or the table on which it is placed, remains still and quiet. The televised images and the surrounding environment constitute a sharp contrast: the former keep shifting, uttering sounds, and steadily glittering, whereas the latter remains motionless, silent, and enveloped in the shade. These are two different spaces: the space of the suprareal world and that of the real world. Quivering with shifting scenes, the TV miraculously creates one little lively world after another within the unchanging physical space of the room. The televised world is framed within a screen so small in size that much of the audience’s attention is attracted by other, surrounding things. It is divided between two worlds, alternating between the existing world and the world of televised images. The screen is unable to gather all attention onto itself and that is why television cannot fully engage its audience. However, there is, nonetheless, some commonality between television and cinema in terms of the relationship between the watcher and the watched: the objects watched in both never look back at the audience. That is, the audience is never watched and there is no communication between watcher and watched, no eye contact, and no feedback from either direction – this is purely a case of one-way traffic. Though the figures in film or television all come from the real-life world, they never pay attention to the audience, nor can they hear them. In this sense, watching a movie on a cinema or television screen is similar to viewing a landscape, for what is seen is a lifeless object except that the figure on the cinema or TV screen is a speaking and moving object. The image seen on the screen presents a paradox: it is a dead figure in motion, a life that is dead. The video camera captures the image of a living figure, but in re-presenting it, it deprives it of its life. This is how the image that occurs on the cinema or TV screen stands different from the human figure in a photo or painting – the figures in a photo or painting do not speak or move; they are still life objects, resembling no real people. They are images of human figures that are materially palpable and can be put in hands, can be viewed or played with, or can even be ripped apart by an angry hand. But the figures seen on television talk and act of theirown accord, like real people talking and acting in the real world, though, nonetheless, they are incapable of communication with the audience. They can be taken as machine-mediated performances, which have to follow the rules of the entertainment industry. Such performances have nothing to do with stage performances: the performers on stage are engaged in a two-way communication with the audience, who is expected to react, to show appreciation, to applaud, and the actors on stage will make adjustments accordingly to further stimulate the audience. There is often a dramatic interaction between stage performers and the audience when a star’s performance evokes an emotional response from the audience. But the actors’ performances seen on the television screen have no such impact on the family, as if their passion had been screened. The TV screen at once connects audiences to what happens beyond their homes and separates them from the outside world. It penetrates walls and all kinds of obstacles, opening the audiences’ eyes to what exists beyond their reach; yet at the same time it draws a strict line of demarcation between audiences and actors, cutting them off from one another.

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Actually, the actor-audience relationship not only exists in the theatre, but can be found in the classroom, in the lecture hall, in the conference room, or at the dinner table, during a walk, or even at a casual meeting with someone as well. What is fascinating to people and offers pleasure of the gaze is watching without being watched. Cinema and television, for the first time, offer such an ideal space for watching without being watched. In this sense, watching television is an unconcealed voyeurism. Such voyeurism yields pleasure and gratifies certain innermost desires, and yet it is risk-free. Even a timid person, when watching television, will feel completely relaxed, for the environment is endearingly cozy and there is no risk of being under any gaze. This is how television purges watching of any danger, restoring it to be an absolute mode of seeing, a manner of one-way watching. It is exactly such a manner of watching, with the watcher reclining on the sofa, that gives rise to relaxation and real pleasure. Well, what else can bring people more relaxed pleasure than watching television at home, after a busy and stressful day, and when there is nothing else worth doing? This is how the majority of people dedicate their daytime to their jobs and devote their evenings to entertainment, to television. Decades ago, there was a starry sky over the night city; today, the night city is filled with starry lights of televisions glittering in a myriad of windows.

3 What is glittering on the TV screen? To be sure, television brings people into direct contact with the world. They can see the most bizarre and unthinkable things in the world, the most beautiful, rare landscape, the most powerful or the most horrifying personages, and the most expensive goods and most trendy fashions. Television keeps people in touch with the world’s newest things and happenings, let alone the ordinary daily phenomena. For sure, television at least has completed a certain process of democratization: nowadays, a country kid knows as much about the outside world as a city child, and unlike previously, a new comer from the countryside encounters no real culture shock in the city. Perhaps one will say that, in a sense, television has completed a certain totalizing narrative as well. However, any real event has to be seen on television, in order to be considered as having really happened. Innumerable things have been left forgotten because they were neglected by television. Bourdieu says, even events like political demonstrations that openly disclose their goals to the world, “without paying attention to television,” risk “being left behind. It’s more and more the case that you have to produce demonstrations for television so that they interest television types and fit their perceptual categories. Then, and only then, relayed and amplified by these television professionals, will your demonstration have its maximum effect” (1998: 22). Television is a window that presents events, but it presents the world in a selective manner, disclosing certain aspects of the world while at the same time repressing others. On the one hand, television repeatedly and carefully searches the world for happenings that are worth reporting; on the other, it cuts the world to a manageable size and shows a condensed

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version of it. The boundless world shrinks to fit the black frame of the TV. The televised world is the actual world. All that the world’s people have access to is a televised reality – a form of screened reality – we all live in the screened reality. A small piece of screened reality is all the reality we have. Perhaps it can be put the other way around: the total actual world is condensed into the televised version. To be launched into the world is to be focused on the television screen. Thus, living in television is equal to living in the public world, because the narrow television frame covers almost the entire space of public life. The television camera turns any space it touches into a public space. People manage to transcend their closeted individuality, through television, to share their experience of public life with others. In this sense, seclusion from television means, to a large extent, being secluded from the world and its reality, rejecting progress, marooned in a parochial space of solitude, or reduced to the status of a monad. Increasingly, people no longer have any immediate sense of what happens around them – sometimes even the robbery that happens next-door is known, not through their own eyes or ears, but through a TV news broadcast. The extent of one’s knowledge about a certain event is not determined by their propinquity to its site, but has to do with whether they closely follow TV news. People in Beijing or Paris sometimes know as much about what happens in Tokyo as Tokyoites. Moreover, as television keeps updating people’s knowledge of the world, the wheels of the world keep rolling forward in television, and people witness and catch up with the rolling wheels of history by watching television. As soon as we stay away from television, we feel as though we are being pushed out of history: the world not only closes itself to us but becomes an alien existence external to us, still and stagnant. If, after living in the close company of television for years, you keep away from it for some time, you will come to realize, all of a sudden, that you are out of sync with the world’s rhythm of life, no longer in the midst of public life. It is ironic that nowadays, anyone trying to see the world with their own eyes only often ends up being deceived: if you are traveling abroad to see the world without watching TV for a while, you will feel shut off from what happens in the world, but the moment you turn on your TV at home, you find yourself on a new page of history. In the age of television, to keep pace with the world is not to go outdoors traveling, but to stay home close to television. As people increasingly depend on television for information about the world, they find reality itself is no longer familiar to them, and television becomes their only access to the real world. What this means is that we no longer seek knowledge of the actual world through our own unique personal experience. When people can easily see everything on television, they cease to be interested in knowing the world via direct contact with it. Children increasingly prefer to watch cartoons on TV to running about with friends chasing little animals in the field. Adults would rather sit in front of a television and watch all kinds of soap operas than try to understand their family’s inner world. While TV game shows often make them laugh their heads off, they have banished games from their own life. Even the so-called live telecast is not unmediated by the TV screen, and there is no longer any immediate experience. When watching a live telecast, people are bound to the

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perspective of the television, and are unable to use their own eyes to see as they will, therefore missing out on many significant details. Television opens people’s eyes but at the same time forces them to be closed. Television has opened up the world. People are no longer curious about any reality or foreign landscape. If television seems to have told us everything about the universe, where can we still find exotic places, legendary personages, or miraculous happenings? Someone returning from a long journey abroad has nothing to share with people; nor can exploration or mountain climbing lead to new discoveries. People have lost the capacity or opportunities for personal experience, which is the source of the stories to share with others. Just as Walter Benjamin has asked, “Who still meets people who really know how to tell a story? Where do you still hear words from the dying that last, and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring? Who can still call on a proverb when he needs one? And who will even attempt to deal with young people by giving them the benefit of their experience?” (1999: 731). The scene of a family sitting around a table to listen to stories is now superseded by the picture of family members gathering around television. TV is destroying the time-space for reading in the home as well. In a world with nothing unknown, people have lost their motivation for explorations. In this sense television is both a transparent instrument between people and their reality and a means of separation between them. The TV screen has set up a fence between the world and its inhabitants, and human beings no longer live within the bounds of the world, but on its unreachable other side. The link of immediate experience between humans and their world has broken down. What they are faced with is not only a world objectified, but one that exists only in images: in presenting everything through images, television produces a world flattened out. A three-dimensional, complex, deep, intriguing world is now brought to TV audiences as visible, one-dimensional, and determinate. The world framed within the black TV screen is divested of its mysteriousness, depth, and multiplicity of associations. The world is not only external to us and beyond our reach, but is reduced to a spectacle with no immanence, or we can say, television eliminates the world’s immanence. Television shapes the world such that the latter seems to be an imitation of the former. The world and television are equally externalized. Watching television means sitting in front of the world, playing with its exteriority. Switching from channel to channel with a remote control is like browsing the convoluted surface of the world. Indeed, television is responsible for the thriving of visualism, and has resulted in the dissolution of experience, both corporal and traditional. Once television starts pictorializing the world, it destroys not only experience, but also fantasy and abstract thinking. The world is represented with such clarity and precision that it seems to allow no room for further representation whatsoever. Then is it still possible to have an imagined world? When people have seen the White House on television thousands of times, are they still capable of imagining the mysterious hub of global political power? Television demystifies everything, and whatever is rehearsed by it hundreds of times, be it the face of the leader of a terrorist organization, or a fascinating fantasy drama, arouses

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no interest from the audience. When the external world becomes so concrete, so graphically vivid, so tyrannically engrossing our eyes, is it possible for us to be engaged in abstract or speculative thinking?

4 Television pictorializes the real world, reducing it to a myriad of images as well as dramatic scenes. By dramatic scenes we mean that television fictionalizes real happenings. The real killings seen on television become performances in audiences’ eyes, as if the killers and the killed are both performers. An airplane crashing into a high rise strikes audiences as a scene shot in a movie studio. Even when people see thousands of dead bodies on TV, these sights do not affect them as much as deaths in the real world. Any violence encountered in real life has a much greater impact on people than violence watched on TV. In actuality, televised sights of war do not impress audiences as scenes of real war; instead they appear to be part of a war film, a scene enacted by a group of actors and actresses using airplane and weapon props. The scene of Libyan soldiers fighting a battle broadcast on TV arouses no real sense of terror, for it is taken as an episode of a guerrilla war movie. It is precisely in this sense that Jean Baudrillardhas famously remarked that the Gulf War never happened; what happened was the masquerade of the war. That is to say, televised incidents always look like stage performances. The TV screen is an invisible stage transforming all reported events into dramatic scenes. Real events, seen through the screen, lose much of their realness. Why is television capable of such dramatic effect? It is a kind of duplicating machine, divesting all reported events of their aura, reducing every full-blooded person to geometrical forms of light and shadow – just think how a child feels when reaching out her little hands in an attempt to capture the moving figures on television only to find out that there is nothing there except a hard LCD. These televised human figures do not exist in their corporal forms; they are not breathing and have no heartbeat, they exude no human smell. The blood they have shed in real life now becomes mere signs of blood when seen on television. Television empties real things of their substance. To borrow terms form Benjamin again, television erases the aura of their singularity. Figures, bodies, and events all become their own signs when they are machine-duplicated. People talking in a room turn into a group of stringed puppets or signs as part of a performance when broadcast on television. Television seems to deprive everything of its singularity, be it an event or a human being, when they are shown simultaneously in millions of households. Both the scene of watching and that of being watched are infinitely reproduced – whatever event massively shared loses much of its efficacy. Television considerably facilitates publicizing the event, but causes it to be diminished in intensity. Despite its demystifying and disenchanting effect on broadcast events, television often endows what is reported with an aura on a different level, heightening their efficacy. Whatever occurs on television, no matter how commonplace, assumes an aspect of splendor. An ordinary person, once televised, becomes news

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passing from household to household, and anyone regularly appearing on TV will be regarded as having an aura about them, and will be compared to a celebrity. Indeed, television has a magic power to valorize and mystify what it touches, and the more frequently someone is videoed for TV, the more often he appears on TV, the brighter his luster grows, the more he is equal to a charming star, and the more he becomes mysterious beyond measure. In this sense, television has a double function: on the one hand, it divests televised human figures of the Benjaminian aura, removes their odor and corporal materiality, and takes away their breath and heartbeat – what remains of them are mere virtual shapes. On the other, however, television brings a mysterious air to everything it touches. When a person is endowed with an aura, they seem no longer a member of their species, transcending their material existence, no longer made of flesh and heart, and no longer someone from the human world. This is the paradox of television: it mystifies and demystifies at the same time. It reduces real, full-blooded, charming persons to cold, lifeless performances, and at the same time transforms every ordinary person into a celebrity with an aspect of splendor. The cold TV screen turns everything into a dramatic scene, an act of performance. Television dramatizes everything because all programs and all scenes are staged as spectacles for audiences, and all that is broadcast on television is intended for an audience. Those who are facing TV cameras know well that they are actually facing large audiences, so they carefully prepare to make sure that they have words ready to say, that the way they look, their hairstyle, and their manner of dress are all appropriate. Preparing oneself for the TV camera is like getting ready for appearing on stage. All that one is going to say, and all postures, are dramatized. Going on stage is a process of self-alienation: being an actor or actress is being alienated from oneself. Television changes everyone into an actor, and that is why the TV hosts and hostesses, as well as the guests, after working for TV programs for years, become professional actors and actresses, and even in their off-duty hours or in their daily life, often act as if they were in the TV studio. One other thing to mention is that television always represents things in a dramatic manner, which means that it follows its own narrative strategies and whatever it broadcasts is always already a constructed narrative. By way of selection, cutting, and editing, it makes news sound more dramatic. Television creates what it reports instead of presenting it. It never objectively discloses things; rather, it produces them. What is reported on television is created instead of presented. As Bourdieu has pointed out, “One thing leads to another, and, ultimately television, which claims to record reality, creates it instead” (1998: 22) In this sense, the source of news is less what really happens than television itself, which creates the events it broadcasts, just like the theatre director creates what is seen on stage. It is often said that only important things are televised; actually, one can also say that it is television reportage that makes things important in the eyes of its audience. It goes without saying that there is a natural affinity between television and drama, for the principle of selection in both is “the search for the sensational and the spectacular. Television calls for dramatization in both senses of the term: it puts an event on stage, puts it in images. In doing so, it exaggerates the importance

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of that event, its seriousness, and its dramatic, even tragic character” (Bourdieu 1998: 19). Why does television dramatize what is broadcast? To provide entertainment. Can we say that TV broadcast is only intended to communicate news instead of offering entertainment? People are saying nowadays, not without exaggeration, that television can entertain people to death. To be sure, it is often out of their desire to hear news, to know the truth of what is happening in the world, that people watch television. However, watching television for news and facts is not incompatible with entertainment. Watching all kinds of sensational and shocking sights on TV is one major means of procuring pleasure in today’s world. It is not uncommon that people enjoy watching horrifying scenes, and even the unprecedented brutal air bombing raids are a thrilling sight to TV audiences. People are more often wrapped up in excitement than seized by despair sitting in front of the TV showing ruins of destroyed places and lives. They turn on the TV to seek pleasure and amusement, to find a way to while away the long night, rather than to merely learn about what happens in the world. Actually, anyone who is immersed in their own trivial matters or has no interest in entertainment will pay no keen attention to what happens far away. News activates people’s potential capacity for seeking entertainment. They listen to news and learn about all kinds of events one after another, but what is the point of listening to news if it does not satisfy their curiosity and their innermost relish for pleasure? Most news stories have nothing to do with the audiences themselves; they are about other people. Watching news is like watching a play, for both are stories about others. The majority of television viewers are unable to intervene in what is happening in the world; they are onlookers. Television is aware of this, and its principle of selection is to ensure that what is broadcast is interesting, sensational, and dramatic. What is entertaining is worth watching, and whether an event is worth watching is certainly determined by its own nature, but more often than not, it has to do with the narrative strategy of news broadcast. News reportage is simply a mini soap opera. Narrative strategies are behind everything, including news broadcast and all other television programs. Television selectively broadcasts events and news, which are all framed and narrativized. That is, people can only watch the world and its happenings from the perspective of a machine: television seems to have become their special lens through which to see the world. On the one hand, television infinitely expands people’s views, bringing everything into their perspective, while on the other, it controls their perspective, limiting their views. Television is a perspective-serving instrument, its narrative strategies being entirely marketoriented, its rhetoric obeying the law of political economy. Television has nothing to do with individual writers with their own signature styles emphasizing some special aesthetics of writing; rather, it is an anonymous writing machine, which is made up of various structural components. The television apparatus is one of the capitalist manufacturing machines, and it is operated to facilitate expanded reproduction, to fulfill all kinds of capital-propelled projects, to occupy a dominant place in the competitive media market. All it does and all its broadcast programs

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are intended to achieve this goal. Therefore there is no objective television news, but only unrelenting pursuits of profits. Television is more of a money-making machine than a news reporting apparatus. Its only principle is to secure audience rating, catering to advertising companies. There is no end of TV commercials, which seem to serve as transitions between programs or shows, whereas in actuality, all the programs are transitions between commercials, serving to maximize the effect of advertisements. It is not that commercial advertisements are violently interrupting the TV programs, but that the TV programs are annoyingly interrupting commercial advertisements. If the news broadcast – which is the primary raison d’être for television – is of necessity transformed into a space of entertainment, then all the other programs have to be acknowledged as overt spaces of entertainment. People use television not as a means to find something, but as a way to pass the time. Seen in this way, television is, in today’s world, an important manner of relaxation. A few decades ago, televisions began to be popularized, radically changing people’s night lives. It not only divided the home into two parts, television space and non-television space, but also split the time of a day into two parts: daytime, spent working, and nighttime, dedicated to watching television. This is how television fills nighttime with meaning, hence the night beginning to exist in broad light. Television provides a way to deviate from work, a means of diversion or relief. It is a transition between two productive periods of daytime, a transition from labor to leisure, from reality to dreams. On the one hand, television makes it possible for people to be transported to a remote elsewhere, unrelated to themselves, or to be immersed in a fictional world, leaving behind the fatigue of the day. On the other, it offers a means of relaxation for people to replenish their energy for work the next day. The advent of television allows the unending repetitive day-to-day labor to be punctuated by restful moments. Inserted in between hours of work, eating, and sleeping, it securely occupies people’s free time. Television provides a regular program schedule for people to follow every day, making nighttime a reward for a full day’s hard work. Moreover, the rhythm of people’s time and the rhythm of their bodies are both adjusted in accord with the rhythm of television. This is how television inserts itself into the reproductive machinery of capitalism, being itself a night factory, working tirelessly to produce entertainment. It follows a strict program schedule and a rhythmic pattern of broadcasting from day to day, contributing to reproducing dreams and energies for capitalism.

