Mckenzie Wark
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new formations NUMBER 10 SPRING 1990 McKenzie Wark VECTORS OF MEMORY . SEEDS OF FIRE THE WESTERN MEDIA AND THE BEIJING DEMONSTRATIONS The People have lost the confidence of the Government. The Government has decided to dissolve the People and appoint another one. (Bertold Brecht) Our basic goal, to build socialism, is correct, but we are still trying to figure out what socialism is and how to build it. (Deng Xiaoping) 1 AT PRESENT TENSE Dateline: Beijing, 27 May 1989. Things at present are tense: this is more than a demonstration by workers and students - it is a carnival. For a few intense, electric seconds, Beijing has become the only city on earth, oscillating in a thrall of political furies, a teeming slo-mo dance relayed via satellite around the globe. Beijing is 'on' and the whole world is watching. I write of these things in the present tense, for now that the spectacle of the Beijing demonstrations is recorded and relayed around the world, it will always take place in the present tense of media memory. Taut images from this wild scenario will now always be present, ready and waiting to be replayed, over and over. I try to capture some of the densely pixilated images that are present here and now, reeling between the lines. Beijing student demonstrations sometimes take on the appearance of a global positive feedback loop: a few thousand students demonstrate at Tiananmen; foreign journalists report it; Voice of America radio relays that report and amplifies it, saying that hundreds of thousands of students demonstrated; students pick up the broadcast, and while many of them are suspicious of the American version of the event, it rings truer than the Chinese press reports, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That, in a stylized form at least, is pretty much what happened in 1987, when the anniversary of the death of Zhou Enlai became the pretext for students to lay wreaths at the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square, and demonstrations snowballed vainly and bravely until the police stepped in. 'Even if these disturbances had been more widespread,' Deng Xiaoping told Noboru Takeshita shortly afterwards, 'they would have no effect on the foundations of our state or on the policies we have established.'1 That may be so. The powers ranged against the students are enormous. Yet in spite of all that, they have managed to turn the monumental power of Tiananmen Square and the moral force of communist ideology against itself, and to plug the staging of their demonstrations into the global media at a level unprecedented for a popular movement in the Chinese socialist state. This is a politics of 'detournement', of turning a space and an ideology against itself. It belongs to what Greil Marcus calls a secret history of modern times, enacted as what official history sublimates or excludes: the possibility of its own negation.2 2 THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY Tiananmen Square is a sacred space, a holy space of mythic proportions, and to understand why it is the focus for so many demonstrations is to delve into the many layers of monumentality that are Beijing, one of the world's most ancient capitals. Despite movements towards reconstruction and deconstruc tion, despite all of the attempts by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to change their symbolic and quotidian functions, the basic grid of the city and the major sites of historical memory, in Aldo Rossi's term, 'persist'.3 The only way to describe Beijing for someone who has never seen it is to say that it looks like Brazilia, Washington, or Canberra - not as they appear now, but as they will look in one thousand years' time. The central axis of Beijing passes through the 'Forbidden City', formerly the palace of the emperor. To the north is an artificial hill, the only hill in this otherwise completely flat city. To the south of the walled Forbidden City lies Tiananmen Gate, and further south again Qianmen Gate, both of which formerly had a symbolic and processional function. Only the emperor entered the Forbidden City through these gates. There were other gates for other visitors: the northern gate, for example, was for military officers, as the north was the direction the barbarians came from. The Forbidden City is now a museum. The exterior of the palaces and temples has been 'restored'. Yet while the palace is no longer forbidden and has been opened to the public, the space immediately to the west of it, Zhongshan Park, has been closed, and forms a new Forbidden City for the new rulers of the old empire. The CPC did not abandon the site of symbolic power, it moved in next door. The space in front of Tiananmen Gate had become cluttered with shops and stalls, and these were all cleared away. A vast square was created between Tiananmen and Qianmen gates. On the east side of the square the Great Hall of the People was built, and on the west side a museum. Thus if one mounts the hill to the north of Forbidden City and looks to the south, one can see a symmetrical arrangement of the old imperial palace and the gates, with Zhongshan Park and the Great Hall just to the east of the axis, and the Workers' Cultural Palace and the museum to the west. Simon Leys (also known as Pierre Ryckmans) wrote some devastating criticism of the CPC's architectural appropriation of Beijing. In Beijing stands one monument that more than any other is a dramatic 2 NEW FORMATIONS symbol of the Maoist rape of the ancient capital: the Monument to the People's Heroes. This obelisk, more than a hundred feet high, the base of which is adorned with margarine bas-reliefs, would by itself be of no particular note if it were not for the privileged place it has, exactly in the centre of the vista from Qianmen Gate to Tiananmen Gate. A good sneeze, however resonant, is not remarked upon in the bustle of a busy railway station, but things are somewhat different if the same explosion occurs in a concert hall at just the most exquisite and magical point of a musical phrase. In the same way, this insignificant granitic phallus receives all its enormous significance from the blasphemous stupidity of its location. In erecting this monument in the centre of the sublime axis that reaches from Qianmen to Tiananmen, the designers' idea was, of course, to use to advantage the ancient imperial planning of that space, to take over to the monument's advantage that mystical current, which, carried along rhythmically from city gate to city gate, goes from the outside world to the Forbidden City, the ideal centre of the universe.4 Leys's brilliant description misses two points: first, besides being an emotional energy field, this monumental space is also a transmitter, a transmitter of information, information coded in the massive redundancy of the symmetrical arrangement and repetition of massive forms.5 It is a transmitter tuned to the frequencies of monumental time, to the long duration. It is built to last. Secondly, while the CPC may have intended this symmetry as a massive affirmation of its power and culture, it has also created a powerful transmitter for quite other kinds of messages. Its original design tuned it to the frequency of monumental time, but as such it has already been turned into an image of all that it stands for, an image which can be broadcast on the quite different frequency of the media spectacle. It is this double transmitter that the demonstrators have learned to appropriate as a channel for their own messages. Messages that will be transmitted down the long duration of monumental time, the time of martyrdom and memory; but messages that will also be transmitted over the extensive, momentary network of saturation presence.6 They are playing a double game with the signs and signifying practices of the revolutionary tradition and of a regime that has appropriated that tradition, reinterpreting those signs, turning them over upon themselves, sending them out into other space and forward into the future. Their demonstration against the policies and practices of the regime is taking place on exactly the same site as the demonstrations the regime used to organize in its own honour, such as the giant Cultural Revolution era rallies, drilled and organized for days in advance.7 But where serried ranks of Red Guards would line up in front of the reviewing stands built on top of Tiananmen Gate, for quasi-religious ceremonies presided over by Mao and Lin Biao, the demonstrators of today sit or stand with their backs to the old reviewing stand, facing in the exact opposite direction. Rather than facing the reviewing stand outside of their mass, the demonstrators focus inwards, lacing the Monument to the People's Heroes in the centre of the square. The leadership of the movement and the hunger strikers cluster around the two- VECTORS OF MEMORY. SEEDS OF FIRE 3 tiered podium of the monument, self-consciously presenting themselves as martyrs in the making. The whole composes itself as a televisual image, and, given the degree of support, sympathy, and advice some members of the Chinese media gave to some of the students, this is no accident. The regime's own expertise in organizing spectacles is here on display, for quite other purposes. 3 THE OPEN DOOR AND THE OPEN CHANNEL There have been demonstrations like this before. In 1976, the funeral of Zhou Enlai unleashed a demonstration of popular sentiment against the Gang of Four.