TRACES OF THE FUTURE

Beijing's Politics of Emergence

Yomi Braester

Lu Hao's installation Duplicated Memories (2008) presents two versions of Beijing. One, on the ground, is a large (about eighty square meters), backlit, contemporary transportation map of Beijing's Old City (see image on the cover of this volume). Another, hovering in the air, consists of Plexiglas maquettes of the Old City gates, most of which were demolished by the 1970s. Lu shows the past not as buried under the city, but rather as hovering above, a ghostly reminder that replicates, complements, and challenges the everyday practices of moving in the city. Lu, who had previously replicated the Tiananmen Gate as a Plexiglas fishbowl (Fish Bowl/Tiananmen, 1999), imagines the Old City gates not in concrete architectural terms but rather as shimmering artifacts that require the viewer to look up and away from the city map and renegotiate one's place in relation to the city and its double. When the installation moved to the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen in 2009, it was accompanied by video art projected around it, further duplicating the urban environment within additional media.

Lu's artwork is symptomatic of the discourse on Beijing's modernization since the late 1990s. The capital has undergone massive demolition, construction, and gentrification, and its skyline has been redefined by brand-name landmarks. The visitor to Lu's installation is asked to imagine Beijing's past, present, and future as defying the onslaught of material destruction and converging, in a remedial gesture, in collective memory. As in other quickly developing cities, a prevalent trope for representing Beijing and imagining its redemption is that of the palimpsest. Like erased ink surfacing onto scraped sheepskin of the palimpsest to show traces of earlier writings, goes the claim, so do earlier urban patterns affect citizens' perceptions of the present. The palimpsest is a tool for the spatialization of memory — that is, it places the passing of time within a narrative intelligible through reference to the transformation of space. By espousing the idea of the palimpsest, urban dwellers can easily anchor their identity in time and space, resulting in their empowerment as self-conscious subjects.

Although I acknowledge the transformative potential of the palimpsest and related metaphors, I propose that they can also manipulate collective memory by allowing the citizen to be subsumed by hegemonic formulations of subjectivity. The figure of the palimpsest seems on its face to offer a location-specific and historically coherent self, but in stressing the layering of time and space the metaphor is often employed to justify the fragmentation of experience and temporal disorientation, in effect introducing collective amnesia. This cover-up is motivated by capitalist interests and has immediate on-the-ground implications. The palimpsest adds a veneer of historical continuity that expedites the commodification of sites and their integration into neoliberal economy.

This chapter explores the ideological and material apparatuses of visualizing the historically layered city, as manifest in present-day Beijing. I start by historicizing the concept of spatial and temporal overlaying and eliciting its critical potential and fault lines. I use for a case study the reconstruction and gentrification of Beijing's Qianmen district in 2008 to show how street spectacles have redefined the temporal significance of the built environment. Buildings, billboards, and digital screens have formed contiguous media in the service of urban utopia. Mourning the disappearing cityscape, and the so-called culture of disappearance, is complemented by what I call the politics of emergence — celebrating new construction and projecting an anticipated future onto the perceived present. Urban discourse in the service of real estate developers fashions the city as a palimpsest bearing traces not only of the past but also, more importantly, of the future.

The implications for fashioning Beijing as a palimpsest bearing traces of the future are tangible and material. I have argued elsewhere that visual practices have accompanied urban development in China and shaped it. Texts, images, maps, and buildings coalesce in creating chronotopes — imaginary space-and-time frames for interpreting places and their historical significance (Braester 2010a). Screen cultures have facilitated the redaction of city plans, the redefinition of public spaces, and the reassessment of cultural heritage sites and political monuments.

Since 1949, Beijing has been imagined through various chronotopes that have fashioned its future as lying on its doorstep. The national and municipal governments have provided idealized images that prescribed the normative uses of space. To emphasize the urgent need for urban reform and the authorities' adequate response, plays and films have portrayed the change as taking place overnight, thereby skirting the painful process of demolition-and-relocation. The prescriptive chronotope and the chronotope of instantaneity, as I have called them, have been transformed more recently into the postspatial chronotope, which abolishes material space altogether by bringing social interaction to virtual environments and augmented reality. The temporal merging and telescoping implicit in these practices are now made more explicit. The conceptual matrix for Beijing's space-time in the twenty-first century, under the aegis of the politics of emergence, fashions the present as a placeholder for things to come. The protocols of engaging with public space are seen as the ghostlike effigy of what is yet to emerge. Current spatial practices can be understood only insofar as they are palimpsestic traces of a utopian future.

The discourse that identifies the urban texture as a palimpsest mummifies the past and fetishizes the future. The nostalgia for historical...