5 Television is an entertaining machine, its audiences being passively entertained. They can only watch but are unable to participate – this is television’s irresolvable problem. Unlike the newly emergent internet media, television is a one-way broadcast or watching mechanism. It is entertainment, hegemonic in nature, and what it shows is unchangeable, what Roland Barthes calls a readerly text.1 True, one can read against the grain of television, resisting its hegemony, challenging the ideas or values it disseminates, but television is unaware of it and utterly

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indifferent. One can resist or reject television, but has no way of controlling or rewriting it. Television is intended for consumption, but not for interaction. But people can control the computer, either in terms of what can be done to it by the user or in terms of the information or ideas that are handled with it. One can exercise their active agency on the computer. If television demands that its audiences passively receive what it offers, for instance, then the computer is not a hegemonic supplier and allows its users to actively produce programs. Just as the way in which the computer provides information is different, so are the provider of information, the information itself, and the mechanism involved in publicizing information. More importantly, the manner of entertainment is changed as well. The computer integrates work, entertainment, and information into a whole. People can only consume television, but they can do creative work on the computer. Nowadays people have an increasingly greater passion for computers than for television. Instead of sitting in front of the TV to spend the evening hours as they used to do, today people sit in front of a computer all day long. They are carried away by the computer, which means that television no longer dominates the world, though it is far from its time to exit the world. There is no doubt that television is past its prime of life. It was not that long ago that the television was so popular that when night fell, people would be glued to their seats in front of it and oblivious to the world around them. The moment the TV was turned off, the entire pictorial world was blacked out, as if all that had been heard and seen on the screen had nothing to do with the corpse-like black machine. The family emerged out of the dark night and began to busy themselves getting ready for bed and for the next day. Today, perhaps people begin their day by turning on their computer, fastening their eyes on its monitor from morning till night. It is much easier to turn off a television than a computer, for the former sits there idle for the majority of the day, while the latter can only retire to rest when its users are in bed.

Note 1 The readerly text, in contrast to the writerly, as Barthes defines in S/Z (first published in French in 1973), is conventional, centered, and has recognizable characters and events. It makes no demands on the reader, who is only expected to respond to it passively. A writerly text, however, is unconventional, decentered, self-conscious, and challenging to the reader. It requires the reader to be a producer of meaning.

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1 Perhaps the cellphone is not a mere device people use; it has simply become one of their organs and seems to have grown onto their body: just like the hand is part of the human body, the cellphone seems to be part of the human hand. When someone has lost their cellphone, they feel as if they had lost one of their vital organs, like a machine that has lost one of its necessary parts, though in both cases the lost part sometimes is not working. Our tongues do not work when we are not speaking; our feet are not used when we are not walking; both our hands and feet cease to work when we are sleeping. The cellphone is a speaking organ, one that is intended to speak to someone far away. The use of cellphones increases the human capacity for language, making it possible to send words to very distant places, or, theoretically speaking, to any place at any time. Meanwhile our hearing becomes reinforced, so much so that we can miraculously hear sounds uttered thousands of miles away. The cellphone as a metallic organ augments the human body’s ability to process sounds. Connecting ear with mouth, it functions as a bridge between them, facilitating the coordination between them. Intermediating between ear and mouth, the cellphone brings them together to work in collaboration. At the same time the human hand joins them as well, hence the triumvirate of hand, ear, and mouth working in unison. Of course, even when not talking over the phone, people also use hands gesticulating to enhance communication, but in such a situation hands and gesticulations are auxiliary instead of necessary, only serving to facilitate verbal expression. It is the use of the cellphone that requires the hand to work together with the ear and the mouth, hence the new quadruple: hand, mouth, ear, and cellphone. The four of them constitute a new speaking machine. It is in this sense that the cellphone is deeply implanted into the human body, becoming a component part of it. It is no wonder that the cellphone is called “hand-phone” (shouji 手机) in Chinese, for it would no longer have its raison d’être if not used by the hand. It owes its existence to its inextricable association with the hand, flowering into its fantastic usefulness when it is connected with the latter. Today cellphone and hand have simply become an inseparable pair – the former has to join the latter to do its job, just as the pacemaker must join the heart to perform its function, or the horse must be joined by the nomad to gallop like lightning, or water must be wed to wind to produce a rippling. These pairings

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enable the cellphone, the pacemaker, the horse, and the water to gain a sense of self-expression. In each case it is the latter that allows the former to display its capacity. A hand holding the cellphone between mouth and ear: this is already a fixed image of humanity today, which has not been long in existence but is already omnipresent. This is no doubt the most emblematic image of our time, which inscribes one of the profoundest secrets of our contemporary life, repeatedly reinforced and affirmed by television, commercial advertising, and various pictures – twenty years back, such an image would have struck people as strange and bizarre. The cellphone, arguably, signals the evolution of the human body: we do not seem to have controlled or possessed it; instead it forces its way into our bodies. A child’s body grows larger when growing older, and this also means that at a certain point in time a cellphone will have been inserted into his or her growing body. This is something that happens so naturally that no one ever has doubts about it or questions it. Eventually everyone will spend every day of their life in the company of the cellphone and its ringtones. Hence something unprecedented is happening: a human body and a machine are integrated into a novel body, a hybrid, that is part human and part machine, which is, to borrow a term from Donna Haraway, a cyborg, a mixture of machine and organism.1 Today this cyborg is our own ontology, a mixed ontology. This brand new human-machine ontology remaps our boundaries, subverting the classical “human condition.” The human body is no longer a sheer organic entity, and no longer constitutes itself in opposition to machine or animal. This is how the cellphone, to extend a metaphor from Hannah Arendt, has become the shell “belonging to the human body [like] the shell belong[ing] to the body of a turtle.”2 Once the cellphone is implanted into the human body, or we say, once the human body starts carrying this shell, its potential becomes magnified dramatically. This could be taken as a significant historic event: humankind is, in a certain sense, taking on the power of a deity, something that has been encountered only in mythologies. Only a legendary hero or someone in science fiction has the ability to talk to a remote person, to hear sounds coming from far away, to communicate with anyone anywhere at any time. The use of cellphones bridges distances between people, enabling them to escape from their helpless state of isolation – this is the fundamental reason it is invented. With the help of a cellphone, a person in a moment of danger can quickly resolve an impending crisis, just like a drowning person can be rescued by a pole reaching him from the bank. In a sense, the most efficient way to debilitate or overpower someone today is to separate him from his cellphone, regardless of whether you are dealing with a criminal or a policeman. Conversely speaking, one always instinctually gropes for their cellphone when confronted with a dilemma or crisis. In all kinds of endangering circumstances, such as when one has lost one’s way or wallet, or when one is being robbed, or caught up in a suspended journey or a fight with someone – when one’s body is in trouble or when one’s corporal organs no longer function, the cellphone as a digital organ begins to exercise its miraculous power, delivering one from one’s physical helplessness and powerlessness as well as the constraints of the immediate reality.

Cellphone 51 The cellphone expands our scope of potential. That is why the relationship between our cellphone and body is of decisive importance in certain moments of crisis or danger. For anyone to lose their cellphone is to lose their limbs, to have one of their organs amputated, to become physically incomplete and drastically weakened in strength. Conversely, when we call a person’s cellphone and are unable to reach him or her, we become worried about the person. The silence of someone’s cellphone, in a sense, means that they are perhaps caught up in a special situation. In actuality, one can never truly understand the significance and function of the cellphone until one starts using it; then one comes to realize that it is unimaginable to live without a cellphone. In other words, once we have become shoujiren (手机人 cellphone-people), it is impossible to go back to the pre-cellphone age.

2 The cellphone dramatically maximizes the strength of the human body. Every human body attempts to empower itself, increasing its functionality, but the problem is that the cellphone is always involved in a two-way process of communication, its maximized functionality depending on the existence of another cellphone. The cellphone desires the existence of other cellphones. The more cellphones there are in a society, the greater their chances of fulfilling their potential. Actually cellphones are increasingly popularized, and there is emerging a boundless network in which every human body equipped with a cellphone constitutes a node. This network provides such an extensive coverage that people cannot but organize their social life in line with it. They are trying to set up their own positions in the society by means of the cellphone, creating a visible spatio-temporal milieu for themselves. Everyone is imagined to be a cellphone user, someone with a cellphone number. Nowadays it is no longer necessary to meet anyone in person, talking with them face to face; what one needs to do, instead, is to find the person’s cellphone number, for to find the person’s cellphone number is to find the person him- or herself. It seems that individual corporeal bodies are being reduced to mere numbers, and every human being has been abstracted into a cellphone number. Exchanging cellphone numbers is the beginning of a relationship established between two individuals, when each offers their cellphone number to be saved in the other’s cellphone. What has been entered in the digital gadget is both a number and a person: for the number registers the person’s background, address, and inner being. A cellphone number is the seed of a relationship, of a human being, for it functions as the soil in which a relationship is to grow and blossom. One’s network of social connections can be identified by a list of networking phone numbers saved in one’s cellphone and that is why the unsaved numbers are often rejected, for the unrecognized number is an alien number external to the networking chains of relations. Actually people often change their cellphone numbers as well, in order to break away from certain social chains of connections. To disappear from certain people’s view is to disappear from their cellphones. In a society where people organize their social circles by means of their cellphones, not having a cellphone amounts to being abandoned by society. For those

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who use cellphones are incompatible with those who have no cellphones. To become part of the society is to become a shoujiren (手机人 cellphone-person), to master, use, and follow the cellphone. Anyone keeping their cellphone off for hours and days will be considered having vanished from society, no matter how often they appear in the streets. As we know, there are two groups of people, one on the top of the society and the other at the bottom, who do not use cellphones. We never see the president of any country hold a cellphone in hand, for he is not a mere participant in social life; his role is to govern or control the society, transcending the homogeneous social groups. The president has such a powerful office staff that covers all the functions of the cellphone, and that is why he has no need for it. Nor do those at the bottom of the society use cellphones, for they do not participate in society as well, though with them it is not a matter of choice, but a matter of not having the ability to do so. They have no means of forming a connection, or finding a number willing to be connected to them. These people are the “unwanted extras” of the population, existing in places whose boundaries are coextensive with the limits of their eyesight, or merely surviving within the limits of their walking distance.An old peasant of a remote village, or a beggar on the roadside, lives within the capacity of his physical body, and has no need for a cellphone whose function is to offer freedom beyond the constraints of the physical body. In a sense, both those who control the society and those who are excluded from the society, to borrow terms from Georges Bataille, can be compared to the “heterogeneous elements” of the homogeneous society, or we say, the sacred beings of the secular world. The homogenizing cellphone networks are unable to design, organize, and encode them, who stand beyond the networks’ capacity to contain them; in a sense, it can be said that they are excluded by the social networks constituted by cellphones. This is how the cellphone becomes a measure of one’s participation in social life. It is not surprising that those who are imprisoned or segregated from the rest of the society are deprived of their right to access cellphones. To be deprived of the right to access the cellphone is to be deprived of the right to socialize, or of the right to live as a human being. Perhaps one can divide up the world anew in terms of access to the cellphone, that is, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have cellphones and participate in public spheres and those who have no cellphones and do not participate in public spheres. This is how people are separated according to their relationship with the cellphone. Actually there is a category of individuals beyond the above-mentioned two groups – those who decide not to use the cellphone. With these people, using no cellphones is not a matter of refusing to socialize, but a gesture of their subjectivity. When the entire society is dominated by cellphones, when every body is becoming a cellphone-body, refusal to own a cellphone no doubt becomes a gesture of cultural politics. In this context, rejecting the cellphone, like rejecting mass culture, certain intellectual trends, or certain fashions of the day, signals a decision to maintain one’s independence. This is an ideological stance against the mainstream ideology. Paradoxically, such people represent a bizarre mixture of conservatism and radicalism, for their radicalism ultimately serves to reinforce

Cellphone 53 their conservatism. They are mostly intellectuals, who are often incredulous towards technology and machinery, towards social progress, having no trust in cellphone technology, in freedom, in action against encroachment on privacy, or in any prevalent new lifestyle. They persist in safeguarding the organicity of the human body. They do not refuse to participate in society, but attempt to adopt a classical mode of participation, in hopes of maintaining their independence from machines. While there are many ways of maintaining one’s independence and exiting from mainstream society, refusal to own a cellphone is the path some intellectuals take to gain this independence. However, the odds are that the expanding ocean of cellphones will eventually drown them though they will be the last to be drowned.

3 Indeed, this new human-machine cyborg is, on the one hand, liberating our bodies from their intrinsic limitations, and, on the other, is subjecting them to the wretched condition in which they are drowned by cellphones. We are being controlled by these handy mini machines, and are increasingly dependent on them. Such dependence drastically hastens the progress of our corporeal degeneration. For we are as much debilitated as we are emancipated with the use of cellphones. They restrict certain functions of our body, limiting the extent of our mobility – people tend to become physically inactive. The use of cellphones causes partial loss of our writing ability, for communication by talking over the cellphone is increasingly replacing communication by writing. In relying on cellphones to save information, our memory capacity is declining. Just as Donna Haraway has noted, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (1999: 152). Our dependence on cellphones is in part psychological, for sometimes we find our hands unconsciously groping for our cellphone, feeling it, and playing with it. When engaged with nothing, when caught up in waiting for someone, or when free and relaxing, we always fumble with our cellphone in spite of ourselves, like children playing with their toys. It is unbearable to separate from one’s cellphone, even for a brief moment. One becomes restless when one’s cellphone is missing and starts feeling lost if there has been no ringing tone for a while. The ringing sound has become internal to their body, and has shaped its rhythm. Even our ear itself, when it has heard no ringing for quite a while, will become deeply troubled, just like the stomach feels hungry when there has been no food in it for a while. An impatient, worried body needs the soothing caress of a cellphone’s ringing sound. The little metal machine possesses a captivating magical power over its users: many people grow fondly attached to their cellphones and are reluctant to replace them with a new one because they have lived with them for a long time, their fingers knowing each key very well – some people can even touch-type without looking. Of course, there are also people who quickly get tired of their cellphones and are constantly in pursuit of the newest design and brand, perpetually fascinated by every new type of product. If two individuals realize that their cellphones are completely identical

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in design and function, they will look astonished and understandingly smile upon each other. It seems the cellphone is able to communicate with its user, speaking of his or her identity and taste. Sometimes people use their cellphones to show who they are. Indeed, the cellphone is today’s fetish. A new fetishism is haunting the world – the fetishism of the cellphone. As people are increasingly cellphone-dependent, there arises the problem of how to deal with the troubles and disturbances caused by the use of cellphones. How to handle the cellphone is now part of the daily technology of the self with everyone. To keep it on or off? To put it in the sound or vibration mode? To respond by texting or talking? These harassing questions leave the cellphone user ceaselessly shifting back and forth between different decisions. The anxiety of waiting for a certain type of ringing or the fear of hearing it makes one stressful and restless. One’s attitude to cellphone ringing usually has to do with their attitude to socialization. A person locked up in their own world or having lost interest in life or enveloped in a depressed, brooding mood is no doubt resistant to answering any call. On the contrary, a person optimistic and full of hope will feel low and depressed if his or her life is devoid of cellphone ringing. Cellphones often interrupt our established order of life, bringing our ongoing activity to a sudden halt: we would stop thinking in the midst of writing, stop talking in the midst of a conversation, and stop eating in the midst of a meal, stop snoring in the midst of sleep, to exit the here and now to answer a call and communicate with someone in another space. Not till the end of the call is it possible to return to the previous context of activity. The problem is that one call follows upon another, all unexpected, and there is no end of them. This is how, thanks to the exploding impact of the cellphone on our life, we are hijacked into an orbit of life characterized by unpredictability, restlessness, and anxiety, unable to stay on the path of our own planned activity, and deprived of the peaceful time and mood we used to enjoy when cellphone ringing was unheard of. Shifting from excitement to confusion to restlessness, and hesitating over whether to keep the cellphone on or off, people are unable to stay calm and self-composed, not even for a single moment, all because of what can be called “cellphone anxiety.” Actually the calls are often sudden and impulsive: when someone is sitting bored at the airport waiting to board a plane (in the waiting hall almost everyone is playing with their cellphone), or when something triggers the memory of someone in their head, or a familiar name is mentioned in a conversation, they will rush to dial a number. All this happens by chance. Such unexpected or fortuitous calls or texts often change people’s mood or state of mind, shattering their inner peace and making them feel splintered. Nay, such casual, unexpected calls will trigger many surprises. The existence of cellphones radically changes our otherwise simple life, immensely deepening its heteronomy. To both caller and called, cellphone ringing has serious consequences. Of course, one can turn off their cellphone or ignore the ringing to prevent the interference from unexpected calls, thus maintaining a certain degree of autonomy. The problem with some people, however, is that they have to always keep their cellphone on, for that is how they work to make a living. Their job is cellphone-dependent. They are always on call, expecting a command, or attending

Cellphone 55 on a certain individual, a certain institution, or some client, or having to closely watch over what is happening. As we know, many cellphone numbers are on display in advertisements, their owners being perpetually exposed to strangers, to public attention. Cellphones throw their users into a perpetual open space, a situation in which they are fully exposed to the world, even when they are resting in their own bedroom or when they are enjoying themselves in the midst of the night. For a secretary, a chauffeur, or a sex worker, the cellphone is always their strong connection to the outside world, in spite of the dark night or thick wall. The problem with them, however, is that they have to be always on the go, to be exposed to others, to be summoned, to be confined, always on call. To these people the cellphone becomes a prison cell. For them to own a cellphone is to be enslaved by it, to be locked fast in an unbreakable iron chain, no matter how far away they are from crowds of people or how deep they are hiding in the dark night. The cellphone exposes us so relentlessly to the outside world, leaving us completely at its disposal. On the other hand, however, the cellphone constitutes a secret space of privacy, preventing the outside world’s invasion. Each cellphone draws a boundary between oneself and those around, precluding any possible transgression. Reading a received short text is like enjoying a secret. A cellphone conversation (a text) belongs exclusively to two individuals, like a contract between them. If they are bound by a strong enough contract, their privacy is entirely guaranteed. Meanwhile, their conversations, by virtue of the cellphone’s mobility, can easily be protected from others. That is why people always use cellphones when the conversation needs to be protected from others, be it in their office, their home, or a public place. It is quite common that people quickly disappear into an out-of-the-way corner to engage in a confidential conversation. The cellphone’s capacity to ensure privacy renders itself an ideal tool for doing all forms of secret business. Swindling, blackmailing, business transactions, politics, and love affairs, all these are often successful with the help of cellphones. As such activities only take place in the digital space of a cellphone, instead of a public space, people have no fear or compunction. Although the swindler’s or the commercial advertiser’s text is sent to numerous people, what they imagine dealing with are separate individuals among whom there is no communication. That is why each individual is made vulnerable facing the deceptive advertising messages, and this is what public advertising can never achieve. As every individual is engaged in a one-on-one relationship with the swindler (or advertiser), people are often trapped unprepared. Theoretically, cellphone texts are private and safe from others, but such privacy and people’s trusting reliance on it often causes trouble as well: true, the cellphone is a new organ of the human body, but it is not absolutely tied to it; rather, occasionally its content is accidentally divulged. Nowadays cellphones are becoming a major killer of emotional or familial life. There are divorces caused by cellphone texts every day. Hence the paradox: just as cellphones’ potential for maximized socialization often results in anti-socialization, so its potential for maximized privacy results in undesired publicity. The cellphone creates a secret channel of life for moderns, which, thanks to its secrecy, is saturated with all forms of desires.

