anna greenspan, china and the wireless undertow — review
the temu version of yuk hui's "the question concerning technology"
the reading experience behind greenspan's "wireless china" feels like one of those collages that tries to be everything so it can connect to the world in every possible way it can in order to ground its own throughlines but at the risk of not developing any substantial ideas on its own rather than minor points in-between the greater narrative. the different chapters have too scattered of a focus, which also makes it seem like the earlier juxtaposition with chinese metaphysics in the totality of chapter 1 (which follows no less than fourteen different chinese philosophers around the concept of ti-yong) is partially obsolete in retrospect to the succesive chapters, at least when you consider the sudden jump that greenspan makes between considering classical chinese metaphysics and the argumentative domain around it, to suddenly talking about 21st century shanzhai and technological integration.
the progression happens in such a way where the sheer amount of references not only hide the entire point of the text, precluding it in endless historicizing. in chapter 1, the position is slightly more seemlessly integrated, whereas in chapter 2, she further strays and expands from the topic rather than closing in on it, and this expansion only ends up growing through chapters 3 and 4, going from the ti-yong problem to shanzai all the way into an ontology of electricity, ending chapter 5 with mou's vibrational ontology as an answer to an experience of the noumenal or a consolidation that explains how chinese cosmology can intersect with western technology (even if the explanation is extremely brief).
there seem to only be three rudamentary ideas in the first three chapters: china struggles with understanding what is essential about itself when met with western tech, chinese philosophers subsume function and essence, contraction and subtraction and waves and lines into one dispersed quality and that can be seen through its culture and media and its earlier philosophical monists/nihilists, and the chinese nation state struggles to make itself look like a metaphysical center of its own technological operationalization. these ideas are then scattered through hundreds of mostly inoperative references seemingly.
the point about earlier chinese metaphysics being more complex doesnt land when binaries are both re-asserted through the text and conceptual distinctions arent actually concentrated. greenspan at certain points argues that chinese politicians or philosophers have struggles with binary splits in their own self-definition and philosophical grounding, yet also that xiong is the eastern whitehead in the sense that his theory moves substance away from hierarchical essence and into heterogenous process, yet greenspan at points analyzes china through certain binary oppositions (like in the third chapter's land and sea analogy which mostly isnt instrumentalized) whilst at other points hinting towards more constructive frameworks.
greenspan's second chapter, "contraction and expansion" struggles hard to maintain even its basic form in very certain respects. when it comes to continuity, its noticable that from subchapter 1 to 2, it goes from wechat straight to the history of the telegraph before it, but before it does this, theres a philosophical section in the middle cut short by the historicizing that happens after. every time greenspan does speak, its extremely light, her thoughts arise so softly that there is hardly a distinction to be made between the material she's analyzing and her own conclusions, even if at times her intentions are to be academically open
for concept, there is not a single mention of the actual terms contraction and expansion in the main body of the second chapter, you could seemingly replace the title with anything else and it wouldnt even be noticable. the problem with thematic tilting is that the theme needs to directly cohere with either the concepts or the references, and here it does neither, since greenspan looks like shes going through google scholarship pages for wechat than building any real ontological foundation for contraction or expansion.
clearly, she is tracing them through the cosmological forces underlining them tied to mental and material manifestations and not tracking them terminologically but instead through translating them into infrastructural processes (synchronization, signal distribution, temporal coordination), however, there is a missing mediative layer that actually translates: idea/history → concept → empirical mediation (prevalent) → conceptual mediation (missing) → idea/history, and this missing link makes it unclear how or to which extent of success chinese empirical reality has or hasnt transferred the concepts forward
when it comes to deliniation in the very first part of the second chapter, a lot of the references arent necessarily all that helpful, the text goes from liyan chen to finn brunton to gabriel de seta to connie chan in regards to wechat but it goes from red envelopes to infrastructural digitality to infinite market possibility all in the same page, doesnt actually comment in an authored voice even a single time about her own thoughts on any of this, the references just come one right after the other, seemingly snapshotted in, and as they roughly transition from wechat to telegraphy. the deliniation also has no coherent function, the wechat section looks like a curious article you'd find on wired, the telegraphy section is a dense history, the techno-nationalism section that follows after is about levenson's critique of zhang zhidong, whereas the last two chapters, technological time and gps/beidou are an analysis of media theory, where the argument shifts register from chinese political history to planetary infrastructure. in the entire chapter, greenspan doesnt use any of the references she posits to build anything individually coherent, instead endlessly collaging them one after the other as if building a clean historiographical account, she could essentially make the same argument without them in five times less text, except the references build the entirety of the argument instead of her.
