Regarding Mr. Wu,a dragon and conversations in traffic: Social acceleration,deceleration and re-acceleration in Shanghai

Introduction

In contrast to the past when western observers portrayed China as ‘frozen [my italics] in time’ (Gamble, 2003: 5), the country is now widely regarded as ‘the fastest changing place on earth’ (see, e.g. BBC2, 2012) with Shanghai cast as a ‘city in a hurry’ (Wasserstrom, 2009: 109) within febrile narratives of head-spinning transformation. Such a discursive shift has resulted because of recognition of not only alterations in China’s material environment but also discourses circulating within these spaces which typically construct time through rhetoric of a linear road or path directed towards a future point (see, e.g. Mueggler, 1999: 468), metaphors that are represented materially within numerous named places in the landscape. This paper is, however, concerned with unofficial engagements with, and re-storying of, official discourses relating to time such as that identified by Gamble when the Communist Party's incitement for persons to ‘look to the future’ was unofficially altered to ‘look toward money’ – by changing one character – the implication being that people are more concerned with making money in the present than with putting faith in uncertain futures (2003: 22). More specifically, this paper, drawing upon ethnographic data generated primarily as a consequence of semi-structured interviews and participant observation, explores residents’ experiences of, and responses to, living within a context that appears to display features of what Rosa terms ‘social acceleration’ (2003) highlighting how different ideas about, and visions of, the future coexist with centrally planned, and discursively articulated, official futures; all of which intermingle in present-day Shanghai. First, I concentrate upon anxieties induced in persons who feel sedentary – relative to others –and their attempts to cope with this. Although such persons are dispossessed of power, my discussion strives to depict their lives realistically without, as Bourdieu notes of renditions of the dominated, either crushing or exalting them (2000: 234). In addition to the impact of the three dimensions of social acceleration to which Rosa refers, namely ‘technological’, ‘the pace of life’ and ‘acceleration of society as a whole’ (2003: 7), I consider how residents respond to living within a discursive environment which locates residents, as Zhang notes generally of urban space in China, within a ‘linear vision of historical progression’ (2006: 465–466). According to this narrative, as Zhang explains, ‘the old cityspace can no longer meet the demands of a modernizing and commercializing society and is therefore a physical as well as a symbolic obstacle to development and progress’ (2006: 466). Part two focuses upon how residents’ attitudes towards social acceleration become refracted in imaginative forms, especially texts currently circulating within Shanghai which insinuate ostensibly supernatural characters into certain prominent locations in the city. It is argued these texts – their structure, architecture, intrinsic form and ‘play of its internal relationships’ (Foucault, 1984: 103) – can act as prisms through which to view the persons and groups who produce, consume, circulate and, in some cases, silence them. As these texts seem to critique ‘progress’ and register residents’ anxieties and reservations towards social acceleration so they smooth over disquiet and unease thereby encouraging not only discourses of development but also the patterns, pace and tempo of social acceleration. Although the data presented in this paper indicates the existence of what Lim, in another context, calls ‘immiscible times – multiple times that never quite dissolve into the code of modern time consciousness’ (2009: 12), the third part of this paper explores the costs of ‘slowdown’, arguing these are sufficient to compel residents not only to re-engage with, and therefore perpetuate, socially accelerating forms but perhaps even to intensify them, hence the deployment of the term ‘re-acceleration’ in the title of this paper.

Involuntary deceleration in socially accelerated contexts

Mr. Wu is a Shanghainese man in his early 50s who has recently been laid off from his job driving a van around the city. He lives with his wife and daughter in a 20-m² apartment in a lane, or nongtang just several minutes by foot from Xintiandi (translated as ‘New World Place’), one of the city's most iconic, and cosmopolitan, entertainment locations, a space in which, according to promotional materials, ‘yesterday meets tomorrow in Shanghai today’. The rhythm of life in and around Mr. Wu's nongtang, however, seems not to be speeding up but ‘standing still’. The timeless quality to the area makes it appear to me as a gemeinschaft oasis in ‘the stormy sea of the Gesellschaft metropolis’ (Parker, 2004: 41) and as a territorial, social and cultural niche that has ‘not yet been touched by the dynamics of … acceleration’ (Rosa, 2003: 15). Because such ‘oases of deceleration’ are, as Rosa notes, under pressure from processes like gentrification (2003: 15), the area has a fragile quality making me feel nostalgic regarding its future passing even while it is still here. Although I struggle (even now) to disregard my typically anthropological view (according to Hansen and Verkaaik) of Mr. Wu's neighbourhood as a space of ‘authenticity’ … ‘opposed [my italics] to the blandness and brutality created by city planners’ (2009: 15), Mr. Wu's description of life therein punctured my utopian view. ‘It is very bad,’ he said emphatically. ‘It's dirty and messy. The environment is really bad’. Mr. Wu continued to pierce my rose-tinted perspective, talking of conflict between residents and explaining how migrants had moved into properties vacated by local homeowners who wait for information regarding when their nongtang will be demolished and, consequently, what compensation they will receive. This demolition has been ‘imminent’, according to Mr. Wu, for as long as I can remember. Such waiting seems to engender in Mr. Wu symptoms which echo not only those Bourdieu discusses with reference to Kafka's The Trial (2000: 229) but also those fictional persons implicated in the case involving Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Dickens's Bleak House. Waiting is, as Bourdieu explains, ‘one of the privileged ways of experiencing the effect of power, and the link between time and power … Waiting implies submission’ (2000: 228).