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4 When social communication is modeled on cellphone networks, then the society is organized increasingly to suit the cellphone-dependent way of life. Everyone is imagined to be a highly efficient cellphone operator, everyone living their daily life in accord with the cellphone-person’s mode of existence. The society begins to reconfigure its grammar of life, with cellphones becoming an integral part of the society, whose processes of self-encoding rely on the functioning mode of the cellphone. This cellphone age obviously features a total compression of time and space, which of course does not begin today but is being unprecedentedly pushed to an extreme in today’s world. Spatial-temporal constraints on information are quickly destroyed. As interpersonal communication is based on the features of the cellphone, all other methods of communication are being rapidly superseded. The world has witnessed the disappearance of telegraph and mail correspondence. Perhaps soon house phones will become extinct – the only reason they are still in use is their inexpensive rate. The cellphone merges the communicative function of words and that of sounds, integrating letter writing with telephone communication, making both quicker and more efficient. However, in comparison with slow mail correspondence, cellphone communication has one major disadvantage: it eliminates all the joy and excitement of looking forward to anticipated mail. With the advent of the cellphone, letter writing as well as its emotional expressiveness and the taste and lifestyle it manifests all become a story of the past. Letter writing is not a mere exchange of information; it is a writing practice, adding depth and richness to interpersonal communication. The cellphone text writing, instead, takes away all the charm of writing, for what it conveys is no more than a message. Millions of season’s greetings are sent by cellphones, but all of them carry traces of machine writing. Today people always carry two metal objects with them: a key and a cellphone. The key opens one’s private, closed space, where one is protected from intrusion by others; the cellphone leads one into a public open space, connecting them with the outside world. However, despite the numerous contacts your cellphone contains, you often feel at a loss regarding which number to dial. This is another paradox of today’s life: on the one hand you have so many phone numbers saved in your cellphone and can quickly get through to anyone you want to talk to; on the other, however, when, in the depths of night, you feel like talking with someone and search through all the numbers you have saved in your cellphone, you will find out that, to your dismay, none of the numbers you wish to dial ever exist.

Notes 1 See Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” pp. 7–46. 2 See Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 153.

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Computer

1 Like human beings, machines have a history of evolution as well.1 In several respects, the computer is the newest product of the evolutionary history of machines. One of its distinct features is that it combines many of the different functions of past machines. Usually a particular type of machine plays a particular type of role, and is defined according to its unchanging function. The television is a machine for watching news, documentaries, and movies; the automobile is a transportation machine; the microwave oven is a heating machine; the air conditioner is an airadjusting machine. Then what kind of machine is a computer? There seems to be no easy answer, for a computer can be used for paying fees, booking tickets, shopping, writing, and playing games – it serves almost all purposes. The computer emerges as the outcome of the evolution of all kinds of machines, integrating all of their functions. It not only constantly gets rid of its own prehistories (the history of the computer is a history of its own evolution, an open-ended process of self-upgrading and self-remaking), but more importantly, has pushed many other machines out of use. It gathers their functions onto itself and therefore can be taken as an evolved typewriter, an evolved video camera, an evolved radio, an evolved television, and an evolved game player. By way of incorporating various other machines it becomes a machine of machines. Actually it is impossible to define the computer by its functions, which are so numerous, and none of them is dominant. Despite its close relationship with information, by no means can we take it as a purely information machine; one cannot even define it by its connection with the internet, for the computer does not necessarily entirely depend on it; rather, the internet is entirely dependent on computers. The latter can be used for reading and writing, playing games, and making designs, all independently of the internet. It is able to do its jobs on- and offline. The computer performs so many functions that it is difficult to determine its central function. Everyone has their own computer, and makes different uses of it, regardless of whether they have the same brand name or the same model, and everyone endows their computer with different meanings, as if what they share is not the same kind of machine. The way the computer is used varies from person to person, just like the way the refrigerator or washing machine is used is different from household to household. Even the same computer in a home may mean

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different things to father and son. Indeed, the computer offers itself for all kinds of uses: one can use it as a bank machine, or use it as a game player, or use it for playing chess, or for fortune-telling. The computer is undergoing an ongoing explosive expansion in meaning and function. One can abstractly say that the computer is both an entertaining apparatus and a working machine; a machine intended both for pastime alone and for all kinds of practical jobs. For the first time the computer combines work and play, itself becoming an integrative machine. If our life is, by and large, an alternation between work and play, then it is no wonder that it is increasingly saturated with computers. The first thing many people do after rising from bed or arriving at their office is to turn on their computer, and turning off the computer is what they do to conclude their day. It is no exaggeration to say that the computer is somewhat like a string threading through every day of people’s lives. Everyone has to be equipped with a computer, just as everyone has to be provided a bed or has to wear a suit of clothes – the computer is becoming a necessity for every individual. For many people, life is divided into two parts: life with the computer and life beyond the computer. Therefore it is a matter of course to keep the computer on every day, and it is especially true with those whose job is computer-dependent. Every day, they cannot wait to turn on their computer, and will have no peace of mind until they are sitting in front of their computer, whether they are in the office or at home. It is always in the name of work or some urgent business that they turn on their computer – in some cases work is their real motivation. For turning on the computer, unlike turning on the TV, which necessarily means doing no work, signals the start of working time. To those who are anxious to work, watching TV or engaging in other forms of recreation is no doubt a waste of time, and will make them feel guilty or trigger a moment of inner conflicts. Sitting in front of a computer makes people feel much more at ease, though it takes a while for them to start working on it. Playing on the computer for some time is usually a prelude to work. It is always after playing and searching aimlessly on the computer for a while that people slowly start getting into the right mood for work. Even in the midst of working, they will, in spite of themselves, constantly use the computer for purposes other than work to have fun. Or, when restless or in bad mood, they will withdraw themselves from work and entertain themselves and relax by playing with the computer. To painstakingly engage in writing is certainly unpleasant, whereas going over all kinds of anecdotes or telltales online is highly pleasurable. It is natural that people have no interest in work, which, quotidian, boring, and tiresome, is what they have to do. On the contrary, people are entirely in their element when they are having fun. Any form of recreation is enjoyable. The difference between work and play consists in that the latter never tires people whereas the former quickly makes them tired. If there is a type of work which never makes people feel tired, then it is no longer merely work but also a form of entertainment, hence collapsing the boundary between them. Actually people always devote more time to entertainment than to work when they are sitting in front of the computer. Play and work divide up their

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time, their computer alternating between functioning as a working machine and as an entertaining apparatus. People often stop working to have a break, especially when some ready-to-hand diversion is a strong temptation. The work process is throughout punctuated by moments of play, and is constantly interrupted. People have to force themselves to go back to work against the temptation of amusement, to resume what was suspended. Play and work, which are two spheres, or two orbits of activity, of life for everyone, two major divisions of time of the day apart from hours reserved for eating and sleeping, compete with each other on the computer for people’s attention. This is how the computer makes possible two kinds of psychological experience as well as two forms of life experience, triggering a perpetual battle between the temptation to use the digital machine for entertainment and the urge to use it for work. As a result, it is difficult for people to concentrate either on work or on play. They use computers to increase their efficiency but playing on the computer reduces the efficiency. This is how people are often caught up in feelings of anxiety and remorse. The computer as an entertainment machine is often an annoyance to hard-working people. Making quick and easy conversions between play and work on the same machine radically changes the condition and mode of work. It also gives rise to a new technology of the self: faced with new temptations, the technology of selfgovernment is met with a new challenge, a new form of inner conflict. However, the computer also provides a self-technology of resistance for individuals, hence the arising of a new challenge to the capitalist mode of governmentality for enterprises. Previously, the workers were controlled by the machine, subjected to its rhythm, or the rhythm of the conveyer belt. As Marx noted, “In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages” (548). The rule of men by the machine is in essence the domination of men by things. That is, “it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. However, it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality” (Marx 1976: 548). Today, the new workers, the computer operators, however, have completely gotten rid of the mandatory rule of the machine, for they have autonomous power and control over the computer, which submissively follows the rhythm of their fingers’ movement. Previously, the company’s managers, by exercising a general surveillance over the employees, were able to identify those who were not engaged in work sitting in front of the machine. Nowadays the managers are no longer able to tell whether an employee is doing their job or is using the computer only to serve their own purposes. To those who are self-employed, the computer is a witness of their own inner conflicts; as for those who work for their employer, the computer provides a means of escape from work, or what Michel de Certeau would call a tactical intervention. They use entertainment to reduce the mandatory labor time, rendering the long working hours less boring and unbearable – the working hours are filled with moments of entertainment. Therefore the computer can be everyone’s plaything. It is a substitute for the toys people used in their childhood. In a sense, one can also say that it is an evolved

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toy, a completely new type of toy, a toy that one can play with while working. This also signals the birth of a new age of entertainment: people can amuse themselves when working with the machine, and can have fun any time they want. There is no end of resources, and a huge plurality of forms of play are readily available. Everyone can find their favorite manner of play – if we can define play as a kind of unproductive consumption whose only result is pleasure. To many young people today, the computer is their only plaything, their only source of pleasure. This is how the computer is becoming a type of fetish, something people are obsessed with. Too much energy and time have been invested in it, which leads to no real reward except for fleeting moments of pleasure. It not only affects work that is done on the computer, but also interferes with work beyond the computer. People addicted to playing with the computer tend to neglect things in their real life. If one’s life can be divided into computer life and non-computer life, and if in computer life entertainment is taking up much of the working time, then we can say that computer life is intruding upon non-computer life. Non-computer life is increasingly shrinking. Many people are complaining about the computer, swearing that they shall fight to get rid of the computer addiction, as they have sworn to quit smoking. However, smoking is completely harmful to a smoker’s health; the pleasure it gives comes at the cost of the slow destruction of his health, and quitting the pleasure of smoking is rebuilding a healthy body. But it is not easy to get rid of the computer addiction – people strive to eliminate their computer addiction in order to rebuild a healthy life, but a healthy and normal life today necessarily involves engagement with the computer, which is already internal to life itself. The computer not only produces pleasure but also enables people to acquire new skills and is therefore practically useful. It won’t do to simply abandon it, to get rid of it. Many people start operating the computer in the name of work, and turn it off in order not to indulge in play and pleasure. But it is easier to turn it on than turn it off. Many people rush to the computer to sit in front of it as soon as they have finished eating; with many others, the first thing to do after jumping out of bed is to sit at the computer desk; some people simply cannot wait to turn on their computer the moment their day of non-computer work is over. Years ago people spent their evenings watching TV, but now they have the computer as their evening company, with which they no longer feel the passage of time. Indeed, the computer has altered people’s experience of time, as if it had secretly sped up the clock. Late at night people sit in front of their computer, their eyes and hands working in harmony, accompanied by the clicking sound of the mouse, rendering the quiet of the night deeper. At this moment, all dark memories of people’s lived experiences are quickly fading away; their computer life is acquiring an unalloyed form of purity and autonomy, all the passion they have for life being sucked into the orgasmic moment of computer life. Television has pushed back people’s bedtime, and now the computer is pushing it further back, even causing the night to be altogether disappearing. Thanks to the computer, the night is as loud as the day.

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2 If a machine is multifunctional, then each part of it is multiple in meaning. With respect to ordinary machines, their component parts are unifunctional. An automobile has tires used for motion; it has brakes to make it stop; the rear view mirror enables the driver to have a broader view; the steering wheel is used to control the direction of the vehicle. Every part of the automobile has its unchanging function, just like every word has its fixed meaning. All these functions combine to constitute a total mobile transportation system, just like individual words make up sentences according to grammar to produce complete semantic units. The automobile’s unchanging and only goal is its mobility. But the computer serves many purposes, and the meaning of its configuration is multiple in nature. Each key in combination with other keys can produce different commands. The computer is operated chiefly by using mouse and keyboard, and the same mouse serves to issue different commands, performing innumerable functions and jobs. The mouse as one single signifier can breed innumerable signifieds: it can make the computer produce sounds or keep silent, or can keep changing the computer screen, and can even turn off the computer. Conversely, one can also achieve the same effect by using different methods or techniques. The way the computer is operated and the result achieved do not constitute a one-on-one relationship, and this is one of the fundamental differences between the computer and other types of machines. The telephone requires that a number be precisely correct so that a call can be made; with the television every number means a particular channel. As for the automobile, every part has a specific function and has to be operated with precision; otherwise there will be disastrous consequences. Every part of the vehicle is assigned a fixed function and allows no change. However, the computer follows a totally different grammar, for there are different paths to follow and different ways to operate it. The route it takes to do a job is often dominated by contingency and what is going to happen is unpredictable. It is exactly such contingency and semantic multiplicity that renders the computer inexhaustibly rich in potential. It has a kind of unintended self-reproducibility, and in comparison with other types of machine, its usage and assemblage bear a resemblance to what Derrida calls “dissemination.” All this has to do with the use of hands. The way the hand controls the mouse and keyboard reveals a new relationship between hand and machine. Actually, the hand-machine relationship is very complicated. Strictly speaking, all machines are operated by hands, and many of them will keep running once they are started. You only need to press the start button to keep them going – washing machine, air conditioner, and television all belong to this category. This is the phase of automatization in the evolutionary history of machines. Still, there are other kinds of machines whose operation also needs the participation of hands, but here the hand is made to passively follow the machine. In a factory workshop, there is a sea of hands working in sync with the rhythm of the engine lathe – this is a scene of passive hands. In such a situation, hands not only have to coincide with the rhythm of the machine, but even become part of it or merge with it – this is

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an instance of hands becoming standardized. Operating the machine causes the operator to be bound to the machine, obeying its rule and order. By virtue of this fact many people say that the machine is a human-eating monster. This is also what Lukacs meant by “reification.” But the computer-hand relationship points to a different situation: the hand has to ceaselessly work together with the computer, which requires its participation throughout the process of its operation – in this sense the hand is not automatized. In actuality the computer and hand constitute a Deleuzian assemblage. The hand seems to be the computer’s starter or oil filler, as if it is the agent that starts and controls the computer and therefore is internal to it. The moment the hand stops working, the machine comes to a halt. The hand is ceaselessly knocking or moving on the keyboard. Its close relationship with the computer recalls the intimate partnership between hand and piano. However, the way the hand works on the computer has nothing to do with passion, unlike the way the hand plays the piano. It indifferently knocks the keyboard and keeps the machine going. There is no compulsory manner of using the fingers and no rhythm to the movement of the hand. It’s all easy and flexible. If the hand cannot afford to make any mistakes when driving a vehicle, then working on the computer offers the hand much more freedom and autonomy: it has choice and can make mistakes; it needs no rhythm or frequency; it follows no regulations, and is not nervous. Even a little child can make a computer work by knocking on the keyboard at random. Also, working on the computer does not consume as much energy. The hand movement brings one neither pleasure nor discomfort. Some forms of the hand-machine assemblage relationship, however, bring people enjoyment, such as in the case of driving a vehicle or playing the piano. As for game-playing, all pleasure comes from the way the hand handles the machine – here the hand is the machine’s goal. The computer game is the game of hands. The hand itches with desire, swelling with a feeling of fulfillment. In other hand-machine assemblage relationships, the hand feels uncomfortable, and sometimes is subject to the violence of the machine – many workers have permanently lost their fingers. In such situations, the machine needs hands, but treats them as enemies. When dealing with the computer, however, the hand does things in so casual a manner, without the vigilance it needs when driving a vehicle, or the ecstasy experienced when playing the game machine, or the enmity it encounters when operating an engine lathe. While these machines foreground the visibility of the hand, the computer pushes it to the background: people often forget about their hands, as if they do not exist. The computer-hand assemblage exhibits a new type of machine-hand relationship, which is careless, casual, and relaxed. No one needs any special training to be able to operate a computer. Even a child or an old person can easily do things with it. The operation of a computer sets no high demand on the hand, and therefore hardly involves any real “craftsmanship.” At a different level, however, the operation of a computer involves advanced craftsmanship. On the one hand, the computer has no repressive regulation for the hand; on the other, as soon as it is connected to the internet, the computer turns into a mysterious object, an impenetrable shadow, an inexhaustible object of knowledge, with infinite potential and innumerable ciphers. As such it rejects any

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regulations or restrictions. Indeed, the computer is the only machine that is impossible to completely master: it is produced by humans but confronts every human being as an impenetrable abyss. It is a machine made up of individual parts, but is also an unthinkable work of art with infinite meaning. This is one of its fundamental differences from previous, old-fashioned machines. Finite and one-dimensional, previous machines were easy to operate. People are able to understand them and can reveal their secret in one single moment. The knowledge of the computer is inexhaustible, the potential it holds being infinite. If the hand operating the old machines only needed to follow a fixed, programmed procedure, then the hand working with the computer is much more powerful and creative, and can open an entirely new digital world, making explorations in the vast ocean of knowledge possible. Of course, no one is able to secure complete control over the miraculous computer, just as no one is completely unable to use it. It is so complicated and deep that almost everyone is awe-stricken in front of it: they can only access some of its aspects, grasp some of its secrets, and develop some of its potential. There are huge differences among different individuals with regards to their ability to use the computer. True, there are computer experts or first-class anonymous hackers who make all kinds of computer experiments. In such cases the computer is used as an object of experiment: many of those who are inextricably attracted to the computer are fascinated not merely by the information it provides, nor by its various functions, but by the way it is used and the experiments one can make with it, and by enigmatic computer technology as well as its inexhaustibility. That is why people not only treat computer games but the entire computer system as the object of their game-playing. On account of this fact, the computer, paradoxically, often loses its various functions and becomes reduced to the status of a mere game machine, one that challenges the limits of human intelligence.

