So we're gonna, we'll let Nick Land speak and then we'll open it up to a conversation. What do you want to do with us tonight? Just hang on for a minute. There's only three things, so like five minutes and it doesn't matter. Are you going to be still there? Is this working? Yeah.
Welcome everybody. After the lucidity and erudition of Jeff's discussion, I see my basic role here as throwing everything into howling chaos. And I will try to do that by complicating the way we talk about the future. There's basically three things that I'm going to be hurtling through in this 15 minute. time related notions that I think are definitely relevant to the kind of things that Jeff's been talking about the things that I hope we're going to be able to discuss later which is the notion
of time spiral the notion of time dilation and the notion sorry I think better to say time modernization and the notion of absolute futurism but before starting on that very quickly I just want to add a few elements of context starting with where Jeff ended us with the movie looper I don't know how many people have seen it I definitely think people interested in the sort of topics that would have brought you here tonight I strongly recommend you do see it regardless of the your eventual judgment about the quality of the movie it's definitely interesting for questions about Shanghai and about time it is a co-production
which has allowed it to get past the normal restrictions on the amount of foreign movies in the country it has that kind of deep institutional relations Shanghai it has amazing Shanghai futuristic scenes and it's obviously a time travel movie. So I won't say much about it now except just a few very quick pointers that maybe are things we might want to return to. As a time travel movie, there's a perfect narrative structure to a time travel movie which conforms to what physicists call a closed time loop, sorry, a closed time-like like curve that's the same time there's one time it goes right round in the
circle things only happen once if things go back in time it's just to make things happen the way they always happen now that movie doesn't do that it's glitched it's glitched very clearly probably as subtly as they thought they could get away with and make sense but it's still glitched and and so it deviates quite explicitly from being a closed time like curve it becomes something else maybe we might want to talk about what exactly it becomes. But the loop in so far as it exists is between the world of 2044 and 2074. The most fantastic Shanghai scenes I guess towards the end of that time are 2074 Shanghai where it's being portrayed as the city of the future. And this too is a concept, the city of the
future. It's a to me a very interesting idea and it's something I hope we can get back to you okay I think I'm not keeping up with my time promises I'm just gonna start gabbling extremely fast and become totally incompatible I just really fast three quick contextual elements one of them is a show that was held at the skyscraper museum in New York in 2010 called China prophecy Shanghai Anna has actually written about it. There was also a review in the Wall Street Journal, which I thought had an interesting title which was the city of the future echoes the past. It
was very clear that talking about what's happening in Shanghai took people into this strange set of questions about about time the pictures up here are my other piece of context I think I'm mostly going to hope that we can get back to that I think the only thing I'm going to try and really point to at the moment is I think these two buildings are kind of twins I hope people see that there's something going on between them they're talking to each other obviously the first one is the Park Hotel built in 1934 the second one is the Jim Mautau built in 1999 it's understandable that the Jim Mautau might be referencing the Park Hotel for the
Park Hotel to be predicting anticipating prophesying the Jim Mautau is a more interesting issue okay last piece of context is art decad that's something people shouldn't talk about fast it's something that people can get irate about actually people sometimes describe it as an illegitimate architectural category I think it will suffice as a as a fuzzy concept for basic trends in Shanghai modernist architecture and there are several things that are very interesting about it I'll just hope a couple
one is that the concept itself art deco is extremely retrospective it's based on a expo actually held in Paris in 1922 and it was only floated as a widely accepted historical architectural concept in 1968 so it was extremely retrospective people starting to study about art deco looking back at this particular French exposition of design and architecture as telling us something about a certain important theme in modernist architecture. One more thing. The other thing I think has to be said about it, two more things.