Mr. Wu's temporal experiences resemble what Bourdieu calls ‘alienated time’, in that he, like Kafka's K, is dispossessed of the power to state the ‘direction of his existence’ being therefore ‘condemned to live in a time orientated by others’ (2000: 237). Nevertheless, although Mr. Wu seems powerless to alter the circumstances of his situation he is, crucially, conscious of it, a symptom sometimes ascribed to anthropological definitions of agency. ‘It is like heaven and earth’, he said when describing his residential life, especially with regards to his proximity to Xintiandi, ‘the Communist Party has not got time for people like us yet. One side of the neighbourhood has posh places. On the other side, there is us’. When Mr. Wu used the idiom ‘liang chongtian’, or ‘two worlds’, he was articulating what Comaroff and Comaroff call an ‘experiential contradiction’ (2002: 782) conjured by an economic context offering vast riches to some whilst threatening the survival of others. Wu's daughter, ironically utilizing revolutionary rhetoric, indicated similar anachronistic feelings. ‘We live in the old society’, she said, ‘but many of the people around us live in the new society’. Such utterances indicate both Mr. Wu and his daughter perceive themselves as possessing spectral, ghost-like, qualities. Such self-images are apposite, and painfully self-aware, responses to what Rosa terms the ‘desynchronization of different groups and segments of society’, which entails an increasing ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ with juxtapositions persisting side by side even being observable ‘on one and the same street’ (2003: 22). Such ‘multitemporality’, as Rosa argues, can transform society into a ‘mosaic of temporal ghettos’; a haunting vision of segregation. Crucially, as the area becomes gentrified, Mr. Wu and his family will become ghosts, erased from the downtown urban narrative and relocated to the margins, or periphery, of the sprawling and ever-expanding, figurative urban text.

Mr. Wu's anxieties relate not only to the fact that his own experiences of ‘slowdown’ and ‘deceleration’, like those persons to whom Rosa refers, is ‘forced [my italics]’ (2003: 22). Since Mr. Wu lost his job he has much time, yet this abundance sometimes seems experientially troubling, resembling Bourdieu's description of ‘dead time’ (2000: 222) or ‘empty time’ that ‘has to be “killed”’ as ‘opposed to the full (or well-filled) time of the ‘busy’ person who … does not notice time passing’ (2000: 224). With no clear sense of what the future will bring, persons like Mr. Wu seem to be ‘muddling through’, albeit in ways which, nonetheless, still seem to endorse Max Weber's claim in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that anxieties about uncontrollable futures can be sublimated through controllable, future-oriented activity in the present (Stafford, 2007: 57). Trips outside Shanghai and, significantly, majiang which, as Bourdieu notes of gambling systems, reintroduce expectation, at least temporarily, thereby enabling persons ‘to escape from the sense … of being the plaything of external constraints’ (2000: 222–223). Nevertheless, echoing observations made by Bourdieu in relation to persons confronting futures devoid of hope, Mr. Wu's wife and daughter increasingly articulate aspirations regarding their future, and imagined, residential lives, which seem ‘detached from reality and sometimes a little crazy, as if, when nothing was possible, everything becomes possible’ (2000: 226), given ‘normal’ levels of compensation. Such ‘fantasies’ relating to spacious and plush accommodation that Mr. Wu's wife regularly talks about nevertheless have, as Sartre notes of imagination, a ‘surpassing’ power, enabling her, often while seeming to irritate her more fatalistic husband, to escape being ‘swallowed up in the existent’ (1972: 273) albeit perhaps only momentarily.