3 The bottomless abyss that the computer is, as well as its experimentality as a machine, makes the computer inescapably liable to plenty of obstructions and mistakes, which, as a result of trial and error, are extremely common, and totally different from what happened to the previous machines. There are always little errors occurring, whether one is using the keyboard or clicking the mouse. But the computer allows for such errors and is able to quickly correct them, preventing any serious consequences. This sets a sharp contrast between the computer and other types of machine such as the automobile. With an automobile, any mistake can be fatal, or we say, no mistakes are allowed. In the case of other machines such as refrigerator and washing machines, there are no operating errors; there are only errors of the machines themselves, and only obstructions that are internal to these machines. These machines do not need to be operated. As long as their component parts are flawless, they will not break down. When they are malfunctioning, people will replace or repair some of their parts – for all the secrets of these machines are inside themselves.

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True, the errors that happen to the computer can also come from within. Apart from operating errors, there are also obstructions caused by its parts, like in the case of the television. However, there is another, unique way that the computer is liable to fail. Even when its parts are flawless, and even when its total system is perfect, the computer can still break down. That is, the errors that occur to the computer are not from within; they often come form outside, for the computer can be affected by external factors, or, more specifically, there can be interferences coming from another, hidden computer. In this sense the computer is not a completely independent or self-sufficient machine; it has wireless connections with other machines. Therefore, it can be easily attacked by invisible viruses or by other computers, its problems not necessarily coming from within but from other machines as well. One computer is assembled with another, connected with a remote one, or serves as a supporting part of another computer – there is a wireless “wire” existing between computers, which recalls what Deleuze and Guattari define as “rhizome,” for no individual computer is the dominant center, and no individual computer exists outside the complicated “rhizomic” system: “the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (1987: 21). As a computer always exists in a network of computers, its obstructions can come from itself or from the computer network. A computer made up of perfect parts can nonetheless break down – this is something unique to the digital machine. This is another major difference between the computer and other types of machines. Despite the fact that it can maintain its status as a form of independent, closed material existence, and that it can be located in a closed small space hidden from the rest of the world, one computer is necessarily intertwined with other computers, and necessarily belongs to an infinity of computers. This places the computer beyond its owner’s control, or, more precisely, beyond human control. Every computer has a host, a legal owner or user, but at the same time, it has one other host, which is a vast, invisible, autonomous computer system, belonging to this anonymous machine network. It can be controlled by two hosts, who have equal power over it. The human host can use it to attack another computer; conversely, it can be attacked by another computer controlled by another person. So one can say the computer is at once unprecedentedly powerful and extremely vulnerable. Someone can use his own computer to control someone else’s computer in an unknown place, thus becoming its actual owner for the time being. Computers can be one another’s enemies or war weapons. Today the computer is both the most pleasant and tender machine as well as being the most powerful lethal weapon. There is not one single computer that is safe and, no matter how it is protected, there is no guarantee that it is out of harm’s way or within its owner’s control. Marx pointed out over a century ago that machines eat human beings, whereas today what is happening is that machines are eating machines. Machines depend on machines for survival. Their destiny has much to do with other machines. The computer is what it is because it is a machine in a system of machines – this is the computer’s unique feature. There is no system of washing

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machines, no refrigerator system, no air conditioner system: all these are individual machines isolated from one another. A washing machine, for example, has no connection with another washing machine. Only computers belong to a system. Then perhaps people will say that many communication machines such as telephones, cellphones, and fax machines are part of a system, for they depend on other telephones, cellphones, and fax machines to function. But there is one big difference: these machines do not attack one another and are not manipulated by other machines. Nor will they be destroyed by them; rather, they match each other. The computer heralds the advent of a new system of machines, which, involved in intricate interconnections, either communicate with one another in harmony or attack one another, either support one another or destroy one another. Moreover, every computer can be connected with innumerable other computers and owes its existence to this interconnected network. The inter-human relationship is being unprecedentedly superseded by the inter-machine relationship. If, in the nineteenth century, Marx saw the relationship between people as a relationship between things, and thus discovered what is called “commodity fetishism,” then today a new machine fetishism is beginning to pervade the world. There is a rhyzomic horizontal relationship between computers, so much so that any individual computer is equal to more than its material framework can contain. Or one can say, it is greater than its total self, or greater than the total of its qualities as a machine. Actually, computers are moving into outer territories; they are transgressing their categorical boundaries, outgrowing their properties as machines; they are becoming other types of machines: they are becoming cellphones, or conversely, cellphones are becoming computers. They are transforming into each other, breaking down the boundaries of self-identity. The deterritorialization that is happening between computer and cellphone will eventually give rise to a new type of machine, something new that can be called “cellphonecomputer.” There is no predicting what will be its final shape, the reason being that it is involved in a permanent process of becoming, an open-ended process of becoming. It is due to this process, to the high speed or frequency of such becoming, that computers are perpetually changing, perpetually self-reinventing. All machines are evolving, but perhaps computer and cellphone are the fastestevolving species of machines. While constantly self-renewing, they are becoming other types of machines as well. In other words, there is not only a ceaseless process of self-innovation within the species of machines themselves, and evolution does not only mean the evolving of their inner organs or parts; evolution also means their evolving into other species. The world has witnessed the evolution of the refrigerator and washing machine, but it is a process happening within themselves, never going beyond the bounds of their respective territories. The evolution the computer undergoes, however, is a process of deterritorializaiton in that it ceaselessly transgresses its own boundaries into new territories, such as those of the television, the hi-fi, the calculator, even the fortune-teller. The computer has many openings, able to form an assemblage with other machines or contain information transmitted by other machines; it has ports and interfaces to receive input anytime. The computer constantly changes its definition and

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functions such that people cannot help asking; what is the computer? Constantly transgressing boundaries, the computer sweeps away other types of communication or entertainment machines, while at the same time is itself changing in shape, growing increasingly smaller, lighter, and mobile. Its physical shape increasingly resembles that of a cellphone, and is increasingly attached to the human body. Previously people had to go to certain places to have access to a computer, but now they have it as a carry-on item. The computer is simply becoming part of the human body. In the beginning, the computer was composed of a monitor and a heavy PC body, which, keeping a distance from its users, was an object external to them. Then it became portable and was carried in backpacks as its user’s close company. Now it is becoming a cellphone-computer, a new organ of the human body, carried in the hand. Marking the latest phase of its own evolution, the computer is miraculously erasing the boundary between itself and cellphone. Here the machine as an individual entity has its own power and reproduces itself by way of integration. “But reproduction, here as in life, produces a new, unique individual, maintaining a family resemblance with the ascending individual but remaining no less absolutely singular” (Stigler 1998: 69).

4 What this means in part is that people spend increasingly more time with their computers. There is emerging a new assemblage, which is made up of human and computer. They are internal to and inseparable from each other. No matter where the computer is located, it invariably attracts people to itself, becoming a hub of their life. The room with a computer in it is no longer a tedious place, and people no longer feel lonely or bored as long as they have access to a computer. With computers people can accomplish many of the jobs at home that used to be done outside, which considerably reduces their need to go out to meet with people. While interpersonal communication is increasing, people are seeing each other less and less. They no longer meet in person to discuss insignificant issues or simply to exchange information. Face-to-face meetings between people are scheduled only for matters of gigantic importance, that is, only when there is a real necessity. Someday in the foreseeable future, a face-to-face meeting will have to be an event. The computer is destroying the physical space for meetings between people. It is creating a new space, a non-physical space of communication. The computer only allows its users to form a spatial assemblage with itself. It ties them to itself, keeping them confined to a narrow space. Of course people can break into an infinite world via the computer. The computer world is both a boundless universe and a closed prison. On the one hand, people are extraordinarily active working on the computer, whereas on the other, they confine themselves to their room to lead an inactive life. The more active and aggressive they are in the virtual space, the more they are confined to the caged space of their real world. A community of computer-bound people is emerging, hence the new coinages of “zhainan (宅男 home-bound men)” and “zhainu (宅女 home-bound women).” While their eyes remain riveted on the small computer screen, they are

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overwhelmed with wave after wave of information about the outside world. As for those who, with no fixed abode anywhere, wander from place to place, idle and empty-handed, the world does not hold a single window of knowledge open to them. When the computer connects the individual confined to a closed space with an infinite outside world, then, ironically, there is to be less communication between roommates. If the TV creates a center in the domestic space bringing the family closer together, then what the computer does is to separate family members from one another. The computer is not intended for sharing with others and each machine is to be used by one person. Every computer occupies a particular space, so there are as many bounded spaces as there are computers in the household. True, the computer – especially the laptop – does not demand much space, but it has the ability to make people forget physical space: where there is a computer there is no awareness of really existing physical space. The computer is so autonomous and so powerful that it can be used in any place, be it a pub, an airport, or a dining hall, no matter how noisy it is. It goes without saying that if everyone in a family is using their computer, obliviously lost in the digital space, then the space called home as well as the rest of the family members no longer exist to them, though they are physically close to each other. A TV-dominated home is filled with noises of a collectivity – the noise of the machine and that of the people, whereas a home with computers is quiet and peaceful. Television-induced noise of the home is being superseded by the quiet of the computer-occupied home. While a TV-claimed home resembles a mini cinema theatre in the evening, a computer-claimed home is a quiet reading room. The computer changes each person into a solitary islet while at the same time enabling potential contact between them and thousands of other people. It partitions a home into separate spaces, and what divides up the domestic world is not the boundary between rooms and doors, but the invisible barriers created by computers. What is it that keeps people focused on the computer for so long and in such an oblivious manner? We have pointed out that the computer is an entertaining machine, a game machine for an adult, an object of pleasure. But its real singular charm, the essence of the pleasure it produces, or the reason it is irreplaceable, is its ability to ceaselessly generate information. If the computer is a productive machine, then what it produces are immaterial products, the work it does being immaterial labor.2 It produces no material entity – this is one of its defining features as a productive machine, separating it from other types of productive machines. It accommodates people’s need to produce and consume at the same time, and being at once productive and consumptive, it integrates both information production and consumption in itself. This is what is called the duplicity of the computer, which makes it distinct from all other machines. Both televisions and VCRs, for example, are consumptive and not productive; washing machines and refrigerators are all productive instead of consumptive. What the computer as a machine produces and consumes is information. To be sure, there has been information since long ago, but the term computer

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information points to an entirely different concept. TV information is always produced and consumed by particular groups of people, and is therefore always screened, encoded, and institutionalized. They are reflections of reality and constitute part of it. Computer information, however, is produced and consumed by the entire population of a society. Most importantly, the existence of computers means that all can be informationalized, including personal secrets (actually people often keep their most private secrets such as those about their own body, property, and innermost intentions, that is, their total sense of existential security, in the computer. Therefore the loss of their computer is the loss of the meaning of their existence). One can translate all that belongs to the world and themselves into computer information. The concept of information is undergoing a radical change in the age of the computer. Before the advent of the computer, it was generally believed that there was information in the first place, which was to be complemented and conveyed by the transmission machine. Efficient transmission machines or means can effectively and appropriately transmit information, and this is how the efficiency of radio broadcast, newspaper, and television is measured. The computer radically rewrites the concept of information: there is no information in the first place; information is produced by the computer. In other words, there is information because there is the computer in the first place. All that has happened, all that is trivial, and all that exists can be translated into information – conversely, all that is yet to come, all that can be imagined, and all that is fictitious can be transformed into information through the computer. The computer can process everything, be it visible or invisible, factual or nonfactual, as information. As critics like Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard have already pointed out, the world is gradually canceling its depth, its secrets, and its interiority, and is simply becoming an exteriority, a spectacle, which is where people live. This is a result of camerawork. Today, with the advent of computers, the world is even no longer a spectacle, and has even lost its exteriority. It is becoming sheer information. The computer is abstractifying the world into information, into an endless flow of fragments of information. If, with their computers turned off, people can see city and country spectacles as well as differences between them, then, the moment their computers are turned on, all those spectacles and their differences quickly disappear. In their computers, all these are canceled and there is nothing but information. Information is the air people breathe. The computer is eliminating differences between regions, spectacles, spaces, and the surfaces of the world. Eventually the world itself will be derealized and what is to be seen of it will be an infinity of information, in front of which everyone is equal. In this sense, the computer is not a mere productive or consumptive machine, it is actually a world of its own, an informational world, which is where people live. The informational world is not a reproduction of the real world, nor its representation or reflection, or a collection of Platonic images; it is a world of its own, a computerized world independent of the real world. Informational machines like television are rooted in the reality world; their function is to change and affect people’s life world: consumption of information is part of their life, and these

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machines are their company in their real life. But the computer is not merely rooted in people’s real life; it produces a life beyond the real life, creating an entirely different world out of nothing, which, following its own rules and procedures, stands parallel to the real world. People used to believe that there was an other world beyond this world, and a ghost world beyond the real world. Today they have found such a duel world: the computer word and the real world. They breathe in the computer world as much as they breathe in the real world. The computer constitutes an autonomous world, which follows totally different rules than the real world. It has its own signs, its own mode of existence, its own language, logic, and values. All its programs, rules, and principles are what one needs to learn in one’s computer life, just like all the rules and principles of real life are what one needs to learn in one’s real life. In their real life, people going to work take the same route every day; in much the same way, they follow the same route of cybersurfing every day in their computer life. People have regular partners or friends in their computer life as they do in their real life. They follow a different set of habits in each life. There is no necessary connection between the two lives. When sitting before a computer, one has a double identity, a double image, and a double character, or as we say, a double essence, a double nature, and a double interiority. In this sense, the computer is a splitting machine, which divides a person into two halves. It is amazing that one can have two so divergent faces. Life on the computer is neither real nor dreamlike, nor is it even a dialectic synthesis of the two – it is nothing but itself. What is taken for granted is that such a life won’t be shattered like a dream; instead it will go on intact, parallel to and competing with real life. Life on the computer means living in the midst of information, which is as ubiquitous as the air people breathe. Interestingly, computer-generated information never remains unchanging; on the contrary, it is perpetually fluid, dynamic, spreading, and growing, and there is no end to its production. It is for everyone to consume and generate. This is the fundamental difference between the computer and other types of media machines: people do not passively receive computertransmitted information, they can actively produce it, for they are the creator and owner of the media machine. Therefore there is no end to the chain of information production and consumption – it is impossible to exhaust it. The increasing volume of information exerts no pressure on the computer, which, though small in size and framed within a fixed structure, amazingly contains an infinite space and an infinity of possibility. What a miracle it is that such an infinity of content has no weight! The computer always remains the same in weight, unchanging in size, neither expanding nor shrinking. Its invisible inside, though, is ceaselessly changing and expanding in spite of its unchanging material existence as a machine. This is a miracle of a machine: it keeps growing and expanding, but there is no sign of its impending explosion. Ordinarily, there is a limit to what machines can bear. Radio and television stations or channels are limited in number, refrigerator and washing machine are limited in capacity, automobile and train are limited in weight capacity, but the computer seems to defy any limit to its amount of information, though, like other the types of machines, it exists within a fixed material

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shape. It seems that, no matter how much input it receives, the computer never reaches the limit of its capacity. People are never tired of the computer precisely because there is no limit to its newness of content, its infinite richness and diversity, and its unending production and consumption of information. It is extremely hard for people to leave their computer once they have started it, for there is always something new to see, always something unknown to be explored, and no single day is enough for people to make a full exploration of its possibility. People will never put a period to what they can do with the computer. Many of us may have a passion for a type of machine, but our interest will die down when its secrets are exhausted. People’s impassioned interest in the computer, however, will never come to an end. The reason they turn off their computer is not because they have no more to explore on it, but because their energy and time do not allow them to stay on it. The computer has exhausted their energy – just as there is nothing more enjoyable than doing things with the computer, there is nothing more energy-consuming than using the computer. People often end up being tired out after sitting relaxed in front of a computer for a while. As computers often run into problems, people sitting before computers often run into problems as well. One major computer-related health problem is that, after years of using computers, people will have their neck, spine, fingers, or body deformed unawares. Such changes are a consequence of keeping their bodies stiffly positioned in front of the computer, and will be irreversible health problems. The computer not only generates a world of its own, but also triggers the birthing of a uniquely shaped human body. Such a deformed body may be conceptualized as something abnormal or as a health problem today when we have been using computers for little more than a decade or so, but will be seen as part of human normalcy in the future when the world will be thoroughly computerized. Perhaps the human body will undergo a new round of evolution: if the improvement of tools has enabled humankind to stand up and walk upright, then after years or decades of engagement with computers, the human eyes, fingers, neck, and spine will be reshaped. Perhaps, someday in the foreseeable future, the human body will be bent low again.