the actual argument greenspan is trying to make towards the end of chapter two with "technological time" is relatively simple: gps requires atomic clocks, atomic clocks require relativistic correction, relativistic correction means einsteinian physics is literally built into the infrastructure of everyday navigation. this argument on its own is interesting, and its even occuring whatsoever obviously because of china's understanding of essence and a hierarchy of time and the nation-states question, or in other words, the point is that the techno-nationalist presumption or otherwise that a sovereign "ti (essence)" can stand above and control a technological yong ("function"/wests technological mediation) — hits a physical obstacle in the wireless environment, where china has to consider what to do about it, or doesnt consider what to do about it and essentially loses their grip on metaphysical cosmology as a result of the corruption of western holicity and syncretic homogeneity.
the problem is threefold, first, greenspan already makes this point at the end of the first subchapter, and then basically rehashes it again later without significant upgrading, the second is that she buries it behind three pages of telegraph chronometry and the history behind the formation of a non-localized yet relative order of time, and the third is that the conceptual distinction itself is essentially extremely weak, by the time greenspan finishes with her argument that goes from national sovereignity into technological subsumption through levenson's argument, into the telegraph and then finally into gps, she wraps it up back through einstein and relativity rather than actually allowing us to feel what atomic time is for her, how it relates to other mechanisms and concepts and so on.
the essential concepts behind time are about its relativity instead of its expansion, and it has to do with localization, spatialization, global coordination and with synchronized experiences, yet, none of these actual bring in sociological questions such as phenomenological imapct or political organization. not only that, but it actually remains unclear how exactly atomic clocks would be organized according to the chinese "ti", what it would take for wechat and for chinese maps to not be shielded into a relativistic-yet-synchronzied totality?
there are even some embedding failures throughout (failures since embedding is supposed to be the strong suit in the work), such as random referential involvements of this type " despite the myth of the lone genius that surrounds him, ‘einstein had constructed his abstract relativity machine out of a material world of synchronized clocks’. he was ‘not a solitary brain thinking great thoughts, but an expert situated at the heart of modern media and machines’" which is a cult of personality and an aesthetic of thinking meant to suggest that time was the essential prerogative behind a certain thinkers mission, which in and of itself blends in with the text much more poorly due to its need to constantly enter new proximate biographical relations in order to posit otherwise simple ideas, compared to the actual narrative driving forces, such as "curiously enough, peters remarks, einstein’s universe, which is now embedded into the wireless mediasphere, ‘looks more like the old order of clock time before railroad time, where every town had its own local time’" that show up as far more strong and worthwhile in the text.
similar embedding failures include "this transition from the electro-coordinated signals of the tele graph to the space-based timekeeping devices of today subtly altered the universality of greenwich mean time that was brought about through the global spread of the telegraph. in introducing his book on the contemporary physics of time, carlo rovelli turns to the ancient philosopher anaximander, who held that all phenomena evolve according to a particular ‘order of time’. the conversion from wires to wireless, which largely took place during the fourth kon dratiev cycle, marks a threshold transition, a transformation in the techno-temporal order." greenspan continues "a functioning gps system requires an extremely high degree of temporal precision. "
the problem isnt only that she doesnt comment on rovelli's point, but that she's using an otherwise redundant passage about rovelli in the middle of her narrative to seemingly support her own previous conclusion, the entire section could have been bypassed with a simple "rovelli's order of time states x and y" and then re-routed back through greenspans narratives, or an even simpler usage of "order of time" with a subsequent note in the referential index that explained the book. instead of this, greenspan devotes an entire paragraph to mentioning the book, almost as if shes promoting it right in the middle of her already tediously long historiographical section that could have already been summarized by her in a few sentences without taking away from the general point.