Those experientially negative qualities of waiting that seem aggravated by uncertainties relating to the future are further exacerbated because his feelings of being sedentary (which arguably deprive him of ways to orient himself in time) are experienced within a socially accelerated society in which he feels enveloped by persons moving at faster speeds. Mr. Wu commented upon such persons, often foreigners (perhaps persons like me), who pass from worlds he feels excluded in a manner I take to be flâneur-like – sometimes lingering and taking photographs of residents wearing pajamas and laundry hanging from windows – and into what he deems to be his own local area while he does not enter into the places they frequent, seeing them as spaces of exclusion. They – perhaps we – are like the werewolf described by Benjamin who restlessly roams old neighbourhoods in search of ‘vanished time’ (1999: 416, 418). On multiple occasions during 2013 and 2014, however, Mr. Wu referred to such persons as speeding by his home in fast cars in a manner I took to be as apposite as his references to those persons who loitered.

Given Mr. Wu's precarious situation and the commentary he provided, it is tempting to read him as resistant to the processes and results of social acceleration. Such an interpretation is compelling given that, as Erie notes, despite ‘recent legislation and regulations to protect homeowners’ rights’, forced eviction remains a common cause of violence in contemporary China (2012: 35) and conflicts between residents and government have become frequent (see, e.g. Cai and Sheng, 2013). Much commentary reveals instances of what Rosa calls ‘fundamentalist’, radical, expressions (2003: 16) of intentional and deliberate social deceleration such as ‘dingzihu’ (nail houses) in which real persons object to demolition in ways which slow down development, albeit only temporarily. It is also compelling to interpret Mr. Wu as subversive in a symbolic sense: as an obstacle to progress and modernity. Seen figuratively as a lexical element in an urban text, he and those persons he lives amongst can be read as rhizomatic; as ‘accidental’ or ‘unintended’ features of an urban text that, perhaps unknowingly, betrays, subverts, its ‘purportedly “essential” message’ (Rorty, 1995: 171). The city has, for several decades, been promoted as a model of development and from the perspectives of persons such as officials and city-planners practices (like wearing pajamas outside which is officially constructed as ‘backward’ and hanging laundry from windows outside) occurring in this area might be viewed as subversive to, and undermining of, the urban narrative constructed in texts presenting a more polished, future-oriented, global Shanghai.

However, persons like Mr. Wu are more resigned to the realities of their situation and it is, accordingly, more appropriate to view him and his family as engaging in what De Certeau calls ‘making do’ (1984: 29ff). There is a mischievous, yet pertinent, quality to the way he sometimes refers to his neighbourhood according to a past name; a time when his family was more affluent, and identities could be more easily mapped according to spatial location and his now rundown neighbourhood attracted more positive connotations by virtue of its proximity to fashionable Huaihai Road. His daughter, meanwhile, refuses to acknowledge, at least to me, the incorporation of ‘her’ own district (Luwan) into Huangpu, seeing the former as central to her identity and not only distinct from, but also morally superior to, the latter (Cockain, 2012: 343–344). Such maneuvers seem to endorse De Certeau's claim that names of places can never hold their ‘proper’ meaning against the actual practices of city dwellers (1984: 104) with everyday practices such as the (re) naming of spaces becoming, as they do for Camozzi's informants, part of a ‘search for an order which is capable of lending structure’ (2013: 305) and meaning to residents’ lives.

Nevertheless, Mr. Wu is complicit with the structures of a socially accelerated society and in some ways his anxieties relate to the fact that, as Pascal notes, the future is ‘too slow in coming’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 209). He is not intent on halting processes of gentrification, which make his residential area exhibit, in the present, features ascribed to a ‘zone of transition’ within sociological literature but merely to ensure as personally advantageous an outcome as possible or, more prosaically, to make the best out of a bad situation. Mr. Wu undoubtedly ‘hangs’ on, waiting for information regarding when his nongtang will be demolished in a situation he has little, if any, power to alter. Crucially, however, ‘games with time’ can only, as Bourdieu notes, be played and ‘set up with the (extorted) complicity of the victim and his investment in the game. A person can be durably “held” (so that he can be made to wait, hope, etc.) only to the extent that he is invested in the game so that the complicity of his dispositions can in a sense be counted on’ (2000: 231).

Reflecting upon social acceleration

It was a humid Friday morning in early October 2011. This was the second time Mr. Chen, a man in his late 20s or early 30s who provides services to persons wishing to obtain Chinese driving licenses, had come to collect me from nearby my apartment in Luwan, just 15 minutes by foot from Mr. Wu's home. Mr. Chen was going to drive me to a venue in Gubei where I would sit the multiple-choice component of the examination. As we were stalled in traffic at the intersection which acted as location for the first text, Mr. Chen began to talk, although the summaries below are constructed from my memory of what he said, representations appearing online and informants' versions.