Notes 1 See Bernard Stigler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. According to Stigler, the issue at bottom is to study “the possibilities of a theory of technical evolution.” He sees “the question of a technical determinism arising in a permanent oscillation between the physical and biological modalities of this evolution, the technical object, an organized and nevertheless inorganic being, belonging neither to the mineral world nor simply to the animal. A central question will be that of the limits of application of the analogy between the theories of technical and biological evolution” (26). In Stigler’s view, technics certainly should be investigated in time, but “technics, far from being merely in time, properly constitutes time” (30). 2 Maurizio Lazzarato defines “immaterial labor” as “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity.” See Lazzarato, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, p. 133.

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1 In the depth of the night, all is still and quiet. People are getting ready for sleep. They press the power buttons and turn off the lights. Suddenly, all is wrapped up in darkness, and night emerges with clear contours. They are hurrying to bed, feeling as content to be hugged by the well-deserved darkness as to be shone over by the well-deserved electric light a moment ago. The abrupt and conspicuous transition from light to darkness, however, does not seem to attract people’s attention. No matter what miraculous changes the lights have triggered, and no matter how they enable visible objects to emerge in the dark of the night, electric lights always fail to attract attention. But what do we see if we fix our eyes on the electric light for a single moment? That is, this very thing which makes objects visible at night, and by means of which people can identify things when darkness is all around, in what image will it appear in view, the moment we turn our eyes to look at it? People always equate light with lighting, but when we separate the electric light from its lighting function, we will discover the aesthetic elements of the light. Despite the fact that the light bulb is the source of light, in the new light system it is always covered and concealed by the lampshade. Normally, there is not much room for creative designing to improve the aesthetic features of the bulb as an illuminant. As its central function is to illuminate, the aesthetic features of the bulb end up being overlooked. Besides, the light bulb is a dangerous object. Lifeless, boring, fragile, and easy to break, it is an object potentially confronting us with horrifying associations due to the electricity it carries. People always feel upset when the filament of a bulb is burnt out. The bulb is always covered up, set into a lampshade, instead of showing itself naked to people. There is a lampshade standing protectively between the bulb and people. Actually the lampshade has the capacity to, among other things, focus light as well, managing it to produce the desired effect. On the one hand, it helps to soften the light as it shines through the veil of a shade; on the other, it sharpens its focus, adjusting its direction and augmenting its illuminating efficiency. The desk lamp, for example, is used to gather light at night and direct it to cover a small area. The lampshade is not, of course, employed only to increase the energy efficiency of the light bulb. Sometimes it stands out so prominent, so self-assuredly displaying

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its autonomy, such that it even completely covers up the bulb, as if to assert itself as the source of the light, reducing the bulb to non-existence. In a sense, the lampshade, the lamp holder, as well as all the facilities surrounding the bulb constitute a complete electric light machine. In this machine, the light bulb as the illuminant is, ironically, the cheapest and the most insignificant, with the shortest life and with the least ability to attract attention; it can be easily replaced by its like, regardless of the difference of brand and design. Moreover, the bulb is also the most bothersome part of the entire electric light machine: it is the only part that can fail, the only part that often needs to be replaced, and the only part that may cause trouble. In comparison with the bulb, the lampshade and lamp holder are reliable and have a longer duration of life, in some cases even outlasting the life of human beings. Further, with the exception of the bulb, everything else of the light system lends themselves well to all kinds of creative designing, catalyzing the birthing of a large designing community. These parts are often made into beautiful artifacts, artworks, or important decorations. They can survive various trends and historical pasts to be collected for posterity. In this sense, what is meant by the electric light, properly speaking, no longer refers to the illuminating bulb alone; rather, it points to a whole set of items that make up the light system. Whenever the electric light is mentioned, what is conjured up in our minds is this system in its entirety instead of a particular bulb. To be sure, the bulb functions totally on its own and is able to illuminate unaided by lampshade and holder (just think of the early electric lights), but what the world is manufacturing and consuming in a big way today are parts of the light system other than the bulb. Despite that it is the bulb which sends off light for us to see, it never really catches our eye, and what claims our attention are other things instead. Perhaps lampshade, lamp holder, and other accessories are no longer secondary to the bulb; on the contrary, the bulb is secondary to these accessories. People always go out of their way to find the right accessories, but never bother much about the bulb itself. Lamps of different designs and shapes are used as adornments for the room, and, when they are of no practical use, are often displayed for their sign values. They can be placed anywhere in the room: on the wall, on the ceiling, on the desk or the floor, or at the center of the roof, or somewhere beside the bed. They can be inlaid into the wall or located in an open space. On top of functioning as illuminants, and this is their central value, the lamps are used as decorations to change the otherwise monotonous look of a place. Indeed, lamps are things of extraordinary sign value – this is what distinguishes them from other domestic appliances. Most of the household appliances are purchased only for their use value; they are admitted to a home due to their practical functions and are not intended to catch the eye, nor are they treated as aesthetic objects. Their metallic existence signals their unshakable solidity, and their confrontation with the human body (though they serve human needs). There is no doubt that all furniture can be used as adornment, and some can even be treated as a work of art, but they are comparatively heavy and give an impression of lifelessness and clumsiness when sitting on the floor. Lamps are different. They are more often placed high up in the air, having

Electric light 73 enough free space for displaying their graceful shapes to impress people; they look more delicate and nimble though much lonelier than other domestic appliances. Many of the lamps can be easily moved and are not worth as much practically. Normally, lights, unlike furniture or other types of domestic appliances, are not to be taken as intrusions on spaces, but as their ingenious decorations. Lights that are thoughtfully selected can often, like plants, give the room a lively look. A poet once said, “The light is a white rose for the room.” Light and rose are engaged in an exchange of affectionate feelings and passions. The lights are never found sleeping regardless of whether they are on or off. The way a family selects and places its lamps is a most important index of its taste – most people consider lights as nothing more than means of illumination instead of as decorations. While the designs and arrangements of lamps decorate spaces, their light recreates spaces. It endows spaces with colors. People always define spaces in terms of their size and volume, and in terms of their shapes and designs; they seldom consider them with regards to the light they allow. Once we take light into consideration when thinking about spaces, we will be distinguishing between brightness and darkness, cool and warm colors, and light and shade. Then we will come to understand how light creates spaces. What is touched by electric light becomes a unique space. It is able to divide one single room into different parts: the light of a desk lamp can portray the little table it covers as a space of its own; separate and well lit. This mini table sets itself off from the surrounding spaces, offering the hardworking scholar of the household a space secluded from his or her family who are already in bed. The lampshade which is used to control the light serves as a crude door at this moment. On the one hand, for light to be partitioned in a room is to find a way to redistribute it; on the other, light is all-pervasive and has the capacity to penetrate any cracks and chinks, preventing any absolute spatial division of it. It is extremely difficult to keep light from spreading from one space to another. Pervasive and irresistible, light has no weight and sheds its brightness equally on everything, able to penetrate any tiny chinks at night. Light is unstoppable unless a deliberate effort is made to prevent its intrusion. That is why the curtain has so important a role to play. As light’s hard-to-defeat rival, the curtain prevents its penetration. It somewhat functions as a boundary between light inside and light outside, and between natural light and electric light. One can take the curtain as a movable wall, for it is able to contain electric light within its own bounds and keep sunlight from getting in from outside. Also, light is what brings colors to a space. People expect light to do all kinds of jobs: sometimes they want it to be bright, sometimes they prefer it to be dark, sometimes they need it to be strong, sometimes they would like to make it soft, sometimes to have it focused, and sometimes scattered. The change of light is a change of space. Oftentimes space is completely dominated by light. Many of the performance stages are stages for performances of light. The inner space of a room at some special moments needs to change its look by way of light. The pub is filled with the kind of light, dim and mesmerizing, which coincides with what is seen through the eyes of a drunk. Light is the director of space and has the capacity to color, divide, and organize it in a variety of ways. Under the effects of

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electric light, space is no longer homogeneous; electric light triggers a miraculous play between light and shadow, and brightness and darkness. While shedding light on one object, it is concealing another. Electric light has the capacity to change the way an object is perceived as well as its mode of existence. Light is a deceptive play between disclosure and concealment, and many great artists’ paintings can be regarded as good illustrations of the marvelous play among light, shade, and object and space. Looked at in this way, light can be considered a Heideggerian language which opens up the being of space. This is particularly true at night when the whole world is lost in sleep, and your room is immersed in darkness, all objects and utensils, regardless of their difference of size and worth, being equally concealed and reduced to invisibility. The moment the lights are switched on, all the furniture in the room emerges out of darkness like growths shooting up out of the earth. They are facing their own truth: the truth of things and truth of humanity. Electric light awakens their existence and triggers the birthing of a new world. Light is both the language that illuminates space and the language of space itself. Space speaks through light. As such light’s function as an illuminant is weakened. As a language, light has its own spectrum of shades of brightness, and is able to create an atmosphere for a space. Its gentle touch brings a space a richness of its own. People may use the language of light to express their feelings, employing electric lights to convey or suggest their meanings. The electric light of the room and its adjustment can help them secure the right manner of speech, and effectively communicate their innermost feelings and sensations. They may increase or reduce the intensity of electric light, augment or decrease its brightness, making the room fully illuminated or pitch dark. The light may strike people as cheerful or gloomy, lonely or warm. Electric light is not only the language of a space but the language people themselves use in the space. Those who are no longer interested in the world sometimes have no need for electric light at all (after a Shanghai writer committed suicide, it was found out that the bulbs of his room had been burnt out for a long time, but he never bothered to have them replaced). They are not willing to talk, nor do they allow their lights to talk. Many people, while preoccupied with worrying thoughts, choose to be embraced by darkness at night, and, on important days, they turn on all the lights in their places to celebrate the festival. Electric light affects people’s spatial experience as well. Dim light no doubt can arouse all kinds of romantic imaginations in a man and a woman surrounded by no others, which is not possible with dazzling light. This is the passion and love of lights. Light can also serve as a means of punishment: this happens when a person is confined to a closed room, continuously exposed to bright sunlight, and made to writhe in bed sleepless for hours. This is the violence and crime of light.

2 Electric lights with their free adaptability are able to generate unusual spatial experience, but they are so quiet, and their hard work often goes unnoticed. Most of the domestic machines inevitably make noises. Only electric lights are so quiet

Electric light 75 and noiseless, such that people do not even think they are machines, and are often unaware that they are doing their jobs. No sooner do they turn on the lights than they forget about their existence, and only when they are going to bed do they recognize their presence. At this moment, they are obstacles to sleep and have to be gotten rid of. When darkness is what is preferred, electric light is looked upon as something negative, and thought of as a nuisance. But when lights are providing illumination to meet people’s needs, their existence is forgotten, because electric light has no voice. It is not only that light does not speak, but that it drowns noise coming from outside. The moment the lights are turned on at night, the outside world disappears at once. It is completely shut out by the room’s lights. What is also dismissed is the noise outside. Electric light functions both to illuminate and separate. Conversely speaking, the moment the lights are turned off, darkness floods into the room, erasing the distinction between outside and inside, and light and shade, all becoming connected and reconciled in the immense quiet of the dark night. Then quickly the room is filled with noises coming from outside. The ear is extraordinarily sensitive at such moments, receiving noise and clamor, invading the room unresisted. The night is rendered still quieter, engulfed in looming darkness. In this sense, it is not that the lights make no sound, when they are switched on, but that their radiance drives it away, or more precisely, it prevents its intrusion and drowns it. The language of electric light triumphs over the language of the dark night outside. The lights start talking as soon as they are turned on, rendering noises less audible by the ear. When the lights are shut off, the eyes are closed. The dark night makes everyone blind. Here is its rule: as soon as the eyes are closed, the ears are wide open with an increased sensitivity. All kinds of sounds begin to be heard. The ticking of the clock imposes itself more aggressively on the ears at night when all is quiet. Electric light makes no sound of its own, but it has the ability to make sound audible or drowned. When all lights are shut off, the dark night not only quietly receives noises from outside, but makes the brain more capable of handling all forms of external images. Our thinking is more active at night. Many people suffering from insomnia actively engage their brains while lying in bed. Lights enable people to work, whereas the pitch dark night allows them to do nothing but think. If they are not engulfed by sleep, the dark night may simply become the racecourse of their wild thinking. Electric light, unlike the darkness of the night, causes thinking to be handicapped. While transparent light provides thinking with its own orbit and order, the darkness of the night gives free rein to thinking. Thinking becomes recklessly wild in the company of the dark night. If the night is not a greenhouse of dreams, it is of necessity a hotbed of thoughts. Light controls sounds; darkness generates ideas. Electric light is invented to banish the night, whose central function is to resist the inexorable rule of the darkness of nature. In a sense, electric light signals an attempt to break the cycle of darkness of the night and daylight. In the universe of nature, day and night are engaged in an unending circle. The imperative of Nature we have is: people are involved in labor during daytime and retire to rest at night, spending energy during the day, and preserving energy during the night. In order

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to work and have energy to spend, it is necessary to rest and preserve energy. This is the significance of sleep. Sleeping and waking as well as rest and labor owe their eternal cycle to the cycle of light and darkness. What is the raison d’être for night if it is not to ensure or enable sleep and rest? Night would be a disaster to humankind if it did not provide a recuperative time-space for the human body. The sleeping hours of the sun correspond with the sleeping hours of the human body. Human beings have to sleep at night, for the night is sleep’s effective protective screen and its nurturing cradle. Sleep and night are mutually subordinate to each other. In this sense, the night is a blessing from Nature, a masterpiece of collaboration between earth and sun. Staying awake at night without quietly descending into the dreamland is a minor disaster resulting from disobeying the rule of Nature. Lack of sleep is always a blemish of life. What electric light does to the cycle of darkness and light is unprecedented, for it interrupts and changes the cycle for good. While depriving people of much of their sleeping time at night, electric light prolongs the length of daytime, sometimes even excessively overstretching it, and leaving no time-space for the night. This is how the boundary between day and night is collapsed as though ours were a world of unending daytime. The night no longer necessarily belongs to sleep. People can work as efficiently at night as during the day, sleeping in daytime – electric light has upset the law of the natural cycle, making it impossible for the night to be completely veiled in darkness. Thanks to electric lights the world becomes more eventful, more efficient, and yet at the same time more noiseladen, more chaotic, more disjointed, and more difficult to keep under control. The night is no longer the end of the day but its camouflaged or frantic continuation, for what happens during the day goes on into the night. The earth is becoming a night world. Many people cannot wait to see the sun set; they relish the various effects of electric light, looking forward to what the night has to offer, be it work, entertainment, feasting, or plotting. Workaholics, aided by electric light, turn themselves into a tireless machine; there are others who, after getting off work, plunge themselves into sensuous pleasure, regardless of costs, for the whole night, which, exposed in the generous radiance of lights, looks doubly hideous. Nothing disturbs the power of the night over the world the way electric light does. No longer looked upon as anything eerie and fearsome or associated with thoughts of ghosts, the night is as accommodating and pleasant as you wish by virtue of the lights. People are seen obliviously wallowing in the pleasures proffered by the night dressed up in fascinating electric lights. Only those who have to work on night shifts or attend evening school have no liking for the night. Although their strong dislike for their bosses or teachers suggests no dislike for electric light, they have no idea that it is precisely electric light that causes them to be ceaselessly engaged in work, that deprives them of their time for sleep, keeping the machine-like city running without a break. When electric light disrupts the cycle of day and night, it is in actuality violating the law of Nature. While creating a great amount of opportunities for humankind, it takes away much of its sleep; it at once increases humans’ productivity and undermines their health (many of the diseases harassing them are caused by

Electric light 77 insufficient sleep at night); it makes life more convenient, but generates a lot of pressure (just look at those kids with no end of homework!); it brings the world a sense of security, but at the same time leaves it apprehensive about crimes that occur at night. In a world of electric light, it is no longer possible for the human eyes to close to rest early at night; instead, they are made to work to maximize their function, suffering from huge impairment. Indeed, humankind has been suffering from a gradual loss of vision over time due to the increasing application of the electric light. Besides, electric light urges people to work against time, as though they had found a way to earn more hours and days. People are always reluctant to turn off the lights. The day begins when lights are switched on early in the morning, and ends its course of activity when lights are turned off. The moment the lights are shut off makes us feel a twinge of sadness: the passage of time is so fast and another day is gone wasted! This is how in constantly turning on and off the lights we measure the progress of time.