whilst all of this is happening, greenspan would have had and did have countless opportunities to expand on her own concept of chinese sovereign time-keeping. obviously we dont expect greenspan to get ideologically involved in suggestion, but should she suggest that china should return to a submarine-pump system of coordination, or better yet, perhaps, a google maps that only shows you "state-sponsored pathways", or one that desynchronizes everyone's time by only relating everyone's position to the relative position of chinese state institutions and using them not only as coordinating units based on the time that they work (and what they unlock when they work in one time or another), or what type of services they provide corresponding with how citizens can generally move in that space
the problem isnt that she must create concepts, but that the research itself is too thematically focused but too unauthored for the frame shes introducing. given that she introduces ti as a problem of sovereignty, she never cashes out what sovereignty would mean under a wave ontology, even though she constantly emphasizes it, which is a deliniation and a framing mistake. even, if we were to take the conceptual fantasy to its most vulgar extent, something could be imagined along the lines of a giant icon of xi jinping that appears as a "boss quest" on everyone's screen whenever they click on the "restaurants" tag on their local coordinating gps that oscilliates in intensity depending on how close you are to a state sponsored area, literally any idea whatsoever of how a sovereign system would look like outside of politicians being supposedly confused about how to let technology remain implemented in state logic would have been more than desired to maintain and even expand greenspan's point, which at almost all times is stuck right in the middle of empirical correspondences rather than theoretical speculation. the failure here is about whether implications are successfully cashed out or not, not necessarily about system invention (even though for a theorist this is the preferred method)
greenspan shows how political beurocracy mediates desire without leading to classical metaphysical capture, such as: "they would, he says ‘provide important coordinates of time and space and become a pillar of national security . . . in three years’ time people may still say “i’m using gps” but in fact their phone will be tuned into beidou.’" the problem is again clear, greenspan right after this paragraph goes back towards talking about the exactitude and power of the atomic clock through peter galison, and then it ends with the einstein section we've already covered. what it doesn't do is explain how exactly speed consolidates classical authority when in relation to china specifically, or which exact forms of alienation it brings about. in the transitional subchapter of telegraphic mediation, greenspan historicizes with "the cable and telegraph, backed, of course by sea power, transformed colonialism into the imperial system in which the centre of an empire could dictate rather than merely respond to the margin."
this shows exactly how speed affects certain forms of business, but again, it hardly ties it with the broader question of ti, which is presumed to be nested in the preceeding and following chapters, but doesnt necessarily clarify there either, because just as with the later paragraph closing abruptly, the former closes as well. the exact structure goes like this: wechat/techno-nationalism → telegraph resistance and seizure → levenson culturalism-to-nationalism → yan fu's critique → may fourth radicalism → internet with chinese characteristics → telegraph globalisation and monopoly capital → technological time/standardised clocks → satellites/gps → beidou sovereignty → atomic time/relativity → ti–yong philosophical resolution.
the abrupt shift from chinese political history to technological mediation doesnt land and isnt clarified by the earlier sections in the work. right before the history of the telegraph, "internet with chinese characteristics" is mostly about the firewall and the idea of censorship and privacy, greenspan constantly says "we cant think about this only through oscillation or contraction or binaries", meanwhile shes quoting levinson and yuk hui to explain how the chinese have an almost cartesian split where they hope to weaponize technological abstraction without their own minds being affected by it, but this doesnt explain what the chinese think about ti during this time period.
