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Chinese Urban
Shi-nema
Cinematicity, Society and
Millennial China
David H. Fleming · Simon Harrison

Chinese Urban Shi-nema
“Fleming and Harrison have produced a deftly-written psychogeography of the

contemporary Chinese city. The authors peel back the skin of the city to reveal
urbanscapes unfamiliar even to long-term residents of Ningbo, but nonetheless
exhilarating. These observations are underpinned by a theory of the screen that is
compelling to the reader in its articulation of a concept that here is inter-woven
with motifs and ideas that draw on Chinese culture. For all those who seek
insights from the collision of screens, global capitalism and contemporary Chinese
urban culture, there is no more sure-footed guide than Fleming and Harrison’s
impressive book.”
—Andrew White, Independent Scholar and author of Digital
Media & Society (Palgrave Macmillan 2014)
David H. Fleming • Simon Harrison
Chinese Urban
Shi-nema
Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China
David H. Fleming Simon Harrison
University of Stirling City University of Hong Kong
Stirling, UK Hong Kong, China
ISBN 978-3-030-49674-6 ISBN 978-3-030-49675-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Mira, the captain of our ship, in memory of our adventures in Ningbo
DHF
For 陈星超, for making the city in this book a place to call home
SH
Preface
Getting Started: And Learning from Our Students

With rapid changes in technology Chinese society has transformed radically…
(Anonymised UNNC Student Essay 2012, p. 1)
After spending the best part of a decade marking Chinese undergradu-

ate and master’s work at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China
(UNNC), we have each encountered many thousands of essays that began
with a riff on the line reproduced as our epigraph. Various modulating
iterations of which were invariably jerry-rigged to introduce a throng of
Arts and Humanities and Social Science arguments on a wide range of
subjects spanning: the rapid modernisation of Chinese urban infrastruc-
ture, the appearance of luxury shopping malls populated by foreign stores
and brands, the spread and acceleration of the internet, smartphone use,
social media apps and new-fangled ways of acting, living, viewing and
spending. These were what most Chinese students were naturally inclined
to write about. And while the vagueness and derivativeness of such open-
ing lines have—on the odd occasion—admittedly frustrated the marker,
when we retroactively reflect upon the sheer volume of these mantra-like
statements we have parsed, it now speaks to us as a general truism, or gen-
erational zeitgeist, indexing a shared impression that no doubt remains
very real to a vast number of young people growing up in China today.
With hindsight one particular dissertation exploring the “becoming-
image” of Chinese culture under capitalism stands out as an illustrative
case in point, and can help us here to gesture towards the core themes of
vii
viii PREFACE
the current project. This was a visual anthropology master’s project that
was authored by a student that had undertaken an internship in a reassur-
ingly expensive Ningbo “pre-wedding” photo agency—just one manifes-
tation of the multimillion RMB modern wedding industry that produces
“fantasy” image-memories for Chinese couples engaged to be married.
Turning her free labour into university work had allowed this supervisee
to repurpose a vast archive of images that, to our Western eyes, looked
more like fashion magazine spreads than traditional wedding snaps. For, in
our experience, wedding pictures are often taken on the big day, then
hung up or archived in the family home, rather than being taken in advance
and then projected onto various screens during one’s wedding. What is
more, these image spreads typically captured the same bride adorning
three or more different wedding dresses across a shoot, while the groom
modelled a corresponding range of complementary styles and colours of
suit: a white wedding dress paired with a black tux and dickie bow, for
example, or a red Qipao with a traditional Chinese suit. All peppered with
an array of hats, shoes, canes, veils and props—sometimes requiring the
assistance of various camera men, drone operators, make-up artists and set
hands. Depending on the season and budget, we were informed, couples
could be bussed with their wardrobe and make-up artists to be imaged
next to: a grey horse in the beach surf; a row boat next to a picturesque
lake; a field of cherry blossoms; a traditional village or some other dynamic
touristic hot spot such as the Shanghai bund or DongQian Lake that pro-
vided their picture with a suitably aestheticised backdrop (Fig. 1).
More affluent couples, the author informed us, would often go abroad
with a crew, with Paris, Sydney and Santorini then being the most popular
options for a romantic shoot—a trend that was itself inculcated around
2008 after the widely covered destination wedding of the Chinese movie
star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who helped popularise and engrain a “No
travel, no wedding” ethos with regard to at least one of the three new-
fangled wedding industry phases (pre-wedding, wedding, honeymoon)
(see e.g. Zhuang and Everett 2018, p. 84). The final images derived from
such events would invariably be edited and colour-corrected, with the
company removing haze and blueing the sky, while also performing com-
plementary 2D digital skin grafts and teeth-whitening procedures as needs
be. The dissertation argued that within the new geometry of Chinese sta-
tus, when eventually displayed on the Big Day or hung in the married
couple’s (invariably) new home, these commercial images signified that
ironclad distinctions between memory and fantasy, reality and fiction,
PREFACE ix
Fig. 1 Wedding shoots at DongQian Lake, Ningbo
were eroding in contemporary China. Channelling Baudrillard she con-