One of them is that it's looking forward and looking backward at the same time not at all accidentally and there's several things people point to they point to Aztec architecture various things like that obviously one extremely crucial reference is the discovered tomb of Tutankhamun that was discovered in 1922 and immediately there was a Tutankhamun exhibition in France in the same year and this had a huge influence and so that at the same time that Art Deco which didn't yet have that name was describing a modern style and it was looking back to the deep past and a past so deep that it could only have
been discovered in modern time the modernity had allowed an access to the past and that past in itself become part of the way that that modernity chose to depict itself and the way that the styles that it thought naturally expressed an ultra modernity so this complicated time looping is something that I think Art Deco has in its heart. One final thing quickly on Art Deco is I think it's helpfully contrasted with what we all take as the dominant the popo and architectural expression modernism is the international style now the international style begins with an ideology it begins with a strong idea about what architecture should be art deco as I say this retrospective it's
intuitive it's inarticulate something happened long before people decided to say what it was that had happened and I think that difference is extremely crucial and it's extremely crucial that the international style has totally dominated our sense of what modernism is and it's only with a certain crisis of that accepted sense of modernity and modernism that we're able to look back and excavate this art deco modernity which was happening which was building things which was reflecting a sensibility which was defining modernity but was not articulated in that high theoretical programmatic ideological sense.
Okay, I'm going to try and pick up speed because I know I'm stretching my limits on this already. So I'm actually now starving. And as I say, three basic points. So the first one, the notion of a time spiral. Now I really am going to be much quicker about this than I'd like to be. I think it's a fascinating thing. It's very suggestively raised in the book that I'm sure you've come across, which is called Oracle Poems, A Journey Between Chinese Past and Present, published in 2006 by Peter Hessler. and the start of that book he has an absolutely beautiful old historical diagram of Chinese history done as a spiral he explicitly talks about us the
time spiral he raises the whole thing very suggestively and it obviously ties with the themes Oracle bones because these Oracle bones just as I was saying about the two town come with they are an even more extreme example of this they were discovered in 1899 right at the end of the 19th century so at the beginning of what we see as the absolutely classical modernist core period and yet they are opening a new antiquity and they themselves are obviously prophetic writings they're aiming to the future and so in this discovery of the Oracle bones there's another time loop being created I mean something has been
discovered in the deep past and that deep past is something that was already reaching out in its own way to the future so the notion of a time spiral I strongly predict has a very good future I think it's extremely powerful notion and it resolves something extremely fundamental because it allows you to avoid the choice between cyclic and progressive time obviously that is that opposition choosing between the time that is basically cyclical and traditional and a time that is progressive and modern has been enormously influential it's been very colloquial and popular it's not been
something dependent upon a high level of theoretical articulation it seemed very natural to people and especially in China it's had an extremely important role if you look at the key episodes of Chinese modernist ideology they very much tended to articulate themselves in these terms if you look at the major fourth movement it definitely said we must go for Western progressive time and escape our own stagnant cyclical time if you go forward from that to the cultural revolution the same basic sense that by destroying the past and affirming a progressive notion of time one is therefore on a path of modernization so
this notion of rejection of cyclical time is the same thing as modernization has been extremely important concept I would say both in the West going back a long way it's even used as a way of articulating different between an Ibrahamic religion which is historical and progressive and pagan ancient a historical cyclical religion or between industrial and rural types of social organization obviously a time spiral doesn't force you into that alternation a time spiral is something that is simultaneously progressive and cyclical so just quickly one more thing on time spirals is just to say that if you see modernization in the west and the east as an attempt to escape
cyclical time there's a deep irony in the sense that the faster and more extremely it tries to enter into a form of accelerated progressive time the more insistently cyclicity returns it returns in the form of the pattern of the very notion of accelerated change when mathematically expressed takes a non linear form it's expressed by the fact that the industrial economy tends to form self exciting loops the notion of a robotic robot factory perfectly captures that. The fact that the economy as it modernizes and becomes autonomous
starts producing cyclical effects that then get studied retrospectively, business cycles, long waves, these new type of cyclical phenomena. The fact that the most emblematic form of intellectual expression of modernist thought is basically cybernetic nonlinear types of thinking, looking at self-stimulating auto catalytic system systems that are loops that are spirals that are circling upon themselves and and obviously as we've seen in science fiction again the kind of archetypal form of hyper modernistic literature there is this attraction to the notion of a time loop and the notion back into a notion of cyclical time okay I'm going to doubly accelerate now because I've still got two
quick things I want to get through time modernization and there's all kinds of ways if you ask the basic question how do you know something's futuristic is because you're tracking a trend and it seems to be up ahead on that trend so what are these trends there's all kinds of useful examples we could use I'll just start with two or take two that are relevant to us because they're time based the first one is to do with the depth of history we've already seen with Tutankhamun, we've already seen with the Oracle Bones, this superficially paradoxical fact that modernity actually advances deeper into the past, that tracks on a very neat curve. Everybody knows that in the West the traditional
age of the earth is less than 6,000 years old. If you want to see the details the Jewish calendar tells you exactly 5,773 years and that actually starts one year before the creation of the world and by 1779 Buffon had said that it was 75,000 years old 1862 Kelvin was saying something between 20 to 400 million years old 1920s which is the period that I'm kind of wanting to concentrate on it's It had already decided that the world was a few billion years old. So modernity is dilating time extensively. It's not just moving you forward, it's moving you into a deeper and deeper sense of time.
