viz. - China

Fahrenheit 451 vs. Long Live Books!

Jay Voss — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:40:47 +0000

(Image credit: TILTS)

The Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS) kicks off the 2012-2013 season tomorrow night with a lecture by Nicholson Baker, to be held in Blanton Auditorium at 5:30 PM. It’s open to the public, and all within the Austin area are encouraged to attend. TILTS is an initiative supported by the Office of the President, the Vice-Provost, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of English of The University of Texas at Austin. Each year the symposium brings a group of scholars to campus with the goal of enriching intellectual life in the community, and I can’t say how much I appreciate the program and the extent to which I think it’s an absolute success. Each year the symposium takes on a different theme (“The Digital Human[ities]”, 2010-2011; “Poets & Scholars”, 2011-2012), and this academic year we’ll be hearing about “The Fate of the Book”. Auspiciously titled, no doubt, but certainly relevant. And though advance copy of Nicholson Baker’s speech isn’t circulating (surely this is as important as major politicians’ speeches?), my familiarity with his books suggests that he’s going to be rather optimistic about the fate of print.

(Image credit: Reuters)

I don’t think we could be hearing about “The Fate of the Book” at a better time. Yesterday we woke up to news that there’d been a significant riot at a Foxconn Technology production facility in Taiyuan, China. This plant makes products for Apple, Dell, and Microsoft, and many sources are reporting that the new iPhone 5 has been coming out of the Taiyuan plant. While reports of worker strife in China are always spurious, we do know that at least 5,000 police offers were called in to quell the uprising. It must have been significant. So, I ask, if books are being made obsolete by various tablets and mobile computing technologies, is our convenience worth the price of exploiting poor workers in places like China and Brazil? Read enough books and you’re sure to answer that question in the negative.

On a less urgent and more domestic note, it’s striking how many arguments in the ongoing election cycle are blatantly dependent upon voters’ illiteracy. It’s shocking, really. Assuming that readers of this blog vote for both sides of the spectrum (I know, I know…most of us probably vote left, but pretending for a sec that we live in a vibrant democracy) I’ll quickly give a benign example. Two days ago, at a fundraiser for Todd Akin, Newt Gingrich proclaimed that “My expectation would be that in the crunch, in October, governor Romney is going to be for the entire ticket, and he’s going to be for Todd Akin.” While this does sound like Gingrich’s typical line of argument, he’s telegraphing Republican hopes that Missouri voters will have completely forgotten about Akin’s odd perspectives by Election Day. Democracy’s contingent upon a critical citizenry, and I’d hate to think that Missouri voters could forget about Akin’s remarks in such a short span of time. I happen to think that reading books impedes such apathy and is fundamentally important to the future of a democratic society. It’s clear that digital literacies will be necessary for corporate success in the twenty-first century, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that they will enhance democracy in the same way that traditional literacy did throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

(Image credit: easyvectors.com)

Digital literacies are important for any number of reasons, and it’s an honor that we have the opportunity to teach them in the twenty-first century. These days, anyone with a decent bachelor’s degree should be able to figure out how to use seemingly odd new computing programs, especially if they had no knowledge of how those programs worked previously. That’s the mark of digital literacy, by my measure. But it strikes me as unfair to assume that a digital system could somehow replace books. For one thing, technology remains very expensive. Lower-income homes simply cannot afford Apple products (even if the company does own an aluminum mine, which I’m starting to suspect they do), and I bet that a majority of humans will continue to read books long into the future, so long as they have access to basic education. Aside from economic constraints, most graduate students I know seek out physical books when they wish to do a few days’ worth of serious reading. Half of my own students choose to read physical versions of our text, even though everything is available digitally. In fact, when I’m in the airport, most of the people I see reading digital books are of my parents’ generation.

So, in short, I do feel optimistic about the future of books. It’ll be fun to hear what others have to say throughout the course of this year’s TILTS symposium. If nothing else, I can’t imagine that humans would ever stop telling ourselves stories – that would certainly represent a certain death.

Xi, It's Good to Have You Back.

Jay Voss — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:33:43 +0000

(Image credit: The New York Times)

With last week’s tempestuous events in the middle east, the subsequent chaos on the U.S. presidential campaign trail, and news of a professional peeping Tom in the south of France, much was lost on the American public concerning the strange and unexplained absence of Xi Jinping, the man in line to be the next president of China. Mr. Xi disappeared completely from public view on September 1^st, leaving only wanting pundits to explain what they thought might be reality. Think about it. Imagine if we lived in an ascendant country and our leader-in-waiting suddenly vanished from the public eye for longer than two weeks. Furthermore, imagine if we lived under a government that lacked any sense of transparency, and under which a freethinking blog post such as this one might warrant imprisonment, all the while the ruling elite might not proffer any explanation concerning our presumptive leader’s whereabouts. We’d be anxious, and the Chinese were last week. Anyways, the reason I bring this event up isn’t to inform the average American about global events (that’s their own responsibility and their newspaper’s job), but rather, I think the whole circus surrounding Xi’s absence provides a unique insight into the ways that China’s ruling elite attempt to visualize their control.

To give some sense of what the Chinese political machine was up against, it might be fun to quickly round up some of last week’s speculative headlines concerning Mr. Xi. On Tuesday, Jeremy Page reported in The Wall Street Journal that Xi was most likely suffering from “a back injury or a bout of illness.” On Wednesday, Malcolm Moore of the British daily The Telegraph reported that Xi had had a stroke. And by Thursday, The New York Times was reporting with some certainty that Xi had had a myocardial infarction. Later on Thursday, Mr. Xi’s nearly reappeared in the Chinese press when he made public condolences for some party members who passed away. This was the first mention of Mr. Xi in over two weeks, even though there was still no evidence of his existence. What gives? Xi Jinping is 59-years old, and it must be said that heart issues are not untypical of folks near that age. What is Beijing afraid of compromising with news that their future leader might be sick?