cluded: “The Chinese no longer have traditional weddings or identities,
but they do produce wonderful hyperreal images.”1 For us, the student’s
project also made clear what Susan Sontag means when she argues that
social change has been “replaced by a change in images,” and that “the
production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology” (2018, p. 178).
Looking back on this period, and both detouring2 and distilling thou-
sands of comparable essays and dissertation work, what successive cohorts
of young people appeared to be experiencing—and often vicariously too
through the eyes of three generations of close-knit family—and docu-
menting was that they were bearing witness to an unprecedented event or
historical phase transition that marked nothing short of a complete recod-
ing and reorganisation of China’s socio-political fabric and cultural being.
Or again, that everything everywhere—from dating to working, exercis-
ing, eating, shitting and personally communicating—was being re-
imagined, re-invented and overcoded. Which is to say, they were bearing
x PREFACE
witness to an unfolding mutation in the relationship between subjectivity

and its conditions of exteriority.
Many of these projects were not wrong in pointing to China’s joining
of the WTO in 2001 as a key catalyst for these changes, albeit better ones
acknowledged the pre-history of this trend through the market-economy
reform experiments of Deng Xiaoping or, better still, pointed to a longer
history of the Chinese state associating itself with civilising drives and
modernising teleologies. However, most young Chinese people saw the
nation’s new geopolitical orientation towards the outside developing
alongside a concomitant reorganisation of its internal cities and their
material infrastructure—as well as the modes of social life unfolding
therein (through the use of technologies—including “of the self”—and
techne more generally). It is these manifold processes that Chinese Urban
Shi-nema takes as its focus.
Looking back, perhaps a short blog piece we wrote together entitled
“Are the Chinese Losing Their Gestures?” retrospectively appears as a sig-
nificant prelude or prolegomenon to this book (Fleming and Harrison
2016). This was a project that we originally wrote together as a form of
report—in the style of a staged philosophical dialogue—derived from a
few conversations we were then having, and which reflexively speaking
demonstrates that we were also taking our lived environment not so much
as a standing reserve but as a stimulus and provocation for thought. That
dialogue developed and helped us to road test and work through a com-
plex of ideas and concepts that stemmed from, and helped to digest, our
different but overlapping lived experiences in China.
As a monograph project Chinese Urban Shi-nema began when we were
both living and working in the place where this book lays its scene, Ningbo,
China. However, as we put our finishing touches to the book today, we
both find ourselves living elsewhere: in Edinburgh and Hong Kong
respectively. It is therefore a book that is shaped by different moments and
speeds, and by a heat proximity and immediacy that has since been tem-
pered by distance and reflection. It remains therefore a work about transi-
tions and transformations—“a finding which is also a leaving” (Thrift
2008, p. 16)—that was contingently compounded by our own transfor-
mations in circumstances.
Stirling, UK David H. Fleming