It's also an intensive exploration of time. If you follow the history of clocks, which you've already seen, Jeff was already talking about clocks. There's a very clear curve again about time resolution. It's not only moving into deep time, it's also intensively resolving time. Again the curve is extremely closed. Mechanical clockwork in the West, the basic technology had been found elsewhere. China's got a very interesting history of the development of these basic technological advances. But there's a very continuous lineage of chronological development in the West
beginning in the early years of the Renaissance where a clock no way was it close to being able to resolve a second. Pendulum clocks didn't start appearing until the second half of the 17th century. The real question of marine, sorry, time accuracy began with marine chronometry and John Harrison won the prize for the marine chronometer with a clock that was capable of losing sorry I should have written this this date down less than five seconds in so I might be a little bit off on this I had a problem with my printer and I'm trying to remember this my memory five seconds I think in two weeks it is well that's the rough order anyway. Quartz oscillators, quartz clocks came in in our
period 1920s. They started off no better than the Harrison's clock actually but eventually they got to an accuracy that's something like 10 seconds a year. Atomic clocks one second every 300 million years. In 2008 a quantum logic clock accurate to one second in a billion years. So you can see the curve of that process. That is modern time understood on its intensive aspect. To be futuristic on one level is simply moving into this bigger expanse of time. You're discovering the continuity of the timeline, but it's deeper, it's bigger, it's more specific, it's more refined than you imagine.
So part of what it is, if you're saying, well what does it really mean to me, what kind of prediction about the future are you making, time has always dilated in the future, it's become bigger, it's become more specific. So we want to talk about the future and the future. I can tell you that the future will be more advanced and more detailed. Okay, this is it finally now. Sorry about this everybody. I know I abused your whatever it is. Thank you. No, no, sorry, I'm still getting up. Five more minutes at most. I'm sorry about this. There is pure futurism. Yeah, yeah, absolute future really quickly. Look, everyone's familiar with the relative future.
That's what people think the future is. Past, present, future. The future is what isn't the present or the past. I won't go into that any further, it's obvious to people. The best way I think to get into a notion of what an absolute future might be like is to start with now, you know the present. The future is defined as being something that's beyond the present, what is the present? Actually that's extremely complicated. What is now? It can't be a point, a point that has no duration, it's not time. time. It can't be a minimal unit of time because thanks to modernity our notion of what a minimal unit of time is is actually pretty mind-bending. It's the time it takes for a photon to cross a Planck length and that is 5.39 times 10
to the minus 44 seconds. Now I'm not a maths geek and I don't know how many maths geeks there are out there. I don't really quite get what 5.39 times 10 to the minus 44 seconds is. So I tried to actually kind of thrash it out a little bit. A trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second is still more than 10 million Planck time units. It's interesting that if you look at the number of seconds since the beginning of the universe, that's 4 times 10 to the 17th. That means if we take, which I think is realistic, now as we intuitively understand it, it's about a second. if you say what time is it now if you get it to a second you're feeling pretty good for yourself that now is vastly
closer to the age of the universe than it is to a Planck time unit vastly vastly vastly several trillions times trillions times so basically I think it's useful to just take it look now clearly it's not an instant nothing like an instant it's a scale-free concept. You know, we've got our own biological cognitive capabilities that make us think now is roughly a second. In doing so, we're just in our own little primate world. An instant, as we know, is 10 to the minus 44 orders of magnitude below that. Go the whole way.