greenspan notes 'chinese officials, who had at first tried to ignore, ban and destroy the telegraph, in the end came to buy and operate it themselves' after which she notes ‘paradoxically, they insisted on change because they had a traditionalistic bias against it.’, after which she notes 'rather than try to shield an essential, unchanging traditional culture from the radical transformations wrought by new technology, ‘the new youth’ of the ‘chinese renaissance’ abandoned the binary oscil lation altogether. they started ‘to doubt that ti deserved any protec tion at all’.' after which she notes 'what was needed instead was a more fundamental revolution, which removed the obstacle of the essence of chinese thought (ti).' this shows a clear geneological background, but it doesnt correspond to the earlier philosophical analysis in chapter one.
the closest (still very far) that greenspan does get to the ability to actually proposing how a mediated contemporary temporality can become mediated through chinese cosmometaphysics is through chapter with mou zongsan and the transcendental materialism argument, where she outlines the idea that the wireless mediasphere is a material a priori that conditions experience from outside experience. it seems that mou believes that the noumenal realm can somehow be accessed through ritualized or religious meditation and then some type of vibratory mass awareness of the body's connection to electricity be realized. a lot of it sounds extremely speculative since its emerging from an ascetic tradition rather than a technological one, and greenspan herself does a poor job of actually thinking of any way in which it intersects with modernity. anna writes "might we consider the practices of these human–technological assemblages as a form of gongfu, which cultivate an encounter with the time waves within which we are sub merged. the addictive manner in which we touch and now embed an increasingly ubiquitous wireless technology reveals the hungry nature of our participation. these techno-bodily rituals cultivate a practical knowledge of the vibratory realm that is now constitutive of conscious experience. " and ends her paragraph with more questions rather than answers as is typical of the writing style in this book.
the actual times she intersects with this idea are in chapter four, where tan's ether as the vibratory medium connecting consciousness and cosmos could have been read against the atomic clock's reduction of time to electromagnetic frequency, and with chapter one, where xiong's ksana doctrine (every thought-instant arising and ceasing, no stable duration, transformation without a prior substance) could have resonated with einsteinian local time and the non-universality of simultaneity, if greenspan either used xiong's thought process to actually develop this idea or otherwise developed it herself.
speaking of chapter one, as opposed to chapter two, it has a much stronger continuity, a much more academically helpful account, and a much clearer progression. the movement goes roughy like: political deployment → failure → deeper philosophical roots → correct reformulation. in one section, greenspan quotes from li " the ‘main flaw of the [slogan] “chinese substance and western applications”’, he writes, ‘is found in the assumption that technology is application and not substance. but the exact opposite is true: technology is substance . . .’ science, technology and industry are the ‘cornerstone’ or ‘essence’ of society.". it is clear that chapter 1 is the real section where she actually considers how chinese metaphysics can intersect with technology, which then puts into question why she spends all of chapter two explainng how modernity is essentially destroying chinese thought instead of speaking of contractions, and shifting her lense to analyze cultural artifacts and goods in chapters 4 and 5 instead of synthesizing the existing material from chapter 1.