Hong Kong, China Simon Harrison
PREFACE xi
Note
1. In their Brief history of Chinese Wedding and Bridal Photography Tourism,
Zhuang and Everett (2018) situate Chinese “pre-wedding photography”
within a booming 500-billion RMB wedding market as “the most essential
spending among all of the wedding event purchases” (p. 80). Our descrip-
tion of real estate showrooms in Chap. 3 explore how these trends become
mobilised in the sale of real estate, where they become further articulated
with what Zhuang and Everett refer to as “the behaviour of ‘travel with a
bridal gown (带着婚纱去旅行)’” (idem).
2. Our use of the term “detour” throughout this book derives from the notion
of détournement, a critical and dialectical manoeuvre popularised by Guy
Debord and the Letterist International, and later the Situationist
International. Détournnement is a term often translated as “deflection,”
“diversion,” “detour,” “hijack,” “misuse,” or “reroute” in English. In thesis
208 of Society of the Spectacle (1984), Debord argues that détournement
must appear “‘in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any
inherent or definitive certainty.”’ Elsewhere, in the 1956 essay “‘A Users
Guide to Detournement”’ co-authored with Gil J. Wolman, the procedure
is described it in terms of a “‘mutual interference of two worlds of feeling,
or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, [which supersede] the
original elements”’ to produce a “‘synthetic organisation of greater effi-
cacy”’ (1956, p. 15). Our use of the term “detour” throughout aims to
evoke this sense of hijacking and deflecting original meaning.
References
Fleming, D. H., & Harrison, S. (2016). Are the Chinese Losing Their Gestures?
Published on Contemporary Chinese Studies at UNNC Blog, December 9,
2016. Retrieved from http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chine-
sestudies/2016/12/09/chinese-losing-gestures/.
Sontag, S. (2008). On Photography. London: Penguin Classics.
Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Routledge.
Zhuang, Y.J., & Everett, A. M. (2018). A Brief History of Chinese Wedding and
Bridal Photography Tourism‑: Through the Lens of Top Chinese Wedding
Photographers. In E. Yang & C. Khoo-Lattimore (Eds.), Asian Cultures and
Contemporary Tourism. Perspectives on Asian Tourism (pp. 79–100).
Singapore: Springer.
Acknowledgements
Chinese Urban Shi-nema was written between 2016 and 2019, even if its
gestation preceded this by quite some time. There are accordingly innu-
merable people and organisations whose thoughts and actions directly and
indirectly impacted this project during different stages of its formation and
development, including the people of Ningbo, to whom we also dedicate
this work.
We would especially like to thank Paul Martin for sharing his material
on the Trent Buildings, which has been referenced in our university chap-
ter. We also extend a special thanks to Melissa Shani Brown for her valu-
able feedback on an earlier version of our manuscript. DHF would also
like to express thanks to Marielena Indelicato for inviting him to road test
an inchoate version of the museum chapter at the Ningbo Institute of
Technology, and David B. Clarke for his feedback and guidance on an
article version of this work.
Special praise also to our many many friends and ex-colleagues at
University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) who are all part of this
book in some way, shape or form. Particular thanks here to the following
for their inspiring chat, or for helping us bounce ideas around, and being
great sounding boards (in alphabetical order): Stephen Andriano-Moore,
Amy Brown, Yu-Hua Chen, Clifton Evers, Maris Farquharson, Fiano Fu,
Filippo Gilardi, Amarpreet Gill, Philip Hall, Lili Hernandez, Derek Irwin,
Daryl Johnson, Dorran Lamb, Peter Lamb, Bjarke Liboriussen, John
Lowe, David O’Brien, Jeanne O’Connell, Du Ping, Phil Ramsey, Richard
Silburn, Rob Smith, Marshall Stauffer, Jonathan Tillotson, James Walker,
Kim Wilcocks, and Siegfried Yeboah. We also thank the IC heads of school
xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
(from 2010 to 2017): Paul Gladstone, Stephen Quinn, Adrian Hadland,