Say now is the age of the universe. You really, you're not far off. it doesn't make any difference, that's just 17 orders of magnitude. So my now is the age of the universe. Absolute future is what is still not yet, if now is the age of the universe. So, even in this extreme case, the absolute future is not outside time, but it is exposed as the edge of the outside of time. connecting to the present but never absorbed into it or converted into it. That absolute future never becomes the present by waiting long enough. If you want to wait to the end of the universe you've got nowhere near it that waited long enough.
It belongs to history rather than metaphysics because it is effectively on the greater tracks towards which things tend. Okay sorry just one more. Two more sentences. Two more sentences and I really promise to shut up. So the proposal of that is that Shanghai Art Deco, perhaps Art Deco in general, and Shanghai Modernism in general, inclines towards an absolute future. Insofar as it days it does it weirdly and not by the straightforward exhaustion of a projected future through absorption into the present and near the past. Okay, I really will shut up now. Okay, thanks everyone. My question really is one for both of you. Why architecture? Why is time and modern always decline?
Benjamin says that architecture is a mass meeting, that it is always consumed in a state of distraction. Is this the reason why architecture is chosen to always talk about the future in a sense? Or does it have to do with regimes, does it have to do with money, does it have to do with space? It's one of the oldest media, certainly, that human beings have ever devised. I don't know, for both of you. Architecture, I first just want to say that I think that's a really fascinating question. I mean, why is it that we trust architecture so much to define our sense of historical periodicity, epoch?
An architectural definition provides a kind of solidity to that, that nothing else seems to quite do. I think it's really important. I just say about that that I think we've really got a spectrum. You know, people can vary about what they put on the two ends of their spectrum. I mean, to be slightly parodic, maybe to have theology at one end and the most base form of commercial interaction and leap up to people's imagination at the other end. And architecture is in the middle actually I think in raising especially tend to just look at the top with architecture at the bottom of the spectrum very interesting you know why not music why not mathematics why not philosophy why not the sciences why
architecture but we can look the other way and say well you know it's architecture rather than you know architecture is a material production and we look at architecture rather than we look at popular products rather than we look at the forms of commercial transaction that were prevalent in the particular EPOP and I think when you look at it on that scale it begins to make more sense. Hi, so I want to thank both of you for coming. Actually my question is pretty much based on what you were just saying. I wanted to ask you about architecture especially compared to Dubai which Dr. Watterstrom you're also mentioning. I found it interesting that just China and Dubai
both kind of represent the future in terms of aesthetic, but are still sort of not quite modern in terms of socio-political structure. And in what terms, how do you see those two? One question here. Sorry, can I just have one quick thing about this? Rather than play devil's efficacy, Jeff, I'll just be the devil and just say, I'm not at all confident about where we get this notion about what is socio-politically futuristic. I think we should learn a lot about our experience with Soviet science fiction and that definitely had a very strong sense of what was socio-politically futuristic. All aliens capable of interstellar
transport were going to be communists and now I'm sure there's some people who still think that's true I require a little bit more support for that and I think that looking and taking that example we should be a bit more careful about sense about what is inevitably progressive in the strict neutral moral free sense of just being where we're going to be then maybe is implied by some of that You mentioned that in the expo there was more of a national statement as opposed to being a statement of Shanghai as a futuristic city. And my question was how do you think that national identity will be playing in the development and the future of Shanghai?
Because when you mention Beijing, I mean it's very Chinese and it's going to very much develop in that, in the promotion of the Chinese culture and Chinese spirit. But when you look at Shanghai, sort of the history of it is from the get-go, sort of a mixture of different cultures and different nations. And there's also sort of this link to trying to be a bit more like Hong Kong, I think, which is dissociated from China. Shanghai is still very much Chinese, so how do you view Shanghai's future incorporating Chinese identity? I think this question lures us into such profound political incorrectness that I'm going to be very cautious about it.