3 Electric light is quick and sudden. It takes no time at all to reach its height, changing darkness into brightness within seconds and allowing itself no transitional phase of dawn or twilight. Its sudden dazzling radiance hurts the eye. The lights properly distribute their brightness in a space in accord with people’s needs. Automatic, welldesigned, mechanized, and standardized, electric light functions as an illuminating apparatus. Once turned on, it will continue working in a stable manner, and with unvarying brightness till it is turned off. It shows a higher stability than sunshine or moonlight – it is the most stable of all kinds of light. It is so bright and steady that it always escapes people’s attention. The moment it is turned on, it is forgotten, as if it never existed, like any fixed, familiar object in the home. Electric lights attract attention only when they are not working or when they are malfunctioning. Electric light achieves its stability by way of erasing time and motion. All other types of light are involved in a progressive course of time and in a visible form of motion. The sunlight drifts slowly from one side of the room to the other; the moonlight glitters dim and timid; the candle burns itself out; the oil lamp shimmers with faint smoke. All these signal a certain visibility, exhibiting illumination as a form of visible motion, which takes place on the tracks of time. What we see is not only its brightness, but the process of its generation as well as the consumption it entails, and there is always a life-burning process involved in the course of illumination. When a match is struck, a narrow beam of light speedily flits across the darkness of the night: it has to quickly find the wick of the lamp within seconds for it to be lit up, and then it burns itself out bit by bit. It takes a while for the lamp light to become stable, or, we can say, there is never a moment when it is absolutely stable. If electric light is generated in a standard manner, predictable and reliable, then the light of the oil lamp or candle is characterized by contingency and variation. Every lamp is different and variable in terms of its brightness, its duration, its density, and location, which all depend on the user and the circumstances in which it is used. There needs to be a human hand in charge

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to trim its wick, adjust its location, light it up cautiously, watch its flame, and put it out when no longer in need. That is to say, the work and skill of a human hand is needed for the lamp to do its job (children are not to be trusted with it). It is not without danger to play with it. Electric light is a different story: it has the radiance of the flames divested of their crazy potential. All forms of light grow dim in the end except electric light. Time is at a standstill in the case of electric light, which never grows dim or dies out. It can be turned off but can never be put to death. It works mechanically and automatically and mirrors no temporal or historical consciousness. This is why the electric light triggers no lamentations or sad thoughts about the shortness of life or the quick passage of time. The candle always evokes the image of tears; the old lamp reminds people of loneliness; sunshine is associated with benediction; moonlight fills the heart with a yearning for love. But has there ever been any connection made between the stable, unchanging electric light and a particular emotional state? The oil lamp looks so dim and weak as compared with the bright and standard electric light. An oil lamp or candle does not much change the thick darkness of the night; its light illuminates a mere tiny enclaved space within the vast dark night, unlike that of the electric light, which powerfully defeats darkness and drives out the night. The oil lamp light, on the contrary, helplessly surrounded by the night and lingering on in the depths of darkness, only manages to make the night exist in clearer contours, while itself flickering in the overwhelming dark night as a feeble presence. Despite its powerlessness, the oil lamp’s feeble light uncompromisingly holds on with such a tragic tenacity that is unknown to electric light, thus displaying a peculiar symbolic significance. There were times when the lamp light, solitary, weak, helpless, shakily glittering in the midst of the blowing wind, gathered the entire family together to sit around it. There is an endearing closeness, an intimate relationship between the oil lamp and humankind. The lamp dominates the night as a domestic center, a spatial center, a focus of attention. It is not to be neglected for a single moment: people have to calculate to have a clear idea about its length of duration, its brightness, its safety. It is owing to the lamp’s weak illumination that the entire family has to sit close together around it. The home with an oil lamp is a scene of intimacy and sharing among all the members of the family. Sitting in front of an oil lamp with no company, however, one would feel overwhelmed with a sense of profound loneliness. What all this implies is that electric light is the opposite and will never make people feel lonely. There is no need for people to sit around it as a center. They are each in their own room. Electric light removes the restrictions entailed by the use of the ancient oil lamp, while at the same time removing the bond that joins individuals together. It throws bright light on everything, but eliminates the aura of the home.

4 What is amazing is that the light comes on just because a hand has lightly pressed a button without touching the bulb at all. Keeping a safe distance from the bulb, the hand only needs to casually press the button to turn on the light. This is entirely

Electric light 79 different from the situation in which the hand has to carefully light up the oil lamp or candle. There is a push-button for every light in a house, and the people living in it know their locations so well that they can find them easily without looking. These buttons are among the best known and least familiar objects in the home: people never bother to memorize their positions, but they are, by instinct, always able to identify them. They use and touch them every day, but never look at them closely, and show no interest in them. The push-buttons are so indispensible, but their presence is so insignificant. The bulb responds to the push-button so fast as if they were synchronized, or as if the latter were a component part of the former, one that keeps some distance from it. It even looks like the push-button is the source of the light in spite of all the links that exist in between them (children are often curious and try hard to find out the secret). The fact is that the illumination of the electric light has nothing to do with a burning fire; instead, it is generated by electricity. It is already commonsense that when the light goes off, what the pushbutton does is to switch off the electric current; it does nothing to the light itself and is only connected to it indirectly. Electricity is the only source of the light. But as electrical wires hide themselves within the walls, the electric current is invisible – actually it is impossible to see electricity. What are noticed are electrical wires which signal the passage of electricity. When, as required by interior decoration, the electrical wires are placed within the walls and kept from being seen, the lamp, hung high up from the ceiling, looks like something that exists totally on its own, cut off from electricity. Only when the light suddenly goes out do people become aware of electricity itself. And only at such moments will electricity, the wires, the switch, etc. assert their existence to our attention as a problem. In actuality, there are electrical wires running everywhere outside, aggressively crisscrossing the entire city, either neatly arranged parallel to one another or twisted together in a tangled mass. It is due to their existence that the city is saturated with innumerable poles on all streets, the perpetual nuisances to people walking on sidewalks. The wires are “arteries of traffic” for electricity, spreading throughout the city, just like water pipes function as “arteries of traffic” for water. They cannot afford to be blocked. It is thanks to their existence that the city gives the impression of an interconnected whole: there is an all-embracing network of wires covering every room in an apartment suite, every unit in a building, and every building of the city. Regardless of how large or chaotic, the city invariably uses electrical wires as its internal or visible network, in contrast with the city’s sewer system, which is the city’s invisible network. These two types of networks – one underground, invisible, and silent, and the other aboveground, visible, and surrounded by noises – are what hold the city closely together. The black wires spread out into every part of the city, keeping some distance from the ground to make traffic possible, and, while connecting separate buildings, they cut up the city into pieces from above. It is these ubiquitous familiar wires that guarantee the illumination of a city. As soon as they run into a building, they become invisible as though they had all of a sudden disappeared; then in a moment they are seen magically running out of a building, stretching away, and circling around in the air for a while before plunging into another building. What is fascinating is that

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where there are no lights, electrical wires emerge in large groups; where there are lights shining bright, the wires are never seen. The lights in the room are always mysteriously flickering as if they were self-generated, like water without a source or trees without roots. Instead of closely confining itself within the room at night, the light always sends its radiance out of the window. It attracts no attention while inside the room, for people often forget that it is working. However, when seen from the dark outside, it becomes a conspicuous presence. Judging by the light, one can easily tell whether there are people in the room. What a wonderful thing the light is! Just imagine that after a long day at work, you are approaching your home late in the evening, looking forward to dinner with your family. When you see the light blinking at your home window, you will feel a sweet familiar joy welling up in your heart, your steps quickening. You cannot wait to hurry home. Electric light can also serve as a form of contact signal for people (this is how a well-known philosopher and his well-known lover began their romance). A light seen in the distance can be a ray of hope to a desperate person caught up in the wilderness at night or marooned at sea. Where there is electric light there is life, and humans and light are always in company with each other. This is how the light becomes one of the central images in the world of humanity. The light encountered in the dark night never fails to be an object of our attention, and always evokes thoughts of something to look forward to. In the eyes of those lost in the darkness of the night, the light is more than a mere visible object; it also signals the hope of finding their way out of the darkness. There have been innumerable poems using electric light as a symbol of the end to all forms of darkness. The density of electric lights in a place reflects its residential density. When evening is beginning to fall, a light somewhere quietly emerges, and then one by one the lights begin to come on while the night is deepening, until at last all of the lights are turned on when the world is completely immersed in the darkness of the night. When a myriad of lights are glittering in individual windows of a building, they seem to be vying with one another to bury the building in their radiance. A well-lit large building looms like a huge radiant body in the night. In the deepening night, the lights seem to be growing brighter every minute. Then close to midnight they begin to go out as though they had exhausted their energy. When at last there is only one single light flickering in the entire building, with almost the entire city in deep sleep, this light stands for the whole building, the only indicator of life and energy contained in it. It does not belong to any one family, it is not a light pointing to any particular window; rather, it stands in for the entire building, integrating all the individual apartment units into a united whole. This single light marks out the total building, rendering its contour visible, as though the whole building were there only to support its presence, or as though the light were there only to accentuate the presence of the building. The whole building seems to be its base and lampshade. By virtue of this single solitary light, the entire building breaks out of the confines of the dark night. Perhaps meanwhile there is another solitary light glittering in a neighboring building. These two separate lights are each other’s only company; they look upon each other with sympathetic

Electric light 81 understanding. At a particular moment during the night, the world will witness the two lights mysteriously conversing with each other. In the twilight of early morning next day, again, the lights begin to emerge one after another in the building, recalling what happened in the early evening of the previous day when lights were starting to appear. However, with the dawn fast approaching, the lights are increasingly losing their effectiveness. They have no night to penetrate now and are, instead, swallowed by daylight. The light in the morning is a weak, momentary echo of the lasting light of the long night. It looks pale in daylight.

5 Likewise, the moon looks pale in electric light. The night is no longer dark in the city. When the city is enveloped in electric light, moonlight is reduced to insignificance, as if the moon had ceased to exist. Electric light has swallowed moonlight, which used to be the only light of the night on the earth prior to the arrival of electric light. When moonlight is scattered over the earth, playing on the surface of the water, glittering amongst the villages’ trees, shining on the alert, excited faces of children playing in the midst of trees, it covers them all with a dim veil of enchantment, giving everything on the earth a mysterious aura. It fights darkness on the earth, but the light it brings is never full and bright. It is an eternal ambiguity between darkness and light, a space of hesitation and transition in between them. It is due to its hesitant light that the moon has been imbued with subtle feelings and sensations. While the sun quickly opens our eyes to what is to be seen, the moon slowly banters with our innermost emotions. The moonlit night is a land of tender love, one that nurtures poetry. People dedicate the songs of the sun to great personages and keep for themselves the songs of the moon (as well as of the stars). The moon is the ambassador of the heart. It has no way of lighting up the whole world, but it has the capacity to illuminate people’s deep inner worlds. It is the moon that has been, for centuries, giving expression to the poetical charm of the night. Such enchanted moonlit night, however, has disappeared forever. Electric light has once and for all dispersed the darkness of the night and the aura that the moon used to give to the earth. Today, every electric light is a mini sun. As soon as the sun takes its leave, its departure ushers in a sea of electric lights for the night. The lights dismiss the night and moon at the same time. The moon (and stars) have disappeared not only from the night sky, but from people’s eyes and hearts as well, and from humankind’s memories and poetry, from children’s games – not games that are played with electronic toys, but games that used to be played outdoors at night.

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Contemporary household spatial production

The concept of family in China today is undergoing a dramatic change. Residential space as well as its function is, I believe, forging numerous myths of the contemporary Chinese family, just as ethical relationships used to inform the definition of family. Previously, it was customary to consider the issue of family within the category of ethics, looking upon the family as an ethical organic entity, an integrated entity based on kinship and marriage. What was of central importance about this entity was not household spatial relations, but kinship. An ideal family was where such kinship and conjugality were continuously reproduced to make it a permanent, stable cohesive force. What domestic space meant in the old days was limited to the external structural framework, and it was not an inherent part of household politics. The keywords that evolved the issue of family relations were all Tolstoyan in kind: harmony or conflict, warmth or violence, affection or enmity, happiness or agony, loyalty or deception. These terms, as we know, amount to no more than inscriptions of family ethics or individuals’ ethical qualities, and this is how the issue of the family was admitted to the field of ethical studies. Ethics was an axis that threaded through the entire domestic space, along which was the task of housekeeping performed and under whose gaze were placed all household matters. Ethics was reflected in every aspect of the family, serving as both a point of departure and a point of arrival for household management. Marriage, which had happiness as its ethical goal, provided the way the family was formed, residential space being a mere means of fulfilling this goal, doing it service but having no effect on it. It was believed that a loving and caring family or a violent and abusive one – these were two primary models of the family – had its roots in individuals’ ethical life rather than in the spatial structure of the home. The ethical choices individuals made were the only cause of any possible domestic storm: how a household was run was ultimately determined by its members’ art of life. However, such an elaborate ethics of family life has been swept away by the massive production of space since the 1990s. Nowadays household management and marriage are no longer maintained by ethical considerations. On the contrary, it is the living space that is increasingly affecting household production. Space is beginning to assert its power to shape the contemporary family. In actuality, the family throughout history has always been a spatial presence in the first place:

Contemporary household spatial production 83 there would be no unbreakable family were there no fixed living space. Living space is the absolute prerequisite for the family. But usually the geometric domestic space was considered an auxiliary framework for family ethics, one that is a neutral domestic vessel, a stage for performing family ethics, a rigid surface of the family’s core elements. It was conceptualized as a static space of no creativity, an apolitical physical space, which bears the structure of family ethics in submissive silence. However, such rigid living space has been awakened from its status of quiet insignificance and turned into an active dynamic force. Since the 1980s, the family living space has been producing ethical relationships internally and reproducing social relationships externally. The structural relationship between domestic space and family ethics has been reversed: spatial relations have superseded ethical relations, becoming the first concern of home management and family life. It is not the ethical relationship among the family members but the geometry of spatial relations of the rooms in the home that is writing the history of the family, dominating its structure, and creating a new domestic politics. In a sense, the contemporary family is an effect of spatial production. All of a sudden, the domestic living space is thrown into the market as a commodity to be possessed by individuals. A new politics of spatial production is quickly activated, and, in no time, people’s conception of space is undergoing a radical change. Previously, the living space was distributed in a strictly planned way, whereas at present it is a commodity in free circulation. While decades ago the residential space, owned by the state government, was only to be rented by individuals, today it is becoming private property owned by individuals themselves. The Chinese people’s previous experiences of residential spaces are memories of moving from one temporary living space to another, whereas nowadays spaces are permanent properties, counted as part of people’s fixed assets that can be inherited. If the Chinese used to live with fewer worries yet had to passively submit to the state government’s distribution of living space, today they are free to buy and own domestic spaces forever but never without worries and anxieties. Spaces in contemporary China are private properties that can be transferred, sold, and increased in value. The state government no longer tyrannically controls and monopolizes all forms of space, and the issue of space has ceased to be internal to the rigid structure of the state. Having broken free from the state’s tight control and become a free commodity choice in the market, space is now an object of rivalry among people. This is how space is no longer in its erstwhile restful quiet state, but has been thrown into a turbulent battlefield, its significance determined by the result of the battling, its value expressed in the midst of ceaseless fights. The issue of residential space is at the core of people’s everyday life as well as all kinds of extraordinary claims, rivalries, and noises. The fight over residential spaces is the most unconcealed form of battling in today’s world. The living space is gathering onto itself multiple fights, politically, economically, and culturally. It also triggers a politico-economic battle among different social classes, a battle among individuals and anonymous groups, among different groups of interest, a battle in the domain of culture, between past and present, and between historical sites and contemporary desires. The contemporary struggle among different

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social groups is activated by the issue of living space that is of central importance to the world today, instead of being stirred up by ideological biases. In much the same way, alliances that are formed among people today have nothing to do with faiths; rather, people are bonded together as allies because of their shared concern with living space, because of their common destiny in regards to it, and because of the same meaning they detect in it. It is precisely due to their correlated living spaces that heterogeneous professional communities share the same passions. Both conflict and friendship are inscribed on the residential space. Today, conceptual politics is replaced by politics of residential space, ideological politics by spatial politics. As we know, the mode of ownership and the mode of possession with regards to individual living spaces have changed, as has the political economy surrounding the issue of space. Such changes are immediately reflected in the structure of household management. People are fervently participating in the struggle over space in spite of themselves. As far as the family is concerned, the living space no longer serves as its outside; it has simply become its target. Actually how to set up one’s own domestic space is becoming a concrete economic problem. The centrality of residential space to a home is well reflected in the fact that the family is defined in terms of the size of its floor space. One’s curiosity about someone else’s family always begins with a question about the size of its home. A family’s happiness depends on how much floor space it owns, affections being of secondary importance to concerns with space. The question of marriage is a matter of space. To build a family is to build and expand a spacious residence instead of building a harmonious relationship between husband and wife. Theoretically speaking, the residential space not only offers people a place to live but also is a type of property with a growing value; as such it is an object of people’s ceaseless pursuit and investment, what is fervently grabbed by greedy hands. On the other hand, spatial expansion is a form of instinctual endeavor propelled by the Nietzschean will to power: space is in pursuit of spatial expansion, of its own multiplication. Space is driven to expand and reproduce itself, and this is how space becomes the engine for the body of the family. Thus the family is no longer deeply concerned with ethical issues within itself; on the contrary, united as a whole, as a belligerent body, it is altogether involved in ruthless competition against others outside the family. Every family participates in the ubiquitous, vast war over space. The history of the family is a rich documentation of wars fought to seize and possess spaces. All a family is and has, including its mission, goals, and principles of home management, is closely centered around the issue of space. The living space, explicitly or implicitly, can be considered every family’s “absent cause,” and no family is ever satisfied and happy with the floor space it already owns. The desire for living space signals an endless chain, on which the family is to be forever laboriously creeping. In a sense, the grand narrative of the family is a story of unending endeavors to move to a newer, larger residential space; the spectacular drama of the family is a tragicomedy of gains and losses; the daily routine of the family is a daily struggle to work hard to increase its bank