The article above was released on Thursday when Mr. Xi made his condolences.

(Image credit: http://www.gx.chinanews.com)

Xi Jinping reappeared in public for the first time in two weeks on Saturday, and he did nothing more than attend activities at China Agricultural University to mark this year’s National Science Popularization Day, according to the state news agency Xinhua. Xi made no comments at the event, and no explanation for the absence has been given since. I suspect that China’s Communist Party is determined to appear stolid throughout this issue for a couple of reasons. First, many of the news organs cited above have also frequently mentioned the fact that China’s Communist Party is currently rife with strife. Various factions within the Communist Party are competing to shape the party according to their wants, and this is clearly not something they’d like discussed. So, perhaps China’s determined to remain strong despite the fact that their future leader might be feeling quite the opposite. Secondly, in the Party’s dealings with public intellectuals such as Ai Weiwei (which I’ve posted about previously), they’ve at times appeared insecure about the stability of a modern Chinese state. They must know that they’re a rich minority when compared their 1.3 billion countrymen, and so an appearance of stability is probably meant to maintain their balancing act. In any case, it’s certainly auspicious that Xi Jinping’s already dealing with public relations questions before his term has even started. I suspect China will change greatly over the course of his presidency, and it’ll be interesting to see how the Communist Party adapts its image to cover the aspirations of a growing middle class.

"She lived happily on this earth for seven years": Ai Weiwei's Subversive Homages

ebfrye — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:00:46 +0000

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

After last week's posts examining representations of the aftermath of the events in Japan, I was especially taken by moving and controversial images from last night's Frontline piece tonight on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that devastated the Sichuan province.

Ai has come under intense scrutiny for speaking out against the Chinese government in recent years, and a studio that took him two years to build was torn down in January. The Frontline documentary by filmmaker Alison Klayman highlights many of his subversive actions and the ways in which he uses new media, particularly Twitter, to reach a broader audience and challenge the boundaries of censorship. Ai has advocated democracy in China and supported 2010 Nobel Prize recepient Liu Xiaobo (New York Times). Liu appears in the piece.

Image credit: Screenshot, pbs.org

Weiwei was particularly critical of the government refusal to take responsibility for what many viewed as flimsy construction of government housing and school buildings in the Sichuan province. After visiting the area and documenting its appearance, Ai was quite stunned by an image of children's backpacks (below):

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

In addition to surveying local survivors to document the number of deceased children and releasing those figures online, Ai a piece that functions as both an homage to the deceased children. The enormous installation covers a significant part of the exterior of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The backpacks spell out a statement made to Ai by a mother of one of the victims--"She lived happily on this earth for seven years."

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

I don't have an extended analysis to offer for any of these images, but I am struck by the potential of documentary image (and Ai's extensive record-keeping) both as a communicator of pathos and as essential to artistic process. Also worth noting is the ability of the everyday object, particularly in our commodity-driven cultures, to communicate when multiplied and poised in a certain context. Ai is often called the Chinese Andy Warhol, but his multiplication of a mass-produced item, here a backpack, still insists on a human attachment to the mechanically made. Rather than stop at criticizing mass production or inscribing it glamorous irony, Ai Weiwei insists on its dual ability to invoke destruction on a grand scale and evoke, without fully representing, the particular.

Documenting Need

Megan Eatman — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:00:48 +0000

Stefen Chow, The Poverty Line

Earlier this week, I tweeted about Stefen Chow's The Poverty Line, a collection of photographs that documents what an individual can buy with a daily wage of 3.28 yuan (49 cents), and here I want to draw more attention to this project and another like it. In documenting the choices one might face with this daily wage (significantly below the World Bank's poverty line, $1.25/day), Chow dramatizes the plight of the poor while staying within the language of economics and exchange.

Chow's photos are less sentimental than many documentary projects that focus on poverty; there are no crying children or hardened, starving adults. By constructing the viewer as the person confronted with this meager harvest, however, these photos do ask that we consider the daily frustration of making life or death decisions about how to handle limited resources. By making the limits of these funds visible, Chow also makes them real for viewers who might not be able to conceive of what living on 49 cents a day in China would look like.

A similar project by Jonathan Blaustein has a different origin and different rhetorical effects. The Lens blog on the New York Times website reports that Blaustein's The Value of a Dollar began when he realized that both the single and the double cheeseburger cost a dollar at his local fast food joint. The resulting project is a meditation on food as a commodity with a constructed value. The quantities represented are about what you would expect; Blaustein was able to purchase very few organic, early season blueberries and a lot of potted meat, ramen, and white bread, thereby supporting the thesis that it is often cheaper to buy processed food (although, notably, he was able to get a lot of grapefruit).

Jonathan Blaustein, The Value of a Dollar

Perhaps most interesting about this project is the composition; the photos set up the food items without packaging and isolated, with a white background, as if presenting them as art objects. Here, Blaustein's project differs most noticeably from Chow's. Where Chow places food on a newspaper and the viewer above, emphasizing the quotidian nature of this dilemma and allowing for easy comparisons between one food item and another, Blaustein plays with scale, sometimes making it difficult to ascertain how much of, for example, a Burger King side salad one can buy for a dollar.

While both artists ask their viewers to consider food as a commodity, their requests take strikingly different forms. In a pedagogical context, these images might be useful for discussing visual rhetoric and illustrating the argumentative different that subtle changes can make.