Wave Philosophy in China
* Book: China and the Wireless Undertow: Media and Wave Philosophy. By Anna Greenspan. Technicities: Edinburgh University Press. 2023
URL = https://annagreenspan.com/china-and-the-wireless-undertow
Contextual Quote
How will civilisation keep time with the machines it has built?
"Every few centuries, civilisation rewires itself. Venkatesh Rao calls these rewiring phases world-machines—vast systems that take roughly four hundred years to assemble before turning on in a single generation. The first modernity machine, built between 1200 and 1600, ran on trade, gunpowder, and the printing press. Its successor, the post-modernity machine of 1600–2000, ran on finance, industry, and computation.
That second machine is flickering to a stop. Its replacements—AI systems, algorithmic markets, digital archives—already run faster than any political or cultural clock can regulate. The result is a civilisation that feels perpetually out of time.
We are writing now because the new world-machine has just been switched on. It is no longer enough to study energy, capital, or intelligence; what demands invention is temporal governance itself. The question for our century is simple: how will civilisation keep time with the machines it has built?"
- Chor Pharn [1]
Description
"A cybernetically informed future-orientation recognizes that the world that is ‘to come’ is not straight ahead. This talk, which is based on my new book China and the Wireless Undertow: Media and Wave Philosophy (Technicities: Edinburgh University Press. 2023), explores not just a change in the future, but rather a shift in the notion of the future as such.
The book uses the idea or figure of the wave to reimagine the relationship between China and wirelessness. It focuses on waves of various scales, from the long slow rhythms of techno-cultural history to the high-speed frequencies of electro-magnetic machines, and argues that now, in the fifth long cycle of techno-capitalist time, with the rollout of fifth-generation cellular networks, these two kinds of waves, which occupy radically different frequencies, converge. It is within this fifth wave concurrence that China’s geopolitical rise has become increasingly intermeshed with the infrastructure of our wireless world.
The relationship between China and wireless media is thus determined by the confluence of two distinct temporalities. One is described by a cyclic theory, which postulates the ongoing rise and fall of K-waves that governs the rhythms of planetary technological, economic and geopolitical change. The other is the high-speed, non-human frequencies of electromagnetic vibrations, which form the material substrate of wirelessness. Our immersive media environment is constituted by imperceptible electromagnetic waves; a cosmic force, that is highly technological but at the same time wholly natural.
Time Waves contends that the empirical, concrete and phenomenal wave-like patterns of techno-capitalist history as well the media environment of electromagnetic vibrations are the expression of a deeper, more intrinsic reality, which is characterized by continuous wave-like change.
This cosmo-ontology of the wave was rigorously articulated by certain figures of Chinese thought
- Xiong Shili 熊⼗⼒ (1885–1968),
Tan Sitong 譚嗣同 (1865– 98),
Mou - Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909–95) - who turned to Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian ideas in their encounter technological modernity. Wave philosophy draws on these thinkers to imagine the cultivation of a future sentient city, the non-human agent of wireless media, tuning itself to the waves.
Anna Greenspan is associate professor of global contemporary media, NYU Shanghai."
More information
* Video lecture: Anna Greenspan: China and the Wireless Undertow Media as Wave Philosophy. Hanart Forum.
URL = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ap6iSPjrmo
- Anna Greenspan's website, https://www.annagreenspan.com