Fintan Cullen, Adam Knee and Andrew White; and the English heads of
school (from 2013 to 2018: Geoff Hall, Matthew Beedham, Margaret
Gillon Dowens, and Lixian Jin).
DHF would also like to thank the “Film-Philosophers” who have heard
and fed back on the Shi-nema work, or whose thoughts and ideas have
inspired this project more generally. Special mention on this outing to (in
alphabetical order): Lucy Bolton, William Brown, Yun-Hua Chen, David
Deamer, Victor Fan, David Leiwei Li, David Martin-Jones, Greg Singh
and David Sorfa. We also thank our friends, colleagues and mentors in
applied linguistics and gesture studies. Our showroom research was first
discussed through the lens of metaphor at panels organised by Thomas
Wiben Jensen and Linda Greve, where we received their generous feed-
back as well as insights from Cornelia Müller and Ray Gibbs. Yu-Hua
Chen contributed to the analyses of student talk in our chapter on the
transnational university, which also benefitted from discussions on panels
organised by Peter De Costa, Curtis Green-Eneix and Wendy Li.
SH thanks Chen Xingchao for enabling many privileged experiences of
Ningbo and for explaining their cultural significance with local insight, as
well as Mark Harrison for cheering on this work from overseas. DHF
thanks Mira, whose own work and inexhaustible support made the writing
of this book possible. This book is also dedicated to Phaedra and Tarran,
our lightning and thunder. Thanks as always to the Fleming and
Vakily Clans.
Parts of Chap. 3 originally appeared as David H. Fleming and Simon
Harrison. (2018). Selling dream (un) real estate with Shi(势)-nema:
Manipulation, not persuasion, in China’s contemporary cinematic cities.
Social Semiotics, 30(1), 45–64; and in Simon Harrison and David
H. Fleming (2019). Metaphoricity in the real estate showroom: Affordance
spaces for sensorimotor shopping. Metaphor & Symbol Special Issue:
Ecological Cognition and Metaphor, 34(1), 45–60. Some sections of Chap.
4 also appeared in David H. Fleming. (2017). The Architectural
Cinematicity of Wang Shu and the Architectonic Cinema of Jia Zhangke:
Diagrammatically decomposing the “main melody” in monu-mental
assemblage art. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 3(1), 33–52.
While we have tried to avoid them, all mistakes indubitably remain
our own.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Shi-Story and Theory 31
3 Commercial Overground Shi-Nema: Some Notes on

Cinematicity and Its Propensity for Selling Dream (Un)
Real Estate in Contemporary China 63
4 In-dependent Art Shi-Nema: Decomposing the Main

Melody via Monu-mental Time-Images 99
5 Transnational Sci-Fi Shi-nema: Or, Diary Notes from

“Westworld” Regarding Neoliberal Dulosis, “Academic”
Automatons and the Franchised Post-historical University
in the Era of Global “Excellence”139
6 Shi-Nematic Games (Casino Capitalism)185
7 Epilogue: Disneyfied Dreamwork Shi-nema—Tracing a

New “Old” Path Through the Inauthentic “Traditional”219
Index231
xv
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Approach to the salesroom 73