Contemporary household spatial production 85 savings towards owning a house. The moment a family’s entire stock of energy that has been accumulated over years is explosively released is when it decides to buy a house, and this is the moment it puts down all its stakes for one decision. Hereafter the family will be carrying a heavy burden of mortgage on its taut shoulders. The living space is at once the family’s residence and its yoke; it can land the family in an abyss of despair, or overwhelm it with a sudden surge of joy. It triggers emotional outbreaks over and over again in the home. This is how the family is propelled by the pressure exerted by the living space. A young couple coming together to form a family may divide the time of their wedding night between whispering intimate words of love and discussing the matter of when and where to buy a house. Many years later when they become old and know their days are numbered, they will be entering the house they own as the central item in their will. The issue of residential space is both a necessary prelude and a troubling end to the family narrative, and what happens between the two points in time is what the family’s members do every day to make a living, which is largely oriented towards expanding their living space step by step: a recurrent scene in a household is the husband and wife hiding themselves in their bedroom to calculate how much their savings have increased, and how much floor space they are able to purchase. After they grab a place that is after their heart, they will be bragging about it. They will be receiving visitors every day for quite a while. This is a period of extravagant celebrations marking a big family festival. Every time a family moves to a new residence, there is a magnificent ceremony of celebration. Nowadays wedding celebrations are reduced to the status of secondary importance as compared with the housewarming. Every family has a utopia about the domestic space they may possess in the future. People’s utopian imaginations about their living spaces inspire them to higher motivations. They become more critical of their present reality, haunted by a feeling of lack or insufficiency. The yearning for a larger living space is a driving force to people in their work and life. An ideal home is first of all such a vivid image of the living space to be acquired in the future. What constitutes people’s ambitious goal of life is the living space they may possess in the future instead of family ethics. Once space becomes a couple’s looming object of desire, it will likely destroy their peaceful life. Dedicated to hard work towards a larger home, what they do and strive towards, instead of being confined to thoughts about the present residence, is motivated by their future-oriented spatial imagination, controlled by it, pushed forward, disciplined, and dragged along by it. This is how thoughts about the future home space inform household management. Great efforts are being made so that everyone in the family is to enjoy the pleasure of space, but at the same time they only manage to be its prisoners. This is the inherent tragedy of the family. A comfortable, spacious home has to be acquired by way of cumbersome toil. It is nothing new to endure hardships and sufferings in the now in order to live a happy life in the future, except that decades ago the imagined future was an invisible heaven whereas today it is a concrete home. For the contemporary family a larger living space constitutes its overwhelming goal of life, and its primary concern is the quantity of space instead of the quality of

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marriage: what is proved by innumerable facts is that decisions of both divorce and marriage are often based on considerations concerning living space. Sometimes people enter a marriage to possess or share a space; in other cases, people decide to end a marriage because they can no longer bear to live in a narrow space; in some circumstances, people cannot but force themselves to maintain a marriage because they have no way of dividing the shared space into two halves, or of finding an alternative space. No matter what, the living space is always the structuring concern of marriage and divorce. We believe that what the family foregrounds in the first place is a visual image of space, instead of ethical concerns, which are only of secondary importance. For a bachelor or a student living in a college dormitory, space signifies a present unconnected to the future, and therefore carries no utopian significance internal to the family. In the eyes of the student, what space means is a mere transition, and it is alien in nature, something to be shared with others, something of temporary value, to be used for the time being, with no economic value. This kind of space brings them a form of unique collective experience – with no privacy, and with a repressive sense of crowdedness, as well as exposure to the gaze of others, or on the contrary, such collective experience brings them the warmth of company, boisterous passion, and the murmur of desire in the evening. The dormitory is not a space to be thoughtfully taken care of (dorm cleaning is a compulsory duty), and it never arouses desires for economic profit. It is possible that a certain form of knowledge, a certain type of ideal, or a revolution may happen in such a spatial framework, but a space of this sort is not to be imagined, nor ever filled with impulsive desire. True, dorm experience brings students a sense of space, but it triggers no awareness in them of economic potential of space: the college dorm space produces students, but not with a view to economic profit. It may have the capacity to generate subjects of various dispositions, but it is unable to produce functional subjects – only the domestic space produces subjects that are dedicated to procuring space. In a student’s view, the dormitory, no matter what type, is always something like a coat to be cast off. It evokes no space-related emotions, nor triggers any spatial desire. The dorm experience has nothing to do with any ruthless space competition. Likewise, a young bachelor is not much involved in any space completion, either. A single person, someone with no family yet, may not have any strong desire for spatial expansion. In his situation, the size of a living space, particularly its functional configuration and organization, does not matter as much as to a family. In the bachelor’s eyes, the residential space is simply a limited continuous space, an integral whole, every part of which completely subjected to his own will. The significance of this space is only determined by one individual’s momentary experience. That is to say, the meaning of every part of the bachelor’s residential space can be recreated, restructured, and reconfigured at will. The bachelor only needs to make a structural change of meaning to generate various functional configurations that normally can only happen in a large space. One person’s space is infinite; it is always larger than the family space, regardless of how small the former is and how big the latter. There are few complaints about the narrowness

Contemporary household spatial production 87 of single individuals’ spaces (unless they are too small to stretch one’s legs in). As well, no one ever measures a bachelor’s social status by the size of his living space. To a bachelor who enjoys absolute privacy, protected from the gaze of others, living in the midst of full autonomy, and therefore with uncompromised freedom, to a bachelor with all these privileges, what difference does it make whether his living space is large or small, whether it has multiple functions, or whether it is a sign of social status? Why should a bachelor go all out to expand his space, if there is no intention yet to get married and build a family? Why should a bachelor get involved in the daily fight over space if there is no power intruding upon his freedom where he lives? All this proves the necessity of the wars families fight over space by negative examples. Externally, such necessity points to economic motivations (what is opposite to the image of the student); internally, it speaks of the anguished desire for freedom (the bachelor’s experience attests to the idea that to have a family is to have diminished freedom). Indeed, every family is fervently fighting for residential space, but there are still huge differences among different families with regards to the size of space they each possess. Such differences are consequent to social competitions. Competitions for space are a major symptom of social competitions. Perhaps housing differences among people are the most reliable indicator of social class differences. Space has never so much served as a sign of social hierarchy, and has never been so prominent a record of social inequality. Different social classes necessarily possess differential shares of space, which in turn reproduce class differences. As we know, people of the same social class often live in similar residential spaces (in terms of area space, house structure, location, and neighborhood), which further reinforce the differences between them and people of other residential spaces, and this is how various residential communities come into being in the first place. Different communities follow different lifestyles: in shanty areas it is common to see people voraciously eating steaming food on the roadside; in compounds inhabited by many families it is nothing unusual to hear roaring noises from morning till night; in residential towers it is an everyday scene that people are lying huddled up in the couches reading evening newspapers; in villa gardens party guests are always seen smiling upon one another with a glass of wine in hand; in suburban communities, people rise early to inhale fresh oxygen first thing in the morning every day. People choose their lifestyles and schedule their daily activities in accord with their residential environments, which play an important role in shaping their habits, their manners of communication, and their attitudes, facial expressions, demeanor, rhythm of life, and tastes. Indeed, different spaces produce different people with different dispositions: in some residential spaces people tend to carry themselves in a dignified manner; some spaces make people behave in a headlong or frivolous manner; some cause people to become optimistic, and some make them narrow-minded; in some residential spaces people become ill-tempered, and in others they behave in a cultured, gentle manner; there are still other spaces which contribute to enhancing people’s health, or induce diseases; in some spatial environments, it is common to hear people laugh boisterously, and some simply cause them to withdraw into

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silence. Day in, day out, people go back home to be shaped and reshaped by the political structure peculiar to the kind of space they have been inhabiting. Spaces patiently and quietly forge and change people’s habits. Spaces generate subjects. Those living in the same community usually have similar physical characteristics. People living in the high-class areas, for example, always look indifferent and arrogant. Those new residential areas follow new criteria for selection of residential lots, new standards of space quality, and new architectural designs. They are developed and designed to serve the interests of certain economic classes, such that the economic criteria serve as the basis of all criteria: people’s economic status determines how their bodies look and has much to do with their habits and lifestyles. It is taken for granted that the members of the same community share a homogenized group identity, and deliberate efforts are made to forge and reinforce such a group identity. Today it is communities people belong to instead of the workplaces they are affiliated with that manifest social stratifications. People’s institutional affiliations and professions are no longer reliable indicators of their identities, and those working for the same institution or in the same profession no longer constitute a homogenized group in terms of economic background, habits, and tastes; rather, what binds them together are huge differences in various respects. What used to be known as living quarters or residential communities that were built for the various workplaces have altogether disappeared. What brings people to live in the same neighborhood is their shared income level, and has nothing to do with their workplaces. City residential communities today are made up not of professional groups, but of groups with the same economic status. Interestingly, the members of a community are economically homogeneous but are heterogeneous in the way of their institutional affiliations and professions. While in respect of their shared class status, members of a community constitute a homogenous social group, they are part of the social heterogeneity when compared with other social groups. Every community can readily recognize and identify its own members. All kinds of gated community walls, door keepers, and security guards serve as their identifying apparatuses. They are the eyes that are able to identify and reject strangers. As community members are not brought together by business or professional connections, they treat one another as strangers though they may be next-door neighbors. However, they nonetheless follow the same rule of life: they lock their doors when leaving home in the morning and unlock them in the evening. The communities are normally quiet and empty during the day when there are only old people and children (that is why crimes always happen in broad daylight). The hustle and bustle of the community starts with the arrival of evening. The larger and more densely populated the community is, the more selfwithdrawn and self-concealed the individual family. Sometimes the community is the family’s extension (it may at times be taken as its residential environment or what gives it a sense of belonging); sometimes the community is the family’s outside (when its doors are fast locked, it doesn’t care a straw what happens beyond its bounds). What brings neighbors to sit down to discuss matters together is not their peaceful co-inhabitance but some common danger they are facing. The

Contemporary household spatial production 89 paradox of the community is one of identity and difference: members of certain homogeneous social groups, while sharing a form of spatial identity, are psychologically differentiated from one another; in spite of their social labels, some of which carry spatial indications of their social statuses, the neighbors of the same community invariably have a sense of alienness and mysteriousness about each other. They may look extremely similar in terms of their bodily features, facial expressions, tastes, and manners of speech, but at the same time they each have an unfathomable inner world and impress each other as mysterious and unknowable. These are neighbors forever beyond reach. As already mentioned, nowadays it is community memberships instead of institutional affiliations that betray people’s social status. The urban geography of spaces is documenting the social hierarchy. Social stratifications are the cause of spatial differentiations, which in turn further reinforce the social strata and class differences. The family space performs a double function: while continuously and obstinately creating individual subjects, it is at the same time continuously and obstinately consolidating the social hierarchy. Despite the fact that domestic space is involved in various social spheres, one domestic space is always an impenetrable dark zone to another: all eyes that look in from outside are rejected by its walls. In this sense, the domestic space seems to be altogether cut off from the outside social spaces. People tend to presume that within the family, having taken off their social masks, they can be their true selves and do anything they want. They also presume that, within the family, once freed from the chains of social hierarchy, they are back to the state of nature and democracy. Likewise, it is presumed in literature, in films, and in all kinds of personal diaries and correspondence that the domestic space is a poetical, restful, and warm affectionate environment. All such presumptions are myths of the family, and are rejected as erroneous in today’s politics of space. The family is anything but a bird’s nest. True, people take off their social masks once inside the home, but do they not put on familial masks at home nonetheless? Do they not suffer from domestic power even if they have kept out societal power? Are they not subjected to spatial pressures at home even if they have gotten rid of spatial pressures of the office or campus? Indeed, power does not even release people from its grip in their domestic spaces. Children who run away from home, men who stay in the office to play chess after work, these are two classic images of the family, attesting to the presence of power in the home. We also believe that the home is a site of production of political relationships among family members. It is not a place innocent of power; nor is it a place where people can freely show their true faces while in the office they have to hide their true feelings and attitudes. In a word, one’s home is not a space of freedom. Coming back home from school or office is moving from one space of power to another. The home’s interior spatial configuration is not without political significance. The spatial power configuration in the home mirrors social spatial power relations at large, and in a sense can be taken as their reproduction. Or, more precisely, the private, domestic space and public, social space are mutually constitutive and reproduce each other. The social space projects its own power structure onto the home space. A father with a prominent social status usually sits at the head of the dinner table, his body and gestures always riveting

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everyone’s attention. The center of the domestic space is always where the father is, whose movement in the home changes its power structure. Normally, whoever has power outside the home has control over the spatial structure at home, and that is why a household is always dominated by the specter of patriarchy. Meanwhile the domestic space is divided into different sections: the parents’ master bedroom is spacious and bright, whereas in contrast the children’s rooms are smaller and less noticeable. Indulgent, doting parents may try every means possible to please their children, but they nonetheless always take up the most imposing room of the home for their own use. Both parents and children keep they own secrets in their respective rooms, and this no doubt reinforces the invisible hierarchical boundaries between them. However, parents have the right to break into their children’s rooms anytime they want, whereas the children are not allowed to enter their parents’ closed rooms: the parent-child generational gap begins with the spatial gap between them. The children’s requests can only be announced in the living room, and the parents’ lecturing is to be received in the living room as well. Thus the living room is the site of the family’s activities and public discourse at home. Here is another paradox of space: the living room is a public space within a closed private place. That is to say, the living room is an open secret space. It can be argued that it is part of the function of the living room and bedrooms to reproduce the politics of spatial relations encountered in various institutions: as we know, the parents’ bedroom, children’s bedrooms, and the family’s living room, in a sense, correspond to teachers’ offices, students’ classrooms, and the sports ground as their counterparts in school, and to the boss’s office, employees’ offices, and the meeting room in the company. A family’s domestic space arrangements mirror an institution’s space arrangements. Every home has a space open to outsiders: just like the company’s meeting room is to receive visitors or clients, the family’s living room is used to receive the family’s confidants, old acquaintances, intimate friends, and relatives from afar. The household’s living room somewhat resembles a community garden in that both are internal public spaces, which are at once guarded from outsiders and open to visitors. The living room receives all kinds of visitors and, as such, it functions like a home’s transfer station connected with the outside world (whereas the bedrooms always remain closed, and without the host’s invitation no visitors are allowed to enter). A few words about the kitchen. Unlike the bedroom, which is a place of comfort and rest, the kitchen is a place of sweat labor and hardship. It destroys the poetical imaginations of the home. What it reveals is that the domestic space is not completely a warm, cozy bird’s nest; it is also a site of food production, retaining some of the features characteristic of the ancient workshop. The kitchen is the modern home’s workshop for hand labor, which reflects a worker’s process of labor at the bottom of a society. Most of the time the kitchen registers the cumbersome and submissive labor in the home. No one wants to be there, and the domestic war, the war that is fought in the family, is a war over freedom from the kitchen: whoever wins the freedom secures control over the domestic space. The kitchen is therefore where the husband-wife power structure is tested. In general, the kitchen is the domestic space women are assigned to, and this is such a universal reality that

Contemporary household spatial production 91 women’s relationship with the kitchen is not a concern limited to household management; it becomes a focus of feminist movements: one of women’s objectives in striving towards equality with men is their emancipation from kitchen drudgery. As a matter of fact, the kitchen is where patriarchal power is most forcefully exercised, and where the social structure is most effectively inscribed. Like the bathroom, the kitchen is always a marginalized domestic space, one that is inconspicuous or concealed. While the kitchen is a place of hardship, the bathroom is a place of pleasure; the former is part of the recesses of the house, a scarred space, where the family is connected with the outside society, whereas the bathroom is where tender joy is proffered, a utopian spot, which keeps the outside society out of the door. The two spaces constitute two extremes in the geography of domestic power relations and in the spectrum of body sensations. They hide themselves in the household, storing the body’s desires and anti-desires a second time. While the home space is saturated with power relations, interior decoration is what tactfully smoothens out the relations. Interior decoration is a painstaking project whose expenses are no less than the construction of a house. People always go all out to use decoration to turn their home into a splendid work of art, to make sure every corner is beautiful. Interior decoration is the magical process that transforms a “house” into a “home.” Every bit of what a home means consists in its interior designing, decoration, and minute attention paid to every detail, not in its building materials and structure. Interior decoration is intended to make people feel warm, happy, and relaxed at home. It covers up the rigid structure, the building materials and their materiality, the rough, stark joints, and the clumsiness and imperiousness of industrial production. In other words, what interior decoration does to the house is to erase its materiality, to turn it into a space with a unique atmosphere. The spatial atmosphere of a home should exhibit a colorful richness and liveliness (that comes from a variety of paints), feature the warmth of a human touch (there should be some little decorations on the walls), and give a sense of artistic taste (wall painting, books, Hi-Fi, ancient furniture), making the living space feel more soft and tender (wood floors and sofas), warmer (with various decorative light handcrafts and curtains), and more harmonious (with fine plaster lines and suspending ceilings), and closer to nature (with plants and flowers growing in the home). The home spatial atmosphere with such features plays an important role in attenuating the hegemony and violence of power, massaging the inner logic of spatial politics, and increasing the unity and harmony of the family, to render the home a place of rest and relaxation. The domestic space seems to have withdrawn itself from social space (like the office). Its function and goal is to provide a potential substitute for social space. However, the structure of the home space remains a metaphor of social space, continuing to consolidate and reproduce social space. I believe that residential space is beginning to dominate the mini social structure of the family in an unprecedented manner. What is happening today is not that the family drama is being rigorously staged in the residential space, but that it is submissively surrendering itself to be directed by the latter. By contrast, the issue of family ethics is at best a matter of minor importance.