But I think Shanghai is the capital of a very distinctive world culture that is Chinese, maritime, cosmopolitan, commercially oriented, that is related very, very strongly to Hong Kong. Between, in the golden age of Shanghai, people move between Hong Kong and Shanghai extremely smoothly and fluidly. There's the role of the comprador influence from Guangdong in Shanghai in the golden age is extremely large. So there is a whole cultural sphere that Shanghai is the natural center of gravitational pull. And obviously there is a complicated political tension
between how much that culture is able to express itself without disturbing other structures of power power and I think that's going to be the big game that everyone's going to see playing out in the future. I agree that it's very related actually and I think I'm taking another few steps into the ocean of political incorrectness I can feel immediately but I think if we go back to the beginning of opening and reform in China and the basic moves that Deng Xiaoping made there. Obviously a huge
amount of that is playing off very carefully this relationship between the autonomy of certain regions and the overall sense of Chinese national integrity which was seen as the big achievement of the 1949 revolution and and the new China. So if you now go to Guangdong, and you look at what's happening in Shenzhen, and you see the relationship to Hong Kong there, the whole thing is on a very, I wouldn't say high wire in the sense of trying to over dramatize the fragility of it, I think it's actually quite robust. But on a kind of ideological and public level, it is quite delicate in the sense that obviously the steps forward have been made
by actually formalized sense of producing this very strong sense of autonomy in certain regions so they can actually express their own potentiality. So the future of Shanghai is very much in exactly the same fact. There is not gonna be a Shanghai SAR officially, But I honestly think a lot of people really are looking at something that would be that, but not explicitly. Because if you look at the plans, there's a Shanghai 2020 plan that involves complete globalization of the Shanghai financial system in a way that makes no sense. Unless there is a massive amount of autonomous economic decision making taking place in this city.
and I think that this is obviously you know the whole question sorry I won't go on about this it's an extremely interesting question but I'll just say one more thing which is just to say I think that if one is going to be really stereotypical and look at these east west differences one of them is that I think westerners really if they have some big thing going on they have to shout it from the rooftops I honestly don't think that's a Chinese characteristic I think they'd rather get something dumb and be discreet about it then make a big fuss and that thing not happen so I think much more is going to happen than perhaps Westerners saying hey why aren't you shouting this from the rooftops are going to be happy with you
know I think I think that the kind of things people at Westerners are going to want to hear people say or declare or whatever protest about I think that that But that is not necessarily what we should be looking at. And we should be looking more about things getting done in a way that is polite, that is safe to face, that is discreet, that is practical and pragmatic. But will still actually be hugely important to making the city fulfilled its potential. When he said that he was very...
What we see today in Pudong is the result, the future we see as a word, the result of a certain type of decisions on a political level. And my first observation would be, isn't it strange that the two people that were mayor of Shanghai, the 80s, Jiang Zemin and Tsunoji, later became the leaders of the country in the 90s in order to build up Shanghai. So Shanghai has been decided upon via Shanghai to Beijing and back. This is the first one. The second one relates to financing and economy. And as I understand, time is very relative, but I find it quite ironic that both the Park Hotel, when it was built, Thomas Tower of Shanghai, was built amidst a global economic crisis. Currently, the Shanghai Tower, the long side, which is going to be 630 meters height, another race for the sky,
is also being completed amongst the global economic crisis. So actually, could it be that Shanghai's future won't be shined as brighter because the rest of the world is in Shams? The observation about skyscrapers' economic crisis is something that I think has become an indicator people have seized upon generally. it's it's it's in a way predictable in the sense that of course you reach for the sky just as about the sky is gonna cave in I think all that I would say about that is the fact that you know if you look at the development of any economy that is now seen as meteoric it's punctuated by crises I mean the
notion that you're going to just keep up on a smooth curve without some serious crunching I think even without reading Schumpeter and of course I advise everyone to reach him but it's not gonna happen you know creative destruction is is the way the future happens and so I wouldn't be to wait if we're talking about 2074 I wouldn't be thrown off of being by the fact that 2009 was at 2012 was looking a bit gloomy. I think I'll stop it there. I'd like to thank Du Ling again for... Jeffrey Pond-Milassane. I definitely need to build this transcription before.
this series continues on November 2nd with Fuchsia Dunlop and Austin Hu talking about the culinary arts and we will continue throughout the course of the year talking about architecture cinema Buddhism and other things so technology Shenzai so please join us and thank you all for coming Yeah, thank you for amazing, fascinating questions.