Fig. 3.2 Secluded beach set-up with private BBQ grill manned
by carte bleu chef 74
Fig. 3.3 Welcome foyer of salesroom 76
Fig. 3.4 Maquette and wall map perspectives 77
Fig. 3.5 The Southeast Asian decoration at Bali Sunday80
Fig. 3.6 Promotional video sent to social media accounts 81
Fig. 3.7 Salesroom with wedding suite mise-en-scène84
Fig. 3.8 Perspectives on the Price Wall 89
Fig. 4.1 The Ningbo Historic Museum 108
Fig. 4.2 Expressionistic cinematicity 122
Fig. 4.3 Expressionistic horror 123
Fig. 4.4 Rhythmical stone montaging 124
Fig. 4.5 Close-up time images 125
Fig. 4.6 Stratified geological aesthetics 126
Fig. 4.7 Opening image of I Wish I Knew126
Fig. 4.8 The larger lion overpowering a smaller cub 127
Fig. 4.9 Arrangements of mahjong tiles 128
Fig. 5.1 Nottingham building’s Classical Revival style.
(Source: https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/hr/job-
opportunities/jobs.aspx)144
Fig. 5.2 Scene from Sou suo featuring the UNNC Trent Building 145
Fig. 5.3 “Two Jags” (later “Two Jabs”) Prescott at UNNC 150
Fig. 5.4 University branded materials at UNNC. (Screen capture from
online store: https://h5.sosho.cn/shop/offer/list.html?mall_
id=168)152
xvii
xviii List of Figures
Fig. 5.5 Captured website image: “UNNC recognized as one of

Britain’s leading businesses in China” 157
Fig. 5.6 Mobile banner announcing success with the arrival of the
Thought Leader 163
Fig. 5.7 Jack Ma, The World Invites You: a student-led amateur short
blending corporate and academic worlds 165
Fig. 5.8 A K-pop dance routine incorporates a Starbucks coffee cup 168
Fig. 5.9 Starbucks outlet built into teaching/learning spaces 172
Fig. 5.10 Therapy animals in the petting zoo during RUOK Week
(displayed on the Department of Campus Life website) 174
Fig. 6.1 Encounter with the building site 192
Fig. 6.2 Wedding traditions reimagined in the grounds of Bali Sunday197
Fig. 6.3 (a) Golden eggs upon entry, (b) pitchman on stage, (c)
salesman dangles red envelope, (d) sizeable crowd gathers, (e)
live-streaming images from the promotion booths 199
Fig. 6.4 Logo of Bali Sunday: a multicolour peacock (left) and the
NBC logo (right) 205
Fig. 6.5 Logo of Bali Sunday: a multicolour peacock 206
Fig. 6.6 Busy mall in promotional video (top); empty mall in reality
(bottom)207
Fig. 6.7 Picket line at main entrance to mall 208
Fig. 6.8 Board game covers the floor of the mall (left), with the wheel
of fortune (right) 209
Fig. 6.9 Logic of the board game (left), with novelty gifts including a
tropical fish (right) 210
Fig. 6.10 Chinese Valentine’s Day instructions and the wheel of fortune 211
Fig. 6.11 Spinning the wheel (left); onlookers gather, player shushes
them (right) 211
Fig. 7.1 The vending machine (future tradition) in the Qiantong
enclosure (historically repurposed setting) 225
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Arguments for the political efficacy of film have always held onto the
idea that film must move off the screen into the world.
—Pratt and San Juan (2014, p. 1)
Cities, particularly large cities, were the places where the strangest
mixtures of food and genes, money and words, were concocted.
—DeLanda (2000, p. 211)
The postmodern city amounts to its posthumous continuation, its
fractal form.
—Clarke (2003, p. 94)
Chinese Urban Shi-nema dives into what has aptly been named the mise-
en-scène of Capitalism’s Second Coming to China (Li 2016, p. 5), to
explore what becomes of Chinese societies, cities and subjectivities during
an unprecedented period of urban and economic generation and transfor-
mation. Situating itself in the historical aftermath of the 2008 Beijing
Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, the book offers a series of
grounded case studies from within the processual city of Ningbo (as it
transitioned from being a second tier city to a “new first tier city”) that
mosaic an archival image of how contemporary urban life in China is
undergoing a series of radical changes, transformations and reorganisa-
tions—including of “genes, memes, norms and routines” (see e.g.
DeLanda 2000, p. 212) as new forms of consumer culture bed in.
© The Author(s) 2020 1