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Postscript

Many people are wondering why I took the trouble to write such a book. An industrious student of mine once asked me in a serious tone: what is the academic value of the essays included in this volume? Actually, the reason I wrote this little book is very simple: I spend most of my time at home (this is an advantage of being a university professor). I never feel bored staying at home, not even when there is no company at all (I have no passion for traveling). Of course, it is not because I have no interest in the outside world; it is only because there is no other place that makes me feel more comfortable than my home. When I came to realize this, I found that my choosing to stay at home had much to do with domestic electronic appliances. They meet all my needs: the air conditioner shuts the burning sunlight out of the window and pumps cool air into my room; the cellphone entertains me in my solitude; the TV and computer satisfy my curiosity (and keep me well informed about what is happening outside); the washing machine, refrigerator, and gas stove make it extremely easy for me to do cooking and laundry. With an air purifier, I can at least breathe fairly well in my own home (I bought two air purifiers at once). Given all these conveniences, why should I bother to go out to meet and talk with people? Therefore I enjoy being surrounded by all kinds of machines at home. I have lived in different types of residences (such as my own property, rental places, and suites allocated by my workplaces), but all these otherwise completely different places are all equipped with similar domestic appliances. These appliances and the residence itself have merged together. A home would be incomplete without these appliances – perhaps there should be a somewhat new definition of the residence today, for machines are internal to it as its organic components. To stay at home is not only to be surrounded by a constructed structure of reinforced concrete, but to be attended upon by the machines. Any residential home experience is an experience of both space and domestic appliances. As I do things with these machines every day, which have become so important a part of my life, shouldn’t I take the time to write about my own experience of them? These are experiences of historical significance – as both residences and the domestic appliances they are equipped with are changing, our residential experiences are necessarily changing as well. There is no doubt that my personal experience using these machines is all contemporary (thirty years ago these machines were non-existent

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in China and thirty years later it remains uncertain whether they will continue to be existent, or whether they will exist in the same manner), and even universally relevant in the contemporary world. These machines are reshaping our life, and therefore are reshaping the world’s history; as such they find their way into every part of the globe, transcending any ideological boundaries. Therefore I tried to document this age by way of an account of my experience with these machines. There are different ways, I believe, to document this age: one can use narratives (films, literature, and history), or can resort to ideological or intellectual analysis, or take action to directly intervene. As we already see, there is no end of debates and representations concerning the characteristics of this age, and everyone has their own unique perspectives, reasons, and judgments. As for myself, someone who locks himself up in his home most of the time all year round, I prefer to record the time in which I live through the lens of my own residential experience and my experience of using domestic appliances. What I have written about my experience with these domestic appliances is by no means a study of the machines themselves. Actually I do not know anything about them at all, and have no interest whatsoever in them, nor do I have any idea about how they work. I only have a beginner’s skills with the machines (I still do not know how to drive an automobile). I write about them entirely because I so much rely on them. Isn’t it a telling illustration of the impact machines are exerting on everyone’s life if someone with no interest in them has to live in their midst and face them every day? Just as ideas and actions change history, so things and machines change history as well. Given all this, why is academic research and debate always to be focused on humanity, ideology, and thought, paying no attention to material things? Humans and ideas have their own destiny; in much the way things also have their unique destiny. These electric-powered machines are quickly breaking free from the human will and choosing their own itinerary of evolution, creating their own marvelous journey of life. The essay discussing the cellphone is a piece I wrote a few years ago. Today it looks like the cellphone is already dead, after having had a few generations of offspring. Machines of a particular type always belong to a particular age, so writing about a particular type of machine cannot but be writing about the age it belongs to. Machines are necessarily subjected to a journey from birth to death, but isn’t it a historical journey of things? Isn’t it true that every moment of this journey is a vertical moment? Doesn’t it have spots of depth? Perhaps we need new forms of biographies, not biographies of human beings, nor of ideas, but biographies of things, things with their births and deaths. True, I tend to presume that there is always an overlapping between my experiences and those of others, and I also try to raise my personal experiences to a level of universal relevance; however, I have to admit that these writings are purely based on my personal observations and understandings. I did not make any use of other people’s writings (and had seldom encountered published research in this regard), and when I occasionally quoted from other scholars, it was to give an impression of academic inquiry (we have to follow the rule of the university: publications with no works cited and notes are not to be accepted as research

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achievements). Therefore I owe special thanks to Literature & Art Studies and Flower City for their open-minded attitude and generosity; otherwise these essays, which do not quite read like academic writing, in terms of subject and structure, would not have had the luck to be published in the first place. The pieces included in the volume were written at different times. I did not begin with any intention of writing a book, and the idea to write a book struck me after I had written two essays. However, when I had collected a few more pieces, I decided to stop and abandoned the book idea – indeed, writing is not something that goes as you will. I find that it is boring to keep writing on similar subjects. Actually it is just as boring to keep reading similar essays as well. So I gave up the original plan to include a few other pieces, and this is how this little volume takes its present shape. As I understand, people today do not have much patience with expansive treatises on any topic, not to mention anything that deals with the kind of tedious and commonplace subject this book addresses. Hence I stop here.

References

Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barthes, R. (1990) S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, Oxford: Blackwell. Bataille, G. (1986) Eroticism: Death & Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Benjamin, W. (1999) Walter Benjamin: Selected Works, Vol. 2, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998) On Television, trans. Priscilla Parkburst Ferguson, New York: The New Press. Chang, K. C. (1977) “Introduction,” in Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, ed. Kwang-chih Chang, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 1–22. Deleuze, G. and Felix, G. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Haraway, D. (1999) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2004) “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader, New York: Routledge, pp. 7–46. Lazzarato, M. (2006) “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 132–146. Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Middlesex, England: Penguin. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Stigler, B. (1998) Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Index

actor-audience relationship 40–41 addiction to computer use 60 “aesthetic turn” xiiin2 aesthetics, vocal aesthetics 31–32 air conditioners, refrigerators as 14 ancient domestic space, law of circulation in 1–2 ANT (Actor Network Theory) xiii anxiety, “cellphone anxiety” 54–55 appliances, in kitchen systems 22–23 Arendt, Hannah 50 artistic creativity, machine performance and 8 assemblages of human and computer 66 automatic apparatuses, washing machines 4–5 “axis of individuation” x bachelors, significance of space to 86–87 Bataille, Georges 52 Baudrillard, Jean 44, 68 behavior, impact of residential space on 87–88 Benjamin, Walter 43, 45 cabinets 13; refrigerators as 19–20, 23 candles 78 capitalism: domestic space as products of 36; and television 46–47 “cellphone anxiety” 54–55 cellphone 49; as component of the human body 49; as cyborg 53; dependence on 54–55; empowering nature of 50–51; as extension of the hands 49–50; fetishism of 54–55; as form of enslavement 55; impact on agency 53; as model of communication 56; and privacy 55; reduction of identity through numbers 51; refusing to own as political gesture 52–53; right of access

to 52; separation from 53–54; shoujiren 50–51, 52; societal importance of 51–52 China: politics of residential space 84–87; private property in 83–84 cinema, comparison of movie-watching and watching television 39–40 circulation in domestic spaces 1–2; food circulation 18–19 city residential communities 88–89 classifying labor 10 cleaning: as ancient method of circulation 2; refrigerators 24 clothes 5–6; feminine nature of 6; symbolism in 6; taxonomy of 7 Clunas, Craig xivn4 color, light as source of 73–74 commercialization of laundry cleaning 6 commodities: domestic space as 83–84; food as 22 “commodity fetishism” 65 communication: gestures 30; interpersonal communication, computers’ impact on 66; modeling on cellphone networks 56; through electric light 80 companionship, television as source of 38–39 computer 57; addiction to 60; deterritorialization of 65–66; as entertainment machine 58–59; errors occurring with 64; evolutionary history 57; as evolved toy 60; grammar of 61; information, production of 67–69, 69–70; interpersonal communication, impact on 66; multifunctionality of 61; operating with the hands 61–62; as “rhizome” 64; for self-employed individuals 59; sharing, impact on 67; uniqueness of as machine 64–65; uses of 58; utility of 60 concealment: of food 24; radio as concealed medium 28–29; through light 74;

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Index

unconcealed voyeurism of watching television 40–41 conflict, domestic labor as source of 11 connection between hand and machine 9 conspicuousness of television 35 consumption: computers’ role in 68–69; deterritorialized consumption 17–18; fire, impact on human eating habits 19; play as 60; of television 48 conversation: on cellphones 55; television’s impact on 37 cooking time, refrigerators’ role in 20–21 craftsmanship 7–8 critical spatial practice xiii culinary arts, training 8 cultural studies, commonality with postmodernism and postcolonialism ix “cultural turn” xivn2 curtains 73 cyborg 50; cellphone as 53 day and night cycle, altering with electric light 75–77 death, effect of watching televised scenes of on the watcher 44 Debord, Guy 68 de Certeau, Michel 59 decorations 36 Deleuze, Gilles 64 de Man, Paul xii demise of radio 33–34 democratization of television 41–42 de Montaigne, Michel x dependence on cellphones 54–55 Derrida, Jacques 30; “dissemination” 61 desk lamp 71 deterritorialized consumption, computers 65–66 deterritorialized food consumption 17–18 dining table, replacement by television in spatial arrangements 36–37 disparity between ear and noise 27 “dissemination” 61 domain of food 22 domestic labor 10; as source of conflict 11 domestic space xii–xiii; cabinets 13; as commodity 83–84; critical spatial practice xiii; decorations 36; floor space 14; as grammar of the family 14; interior decoration 91; kitchens 22–23, 90–91; law of circulation 1–2; the living room 90; manual labor 7–8; neighbors 2; ownership of in China 83–84; as products of capitalism 36; sharing, computers’ impact on 67; spatial organization 14;

trinity characteristic of the modern domestic space 25; washing machine 2; women’s role in 5–6 dramatization of televised news reportage 45–46 ear: disparity between noise and 27; listening, relationship to speaking 32–33; unheard words 27; unlistening 27 eating 22 efficiency as washing machine selection criteria 3 electric light 71; communicating with 80; cycle of darkness and light, altering with 75–77; as indicator of residential density 80–81; lamps 72–73; lampshades 71; language of 75; light bulb 71–72; pushbuttons 79; silence of 74–75; stability of 77–78; wires 79–80 empowering nature of cellphones 50–51 energy, preserving through light modulation 75–77 enslavement, cellphone ownership as form of 55 entertainment 47–48; computer as 58–59 errors occurring with computers 64 ethics of family life 82–83 evolution: of human food 19; of machines 57 eyesore, food as 15 family: ethics 82–83; grammar of 14; in modern China 82; politics of residential space 84–87, 89–90; sharing, computers’ impact on 67 female image, washing machine impact on 5 feminine nature of clothes 6 fetishism: of the cellphone 54–55; “commodity fetishism” 65; of the computer 60 fire, impact on human eating habits 19 floor space 14 Flower City 94 food: circulation of 18–19; as commodity 22; concealment of 24; cooking time, refrigerators’ role in 20–21; deterritorialized consumption 17–18; domain of 22; eating 22; evolution of human food 19; globalization of 17–18; kitchens 90–91; preserving 21; production labor 22; regional cuisines 18; regulating supply of 15–16; supermarket refrigerators 20; taxonomy 20; as visual discomfort 15 food processing, refrigerator as mode of 19 Foucault, Michel x

Index gender, women’s role in domestic spaces 5–6 gestures 30 globalization of food 17–18 grammar: of computers 61; of the family 14; metonymic 30; of the washing machine 7 groundedness ix Guatari, Félix 64 hand-machine 9 “hand-phone” 49 hands: cellphone as extension of 49–50; in computer operation 61–62; machines as substitute for 9; push-buttons 79; see also gestures Haraway, Donna 5, 50, 53 Harman, Graham xiii “heterogenous elements” of society 52 housekeeping, refrigerator cleaning 24 Huang, Yongping 9 human relationship to the radio 25–26 image of the female, washing machine impact on 5 “immaterial labor” 70n2 information: computer-generated 69–70; production of 67–69 interior decoration 91 International Relations theory xiiin2 interpersonal communication, computers’ impact on 66 kitchens 22–23, 90–91 Kracauer, Siegfried xiii Kramer, Jane xivn5 labor: classifying 10; domestic labor 10; food production 22; “immaterial labor” 70n2; outside the home 10; wages 10; watching TV as specialized job 26 lamps 72–73 lampshades 71–72 language: electric light as language of space 74–75; “national language” 29; of radio 30 Latour, Bruno xiii, 10 laundry cleaning: commercialization of 6; requirements for 8; training for 8–9; women’s role in 7; see also housekeeping law of circulation in domestic spaces 1–2 Lazzarato, Maurizio 70n2 “Legal Orientalism” xiiin2 leisure time, machines’ impact on 11 light: and concealment 74; in creation of space 73; curtains 73; as illuminant 74; mood of 74; of oil lamps 78; as

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punishment 74; as source of color 73–74; sunlight 81; see also electric light light bulb 71–72 listening 27; relationship to speaking 32–33 listening to music 31 Literature & Art Studies 94 live televised events 38; watching 42–43 living room 90 machine performance, and artistic creativity 8 machines 92–93; history of evolution 57; leisure time, impact on 11; old-fashioned, operating 63; as “quasi-object” 10; radio as healthiest type of 26; spatial machines 13; as substitute for hands 9; uniqueness of computers 64–65 manual labor 7–8 Marx, Karl 59, 65; “commodity fetishism” 65 meat: changing for consumption 16; preserving 15; regulating supply of 15–16 metonymic grammar 30 Ming dynasty x mood, creating through light 74 moonlight 81 multifunctionality of computers 61 music 31 mystifying effect of television 45 “national language,” radio as conveyor of 29 neighbors 2 networks of wires 79–80 news: dramatization of reportage 45–46; objectivity of reportage 47 night, altering cycle of 75–77 noise: disparity between ear and 27; of electric light 74–75; silence of electric light 74–75; utterances 27 nonverbal communication, gestures 30 objectivity of television news reportage 47 oil lamps 78 OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) xiii operating: computers 61–62; old-fashioned machines 63 phonetic communication 30 placement of washing machine 2–3 play 60 politics of residential space 84–87, 89–90 postcolonialism, commonality with postmodernism and cultural studies ix postmodernism, commonality with cultural studies and postcolonialism ix

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Index

preserving: energy through light modulation 75–77; food 15, 21 privacy: and cellphone ownership 55; and computers 64 private property in China 83–84 prose: suibisanwen xivn3; xiaopinwen x public space, television’s representation of 42 pulsator washing machines 12n1 punishment, light as 74 purging, washing machine’s role in 2 push-buttons 79 Qing dynasty x “quasi-object” 10 radio 25; as concealed medium 28–29; demise of 33–34; disparity between ear and noise 27; as healthy machine 26; human relationship to 25–26; as human vocal organ 28–29; listening to music 31; “national language” 29; phonetic communication 30; sounds, controlling 27; speech, relationship to listening 32–33; and television, comparing 27–28; vocal aesthetics 31–32 rate of circulation in the domestic space 1–2 readerly text 48n1 refrigerator 13; as cabinet 23; cleaning 24; cooking time, refrigerators’ role in 20–21; deterritorialized food consumption 17–18; food circulation 18–19; as foods’ air conditioner 14; as intermediary 16–17; as mode of food processing 19; requirements for 14–15; selecting 13; storage space 14, 15, 19–20; in supermarkets 20; supply chains, role in 17–18 refusing to own cellphones as political gesture 52–53 regional cuisines 18 regulating supply of food 15–16 reliability of electric light 77–78 repetition 4 representation of public space 42 requirements: for domestic production 10; for laundry cleaning 8; for refrigerators 14–15 residential space: bachelors, significance of space to 86–87; behavior, impact on 87–88; electric light as indicator of density 80–81; interior decoration 91; kitchens 90–91; living room 90; in modern China 82; politics of 84–87; selection criteria 88–89; in urban areas 88–89 “rhizome” 64

Said, Edward ix security: and cellphone ownership 55; of computers 64 selecting refrigerators 13 self-employment, computers’ role in 59 separation from cellphones, physiological effect of 53–54 sharing, computers’ impact on 67 Shiqiao, Li x, xiiin1 shouji 49 shoujiren 50–51, 52 sign value of washing machine 3 silence of electric light 74–75 Silverstone, Roger 36–37 Simmel, Ernst xiii society: “heterogenous elements” 52; importance of cellphones in 51–52; information, production and consumption of 67–69 sofa, spatial relationship with television 36 solitude, television as companion 38–39 sounds: music 31; of radio, controlling 27; radio as vocal organ 28–29; of washing machines 4; see also the radio space: family significance of 86–87; light as illuminant 73, 74 spatial machines: refrigerators 13; television, spatial centrality of 36 speech: electric light as language of 74; gestures 30; radio as vocal organ 28–29; relationship to listening 32–33; vocal aesthetics 31–32; see also the cellphone Spivak, Gayatri ix stability of electric light 77–78 Stigler, Bernard 70n1 storage space: in refrigerators 14, 15, 23; refrigerators 19–20 subjectivity of television reporting 45–46 suibisanwen xivn3 sunlight 81 supply chains: refrigerators’ role in 17–18; supermarket refrigerators 20 symbolism in clothes 6 tactical intervention 59 taxonomy: of clothes 7; of food 20 technics 70n1 Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stigler) 70n1 television 25; actor-audience relationship 40–41; central role of in human rhythm cycles 47; conspicuousness of 35; conversation, impact on 37; democratization of 41–42; distancing

Index effect on perception of reality 42–44; dramatization of news reportage 45–46; entertainment 47–48; live televised events 38; objectivity of news reportage 47; and radio, comparing 27–28; representation of public space 42; as source of companionship 38–39; spatial centrality of 36; subjectivity of 45–46; unconcealed voyeurism of watching 40–41; valorizing effect of 44–45; watcher-watched relationship 35; watching as specialized job 26 Television and Everyday Life (Silverstone) 36–37 theatres, comparison of movie-watching and watching television 39–40 training: in culinary arts 8; for laundry cleaning 8–9 Treatise on Superfluous Things (Wen) x trinity characteristic of the modern domestic space 25 tumbling box washing machines 12n1 types of washing machines 12n1 unheard words 27 unlistening 27 urban residential space 88–89 utility of computers 60 utterances 27 valorizing effect of television 44–45 violence, effect of watching televised scenes of on the watcher 44 vocal aesthetics 31–32; speech, relationship to listening 32–33

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vocal organ, radio as 28–29 voyeurism, unconcealed voyeurism of watching television 40–41 wages 10 war, effect of watching televised scenes of on the watcher 44 washing machine 11–12; circulation in domestic spaces 2; and clothes 5–6; commercialization of laundry cleaning 6; grammar of 7; placement in domestic space 2–3; sign value 3; sounds of 4; style of operation 4; types of 12n1; as working machine 4 watcher-watched relationship 35 watching TV 36, 37–38; distancing effect on perception of reality 42–44; live televised events 38, 42–43; mystifying effect of 45; scenes of violence and death, effect on the watcher 44; as specialized job 26; unconcealed voyeurism of 40–41; and watching a movie in a theatre, comparing 39–40 Wen, Zhenheng x, xivn9 wires 79–80 women: role in domestic spaces 5–6; role in laundry cleaning 7; zhainu 66 working machines 4; computers 58, 59 writerly text 48n1 xiaopin prose x–xi xiaopinwen x zhainan 66 zhainu 66