The building of the Yanan elevated highway went smoothly until it reached the junction with Chongqing Road. Despite great efforts, workers were unable to dig deep enough to insert the central pillar. After engineers were unable to explain the cause of the delay, a monk was summoned to the site. After many prayers, the monk informed workers a dragon which had been sleeping beneath their work site had been woken by construction and, presumably in irritation, was preventing the pillar from being installed. Because dragons are proud creatures, the monk explained, a gesture in the dragon's honour would allow it to return to sleep thereby enabling construction to continue. The workers complied, not only erecting a nine dragon pillar but also adhering to the dragon's wish for it to be built on an auspicious day, after which construction continued without further problem.

The costs of, and responses to, multiple times and slowdown

When informants reflected upon whether or not they believed texts relating to ostensibly supernatural instances, typically they either hesitated or vacillated. This was especially apparent when I talked to Zhou, a female in her early 20s who since completing secondary school has performed various administrative roles in offices within Shanghai, on weixin (or ‘WeChat’, literally ‘micro message’, a multi-platform text and voice messaging service). Initially she replied simply and affirmatively to my question, deploying one character ‘xin’ (, believe). Although it seemed inconsequential at the time, the screenshot I took of our conversation reveals a gap of 12 minutes between my question and Zhou's response. Although perhaps not much should be read into this, it is feasible Zhou spent these intervening moments between question and answer in the realm of the ‘fantastic’ which, according to Todorov, comprises the duration of uncertainty experienced by characters and readers when an ‘“apparently supernatural event,” … appears to confound all explanations that accord with the laws of “our familiar world”’ (Lim, 2009: 29). The fantastic is fragile and likely to ‘evaporate at any moment’ (Todorov, 1975: 41) because people who encounter it ‘must decide upon one of two solutions: either they are victims of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination – and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality’ (Todorov, 1975: 25). This interpretation is compelling not only because the linguistic exchanges surrounding this, relating much less to weighty matters, were answered almost instantaneously but also since Zhou almost always responds to messages immediately, a factor suggesting this was somehow extraordinary. When Zhou was asked to elaborate, her responses appeared inconsistent. After claiming she believed, she proceeded to state they had no meaning, before explaining her thoughts about the dragon on Yanan Road which she had passed each day on her way to school in a manner which implied poignancy. ‘When passing I’d think, oh, there is such a story’, she said, ‘People tend to think of their own sight, their own sense of hearing and smell as giving them the most real and truthful feedback but how much can we really see?’

Such vacillation occurred in many conversations regarding these texts. Liu, a male in his early 20s who works as a salesman, initially dismissed these ostensibly supernatural occurrences as ‘unreal’ yet then described instances which seemed contrary to this, such as his experiences of disorientation after having visited a metro station to the south of the city, believed to be haunted due to its proximity to a cemetery. Tan, a female in her mid 30s who is a home and car owner as well as frequent traveler both inside and outside China, explained her reaction to the texts. ‘I’d rather believe than not believe’, she conceded, ‘everybody takes delight (jinjinledao) in talking about them. You're afraid, but the more you're frightened, the more you want to hear’. This delight to which she referred was evident when she described several other instances when supernatural presences had revealed themselves within both public spaces such as Xintiandi and the private spaces of her extended family members. Yet this excited, even febrile, flow of ideas halted abruptly. Defining the stories as unreal she referred to the ready multiplication of characters –a feature Todorov's ascribes to the fantastic – and the generic conventions these stories adhered to, factors that precipitated her modulation towards an uncanny rather than marvelous explanation. ‘When a building is constructed’, she said in a tone that seemed to echo my own when critiquing Hollywood narrative structure in class, ‘a person always dies. Then something else happens, a fengshui master comes and the situation is resolved’.