other than the fact that chapter 1 is also riddled with biographical details that are interesting and intimate but essentially useless for the reading experience since this book is clearly not trying to be a biography (but ends up being one anyways) "in 1922 xiong left nanjing to take up a position teaching bud dhist philosophy at peking university. it was in this new academic context that he began to analyse his, until then largely uncritical, belief in buddhism and began to read yogacara texts"
xiong is the only philosophically productive thinker that confronts anna's questions directly in this text. the only problem is that as anna shows, xiong's narrative and his conceptual developments actually appear to contradict. one on hand, anna notes about xiong: "when it consolidates, it forms material objects’, wrote zhang, ‘when it disintegrates, it is simply a massive formless qi.’ for wang – and later for xiong shili – there is no substance behind our experiential world, ‘no separate fundamental state (ti) independent of its function (yong)’. the idea of substance as a ‘fundamen tal ground’, a primary stuff that is ‘ontologically basic’, implies an ontological hierarchy that wang, as well as xiong, firmly rejects. ‘the reality is nothing but qi’, wrote wang, ‘and its function mani fested in concrete things." yet on another hand, xiong's conceptual framework looks something like: "every contraction and expansion constitutes a ksana or ‘thought instant’, a buddhist term for the smallest unit of time. yet even this most minute moment of permanence is illusory. no dharma, xiong insists, abides in time. one can’t say first there is xi and then there is pi. instead, ultimate reality is nothing more than thought instant following thought instant, each of which ceases as soon as it arises. "
first of all, not only is there more about contraction and expansion in this short paragraph than there is in the second chapter which literally carries this name, but furthermore, greenspan clearly shows us how xiong and wang's general narrative doesnt actually enable any type of chinese exceptionalism, in fact it enables clearly quite the opposite, it sort of leans toward the idea of a western philosophical "capture" (synthetic influence) of china from the western pov. in a sense, this is typical of chinese political positioning, its emphasis on stillness, integration and inclusion actually disinegrates its inner core in many regards. xiong's conceptualization of ksana can actually work in chinese contra-modern favor, if it was conceieved of through einsteinian local time as a unique chinese metaphysical conclusion, if only chinese app developers actually took that into consideration when building their technology, yet, this problem also raises the more general contradiction that standpoint theorists have been suggesting about the limited influence between philosophy and science.
regardless, greenspan ends the chapter simply to argue that xiong was far more capable of organic synthesis than some of his predecessors such as zhang (even if she doesnt make this comparison direct), yet, there is no actual comment on how xiong's framework can be used for integrating with modernity or for arguing against it, like you'd see in say a byung chul han or a yuk hui who appear as regular references in this text and can clearly pin-point the intersection with modernity. in assumption, chapter 2 follows because greenspan naturally arrives at the need to geneologically investigate how china is integrating technology through its own philosophy, but since all of greenspans conclusions about this are negative, it requires her to go into chapter 3 where she attempts to sketch out where china does actually synthesize its own philosophy or in other words where essence and copy, original and replica, centre and periphery are inseparable in practice.
yet in chapter 3, greenspan doesnt offer a vision of china where certain areas of it can resist modernity. instead, she offers us deleuze's well known (therefore kind of misplaced in this text) rebuke of platonism, byung chul hans explanation on how the active transformation of shanzhai show how copies are not any less valued in china than "originals" which it doesnt have an "essential" view of unlike western philosophy, and a reading of a nomad-influenced, wheat-sourced red china vs an sea-influenced blue peripherial china, where greenspan ends her paragraph with the wishy-washy sentiment "with no stable or permanent grounding in a separate sub stance or essence, they are commensurate with the exterior plane of the untimely and its fluid, alien rhythms, which ‘ceaselessly [rumble] in another dimension’ underneath the ‘laws of nature that govern the surface of the world’." the point of this claim is quite central actually to anna, its the idea that shanzhai as a land allows the commericalization and spectacularization of public life, unlike the west, precisely to emphasize the hidden and real nature underneath everything else that is happening, a nature that doesnt need to be preserved as original.
the chapter actually starts with a much stronger thematic direction, one that would get us closer to consolidating or explaining the existence of the first chapter, "for tu, the transfor mative power of the edges raises critical questions about the mean ing of ‘chineseness’ and its relation to modernity. tu’s own project mobilises the distinction between the diasporic huaren (華人 people of chinese origin) and zhongguoren (中國人 people of china, the state) in positing a cultural identity that can serve to decentre the authority of the geopolitical nation." where anna does in fact at the very least pose the exact question we've been looking for, but instead of answering it, she allows it to dissapate in a cultural analysis that doesnt actually emphasize how chinese concepts were envisioned seperately from western ones (which is the sole goal of the first chapter, which also dissipates into accepting synthesis and integration at the cost not of creating anti-modern chinese sentiment but at the very least of actually explaining how chinese philosophy encounters modernity.