D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_1
2 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON
Harnessing a pars pro toto approach, we explore five very different archi-
tectural assemblages, or technostructural arrangements—including luxury
real estate showrooms, a Pritzker prize winning history museum, China’s
“first and best” Sino-foreign university campus, a series of gamified urban
“any-now(here)-spaces” (Fleming 2014) (such as shopping malls and
building sites that channel and express the frenzied logic of so-called Casino
Capitalism) and a new “Old town”—that together cast light upon the
broader picture sweeping up Greater China during the most radical and
rapid period of urbanisation and infrastructural transformation the planet
has ever witnessed.
Our Realist soundings of these different assemblages typically hone in on
the psychophysiological experiences of various (domestic and alien) citizens
that become transactionally incorporated into these newly emerging forms
of affordance space, which we, in a nod to Le Corbusier, frame as contem-
porary “machines for living” (1986, p. 95) indicative of a postsocialist phase
of Chinese modernity. More specifically, the book’s triangulation of philo-
sophical concepts, empirical data and ethnographic observations become
mediated through a creative encounter between the Chinese concept of
“shi” (势) and the human geographer David B. Clarke’s notion of “cinema-
ticity.” Shi is described by sinologist philosopher François Jullien as the
inherent potentiality at work in configuration, or a “potential born of disposi-
tion” (1995, p. 27, emphasis in original), while the portmanteau cinematic-
ity blends theories of urbanism, cinema and contemporary capitalism
(illuminating both the cinematic qualities of the city and the city on screen)
with a sense of cinematic automaticity, suggesting something akin to the
automatic thinking of the city by the cinema and vice versa.
Paramount to this study is the emergence of new “entrepreneurial cit-
ies” in China, which arrive in tandem with a historically new species of
consumer citizen: or what David Leiwei Li, after Michel Foucault, re-
christens homo economicus—that “instrumentalist figure forged in the
effervescent conditions of market competition” (Li 2016, p. 58). Keeping
one eye on each, or a blend of bodies-cities, we foreground contemporary
examples of what we playfully call urban shi-nema (and more on which in
Chap. 2) that surface as historically unique sites/sights designed to direct
and trigger a range of desired human (trans)actions, thoughts and feel-
ings. Collectively, in the following chapters we thus investigate what we
might call the “significant forms” and affective constellations of five differ-
ent urban configurations, which each expose how China’s external embrace
of global capitalism, its internal promotion of consumer culture and its
1 INTRODUCTION 3
attendant mnemonic practices have radically reshaped modern life and

subjectivity. These vary from “apparatuses of capture” (to borrow Deleuze
and Guattari’s terminology; 2004b) to bona fide artworks, whose con-
trived arrangements (of objects, materials and their attendant qualities)
appear designed to move, make act or transform (change the status/
capacities of) the human traffic that pass through them: typically in a prof-
itable way (both to make profit in the case of a showroom in Chap. 3 and
the sales rooms of Chap. 6 and to endow the profits of a foreign educa-
tional model as per Chap. 5). Or, put differently, the urban spaces we
investigate all “intend” something and thus reveal forms of anticipation
and affective agency parametrically built into their material structures.
Chinese Urban Shi-nema accordingly strives to isolate what we might
call five pivotal points of 4E psychogeographic articulation within contem-
porary Ningbo in a manner designed to be at once productively alienating
and defamiliarising for (to momentarily speak like others) its Chinese and
Western readers alike. Ruminate here that with regard to our alien and
alienating methods we are keenly aware that, for good or for bad, the
practice generally known as “psychogeography” has, since the work of
Guy Debord (1981, p. 53), aptly been described as the “science fiction of
urbanism” (Asger Jorn quoted in Coverley 2010, p. 99). And while some
might no doubt parse this phrase in a pejorative fashion, we rather—recall-
ing Gilles Deleuze’s description of a good work of philosophy being part
detective novel, part science fiction—take this to be a positive thing, and a
necessary step in fashioning new perspectives or ways of thinking and pro-
ceeding (see e.g. Deleuze 2004a, p. xix; 2004b, p. 162). In point of fact,
we push Debord’s science fiction method for producing fresh alien per-
spectives even further by putting them into transformative compositions
with what has variously been called the new “E-approaches” (the “E” of
ecological, meaning embodied, extended, embedded and enactive). From
such perspectives each chapter explores how different combinatronics of
urban sensation and affect become constellated and arrayed in a manner
designed to transactionally guide or manipulate certain outcomes.
By such measures Chinese Urban Shi-nema also effectuates a form of
provocation, inasmuch as by setting itself the important but always diffi-
cult task of merging theoretical discussion with empirical analyses (while
blending philosophical thought, empirical data and (auto)ethnographic
observations) it strives to push readers to perceive how millennial urban
China is increasingly becoming-cinematic, or rather, as we will show in the
next chapter, operating upon hyperreal shi-nematic principles.
Notes Towards a Method

