China and the Wireless Wave

China and the Wireless Wave Anna Greenspan In 1832 Michael Faraday wrote a secret letter to the Royal Society, which remained sealed for over a century. In it he wrote: I am inclined to compare the diffusion of magnetic forces from a magnetic pole to the vibrations upon the surface of disturbed water, or those of air in the phenomenon of sound’, i.e., I am inclined to think the vibratory theory will apply to these phenomena as it does to sound, and most probably to light. By the time Faraday’s letter was opened, Maxwell’s mathematical theorems and Hertz’s technological experiments had conclusively proved the existence of electromagnetic waves. We are immersed in an ocean of frequencies, as Faraday predicted, surrounded by vibrations that are beyond our perceptual capacities. *** At first Heinrich Hertz could see no practical purpose for his experiments. ‘It’s of no use whatsoever’, he is reported to have said, ‘this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there.’ A little over a hundred years later, wireless technology—from radio’s capacity to occupy the airwaves, to today’s mobile phone, a device that has been adopted throughout the planet faster than any machine in history—has involved an ever more intimate engagement with Hertzian frequencies. Today, the ‘mysterious waves’ that surround us but that ‘we cannot see’ serve as a carrier signal for the millions of ‘smart objects’ increasingly embedded in all aspects of life. *** The prehistory of wireless lies with the telegraph, a technology whose capacity to ‘separate communication from transportation’ enabled the sharing

of messages at nonhuman speeds. By transmitting time across distance, the telegraph solved the problem of global simultaneity and, with the invention of the instant, spawned the modern world. By the early twentieth century, electric veins of transmission permeated the body of the earth, wrapping it in a single technologically generated, standardized time. In 1967 global simultaneity fused with electromagnetic vibrations. It was then that the International Committee for Weights and Measures ceased to define the second as a micro-division of the seasonal year and established an atomic description, which tied the second to the rate of electromagnetic transitions in the hyperfine structure of the cesium-133 atom. From then on, time was determined by the designation for frequency: hertz (or cycles per second). Today, the locative omnipresence of wireless devices ensures global synchrony through the GPS system, arguably the cell phone’s killer app. GPS requires satellites with onboard atomic clocks accurate to within a billionth of a second. The drive for ever-greater temporal precision is vital for AI systems such as self-driving cars, automated weapons, and the growing field of augmented reality. With this, as William Gibson foresaw in Spook Country, comes the ‘everting’ of cyberspace such that the ‘grid’ now envelops the whole of the earth. Computation unfolds outward, escaping the limits of the machine, as the world crosses over to the other side of the screen. *** Since the 1980s—the retrochronic date for the first generation of cellular systems—the ongoing transmission of wireless media has been concurrent with China’s remarkable rise. While the telegraph was viewed as an alien invader, by the time electric communication went wireless, China was deeply embedded in the wave of technocapitalist innovation that now ripples across the globe. The dramatic pace of this sociotechnological mutation reaches its fullest expression in the megacity of Shenzhen, on China’s Southern coast, where most of the world’s cell phones are produced. Shenzhen has combined its role as factory to the world with a ‘shanzhai’ street commerce, which emerged from the in-between cracks of the global economy. Plummeting prices combined with a distribution network of unprecedented scale and speed to create a hub of global electronic production. The markets clustered

at Huaqiangbei overflow with wireless devices: phones, wearables, sensors and circuits. Cheap versions of the latest smart object flow from the rising metropolis, out to every corner of the planet. *** The clock was invented in China, but it was not until centuries later, when it was rediscovered in Europe, that it transformed into what Lewis Mumford would call ‘the key machine of the modern industrial age’. This cultural divergence in the fate of the mechanical clock is an example of the Needham question—the name that has crystalized around the still lingering problem of the ultimate compatibility between Chinese culture and modern technology. In his densely detailed tome Science and Civilization in China, Joseph Needham asked how a place famous for the four great inventions (si da fa ming)—compass, gunpowder, paper, and print—could have faltered in the modern period such that it was ‘totally overtaken by the exponential rise in the West after the birth of modern science at the Renaissance’.1 In China, reaction to this ‘great divergence’ has been polarized. On one side is a determined resistance to ‘foreign’ technology (from the Boxers tearing up telegraph poles to the Great Firewall and the censorship of cyberspace). On the other is a belief, most forcefully expressed in the May Fourth Movement, but still prevalent in the internet politics of today, that in order to modernize, China must Westernize. Both tendencies are deeply entangled in the late Qing intellectual strategy, which mobilized the ancient cosmic dualism ti/yong (essence/use), in order to create a barrier that would separate Chinese cultural and intellectual heritage from the practices of a modern techno-scientific world. *** Twentieth-century New Confucianism seeks to synthesize an abstract, reinvented tradition with an emergent modernity. Xiong Shili, one of the movement’s founders, turned to Buddhism, and insisted on the nonseparation of ti and yong. The apparent division between a culture’s essence and its practice, he argued, was a delusion born of attachment. ‘Just as the water in the ocean is manifested as waves, ti is like the deep and still sea and yong like the continuous rise and fall of its many waves.’

Xiong’s most famous book Xin Weishi Lun (A New Treatise on Consciousness-Only) fuses Yogacara Buddhism with the continuous transformation described in China’s most ancient classic, the Yijing (or I Ching). For Xiong, China’s best hope in facing the alien world that had arrived on its shores was a return to the cosmo-ontology of the wave. Implicitly influenced by the ambient electric frequencies that were everywhere around him, Xiong saw in the ‘uninterrupted flash upon flash of lightning’ the ceaseless ancient pulsation of contraction (xi) and expansion (pi), generation and extinction, that is the essence, Ultimate Reality or Original Body of the Ten Thousand Things. Xiong’s disciple Mou Zongsan pushed the project of integrating Chinese tradition with modernity even further through an engagement with Immanuel Kant. Using the conceptual language of Chinese Buddhism, he translated all three of Kant’s critiques. Mou’s aim was to show that Chinese thought offered a path beyond the limits of reason, opening a gate to what Kant deemed impossible: intellectual intuition, or access to the thing-in-itself. Mou held that this practical, rather than theoretical knowledge was contained within the Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist tradition. He likened the awakening they promised to a vibrational event. In describing these vibrations, Mou turns to a calendric event. In early spring, around the fifth of March, when the sun reaches 365 degrees, the Chinese nongli (or agriculture calendar) shifts into the third of its twenty-four solar periods. This marks the beginning of jingzhe (the awakening of the insects) when the buzzing reverberations signal nature’s renewal and the wavelike reccurrence of time. *** Both the Wifi Alliance, which aims to ‘connect everyone and everything’, and China’s own GPS-like satellite system Beidou, chose as their symbol the undulating image of Yin/Yang. The logo—the most famous diagram of Chinese thought—resonates with the wireless wave at a variety of scales— from the techno-capitalist wax and wane of historical time to the microtemporal electromagnetic frequencies, through the myriad vibrations of our now ubiquitous mobile devices that grow ever more immersive, autonomous and smart. In tapping into the electromagnetic field that is everywhere around us, wireless media operates as the underlying abstract

infrastructure of our cyborgian existence. Beyond their role as communication devices, these censors and circuits effectuate a ‘cosmological revelation’, trafficking in frequencies that we cannot directly perceive. This vibratory plane hosts a myriad of nonhuman sentient agents, which increasingly constitute the invisible, abstract, alien atmosphere that Faraday, long ago, secretly foresaw. NOTES 1. J. Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West [1969] (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005), 285.