Why did such vacillation, typically, result in informants modulating to rational explanations and why did willingness, even excitement, to talk about these texts change to unwillingness to elaborate further? In a sense such reluctance is unsurprising. Although these texts provide possibilities for residents to transcend official, linear, rhythms thereby constituting ways of coping with social acceleration, they also disrupt residents’ senses of normal, what Schutz calls ‘natural attitude’: ‘the habitual sense of the world a person has’ (Inglis and Thorpe, 2012: 90). As Inglis and Thorpe note when habituated senses of ‘reality’ fall away, ‘uncertainty and anxiety reign’ (2012: 90) and this, as Dyer notes of the unsettling symptoms that accompany the questioning of ‘common-sense’, has a ‘halting quality’ [italics not in original] (1992: 1). Residents are also undeniably aware of how ghosts have, for the past generation or so, signified luohou, or backwardness (see, e.g. Mueggler, 1999: 478) and it is feasible this predisposed them to articulate rational explanations, if only to me rather than themselves. There are, moreover, material costs to slowdown in sociocultural and discursive contexts privileging and rewarding speed and future-oriented gazes. As Rosa notes in the context of postindustrial societies, ‘whoever withdraws … from the pressure of an accelerated tempo … risks missing the boat and finding no chance for readmission’ because when ready to return to ‘mainstream society’ their resources ‘are hopelessly obsolete’ (2013: 86). Such dangers, equally evident for residents in Shanghai, are encapsulated in the expression circulating amongst informants during 2011 and 2012 ‘don't let your child lose at the starting line’. This oft-repeated adage, sometimes voiced in tones suggesting that even though they disagreed they felt they had no alternative but to perpetuate it (e.g. by enrolling children on all manner of classes to improve their future ‘marketability’) indicates how figurative movement and the rush to gain forms of capital begins earlier in life in a manner that seems to endorse Bauman's claim that when ‘running among fast runners, to slow down means to be left behind’ and ‘when running on thin ice, slowing down also means the real threat of being drowned. Speed, therefore, climbs to the top of the list of survival values’ (2000: 209). Nevertheless, these informants, like Mr. Wu and the dragon, are not forced to enter into the race. Instead they join in order to have a chance of winning, or at least not losing and it is this complicity that enables the game to continue.

Concluding thoughts

This paper has explored the impact of what Rosa terms ‘social acceleration’ (2003) upon the rhythms of everyday life in Shanghai, focusing upon anxieties induced in residents who feel sedentary – relative to others – in acceleratory social and discursive contexts and the ways they respond to this. This paper has also considered how these anxieties come to be constituted in symbolic forms and the ambivalence not only contained in, but also generated by reflection upon, certain texts, notably those relating to ostensibly supernatural occurrences. Despite the ideological dominance of time-as-progress and the pervasiveness of forms of social acceleration, the texts explored in this paper reveal engagements with time that are alternate to future-oriented movement. These texts are productive in the sense they contribute to the futures which, like those outlined by Barbara Adam, are being ‘created continuously … every second of the day’ (2009: 7), in a manner I take to be decidedly rhizomatic. As these alternate, non-linear, conceptions of time provide residents with possibilities so they have a haunting quality, not least because they erode habituated senses of reality constructed and constantly reinforced by dominant discourses of time-as-progress thereby revealing how implicated we are in arbitrary, yet rationalized definitions of time (see, e.g. Hassan, 2003: 11). Although my informants seem disposed to question narratives of teleological ‘progress’ and the ways they are unfolding within Shanghai they either do not wish to reject them or are incapable of imagining ontologically comfortable alternatives – and probably a combination of both.

Given the ideological dominance of conceptions of time-as-progress, the security these narratives provide, anxieties resulting from immiscible times and the costs of ‘slowdown’, it is surprising any alternate conceptions can emerge. Perhaps a clue to this conundrum can be found in Freud's paper on The ‘Uncanny’, a term he uses differently to Todorov (1975) who imbues it with more rational connotations. Freud observes that we no longer believe in the uncanny, ‘we have surmounted such ways of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new set of beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation’ (1919 [2004]: 95). Perhaps, therefore, the texts discussed, and residents’ engagements with them, might not only indicate the resilience of other conceptions of time despite the pervasiveness of narratives of time-as-progress but also uncertainties with existing concepts. Such factors might explain why these texts have not disappeared, either as the public tires of them or the tensions they express become resolved, but become part of local narratives. By extension these texts might even emerge dialectically because rather than in spite of the ideological dominance of rationalized, scientific, capitalist and linear concepts of time. As Castle notes, ‘the more we seek to free ourselves … from the coils of superstition, mystery, and magic, the more tightly, paradoxically, the uncanny holds us in its grip’ (1995: 15). Accordingly these texts might reveal how although principles of rationality suffuse numerous spheres of contemporary life, there is still space for the carriers of ‘magical effects’, as Weber observes of art, or the things which, as Adam notes in her insightful ‘complexification’ (2009: 17) of Weberian thought, escape ‘the iron grip of rationality on the social world’ (2009: 11). While cautious not to overstretch my point, this might, as Lee notes in his equally engaging reading of Weber, intimate ‘the future as shadowed by currents antithetical to rationality’ (2010: 181).