this was one of the key aspects of the second chapter, which was supposed to explain how modernity corrupts chinese sovereignity, the same question goes unanswered precisely because the thematic focus of the work is already reconciled around the question of a chinese identity as already encountering a synthetic break with the west (ti-yong), the same type of question that disallows for a "folk chinese resistance to modernity". if anything, greenspans total refusal to pose this question resembles the "machine decision is not final" imperative, china is seemingly always heading towards the future because apparently nobody, not even its western scholars, will ever permit that at any point it allows itself to land a single definitive functional permittance of essence in any capacity, not even in its analysis of modernity
of course that is, unless you just read yuk hui - and just as an example, in just one chapter of cosmotechnics, hui's geometry/time chain in cosmotechnics expounds on the modernity issue quite succinctly (greek geometrisation → spatialization of time → tertiary retention → mechanization → reconstitution of temporality). hui argues that when european logic encountered china, it ruined cyclical time by changing it from points back into intervals, ruining propensities/situations by bringing them into modernity-as-linear-advancement. hui believes that cosmology + technics produces epistemic outcomes, but epistemic gates themselves only foreclose on conditions.
it may be too harsh to state that modernity is the required goalpost, given that the second chapter was supposed to deal with that, but if we don't account for that as a functional expectation of this chapter, that would also mean that the chapters have a weak associative value, which further poses the question of why classical philosophy was only interrogated or blended into the first chapter and not the other ones. on that note, chapter four of the work not only doesnt address any of these questions, but almost lands as its own seperate work, and in fact, is by far the strongest chapter in the work, one that is essentially useless to even mention in this review, whereas, the continuity of the third chapter is also by far the weakest in the book. the tarkovsky zone opening never actually reconnects to the sez material in any operative way, whereas the manufacturing history section (wintelism, foxconn) runs for several pages with no philosophical traction. the deleuze section arrives too late and too briefly to retroactively organise what preceded it, and it also arrives in spite of having to define a chinese modernity. the land/sea closing is also somewhat structurally disconnected from the shanzhai argument, and the cultural analysis that preceeds it as just noted doesnt allow for an investigation into modernity.
greenspan tells us "the zone is an ultimate expression of the ‘changing practices of sovereignty’, which use ‘nested exceptional isms: the interplay of exception and rule that creates intersections for networks, markets, and political rule’." which is an excellent definition of the zone from a political standpoint, one that clearly delinates it as a liminal zone between the chinese firewall on either sides of it. yet, not only are these analogies not necessarily functional, since liminality, borderline areas and so on dont need shifting time and space and holographic qualities and magical properties and schrodingers experiences to become understood as politically protective domains, but greenspan herself is unsure of the picture shes using ireland and fisher to paint
"the special economic zone is clearly distinct from the zone trope that traverses the science fiction imaginary. nevertheless, they share some critical properties. the city of shenzhen, where much of the world’s wireless media gets made, has hosted a vibrant pirate culture that innovated practices of repetition. the continuous copying and mutant iterations at the heart of this techno-culture fundamen tally disrupt a familiar, stable order that is based on the primacy of the original. " after saying this, greenspan simply moves on to explaining the actual politics behind special economic areas, literally never returning to the zone paragraph she just sketched out. not only that, but even her brief explanation on how they are similar doesnt seem all that convincing, given tarkovsky's zone is neither a simulacrum, nor a place that actually creatively leveradges iteration, nor anything that possess any type of culture. also, the ontological explanations of a collapse of time and space, although they do cohere with what she says about saz, are synthesized to refer to a supposedly different temporal experience in that area, but greenspan doesnt take the effort in this work to explain exactly how that translates in the ambient experience of the physical territory.