In the second half of the twentieth century Deleuze and his erstwhile col-
laborator Félix Guattari noted that the dominant system of global capital-
ism had undergone a mutation (see e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 2004a,
2004b; Deleuze 1997; Guattari 2010, 2013). Broadly speaking, since
Marx’s writing, capitalism has evolved and shifted away from enclosed
industrial structures (and disciplinary systems) geared towards production
and services towards new structures concerned with producing “signs,
syntax and … subjectivity” (Genosko 2012, p. 151)—a system that
Guattari’s friend Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2007, p. 76) later came to call
global semiocapitalism, wherein capital-flux increasingly “coagulates in
semiotic artefacts without materialising itself” (in Genosko 2012, p. 150)
and the “production and exchange of abstract signs has taken the pre-
dominant place in the overall process of accumulation” (Berardi 2015,
n.p.). These are notions that clearly align and resonate with a longer tradi-
tion of cultural criticism (stretching from Herbert Marcuse to Guy Debord
through Jean Baudrillard and Jonathan Beller) that foregrounds how capi-
talism in the West (or the Global North) progressively came to function as
“a semiotic operator” that aimed to “[seize] individuals from the inside”
with the goal of “control‑ the whole of society” (Guattari in Genosko
2012, p. 149; see also Guattari 2010).
With this last point in mind, Berardi has more recently penned a grim
account of what he refers to as our “dark zeitgeist,” honing in on the pre-
vailing conditions of what he now calls absolute capitalism (on account of
the etymology of “absolute,” meaning emancipation from any limitation)
upon the collective well-being and mental health of people around the
planet. The paradigmatic political expressions of our global winter of dis-
content, he argues, have now become mass murder, murder-suicide and
self-murder (Berardi 2015).1 “Suicide is a reaction of humans facing the
destruction of their cultural references, and the humiliation of their dig-
nity. This is one of the reasons that it so indelibly marks the landscape of
our time” (2015, p. 159). And although incidences of suicide do form
pertinent vectors within each of our case studies here—with both authors
having witnessed the aftermath or been made aware of multiple suicides
and suicide attempts within and around the architectural assemblages fea-
turing in Chaps. 3, 5 and 6—for various political, personal and ethical
reasons we opt to screen out these considerations on this outing and
1 INTRODUCTION 5
instead make reference to Berardi’s present-day work for an altogether

different purpose.
Indeed, above and beyond the overwhelmingly dark picture Berardi
extracts from contemporary life under absolute capitalist structures, there
remains a ray of light that emerges courtesy of his being convinced to
travel to the East Asian city of Seoul to deliver a talk on his political proj-
ect. Of importance to our approaches here, during this trip (to what is
ironically the country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world,
see e.g. BBC 2019; WHO 2019), Berardi outlines gaining a fresh perspec-
tive courtesy of his alienating encounter with the unfamiliar citizenry and
urban construction of the Special City. There, he describes:
inspecting the faces of young people—their signs and gestures, and their
ironic declarations of the T-shirts (“I’m easy but too busy for you”)—I was
impressed by the importance of design in Seoul’s contemporary visual envi-
ronment. The traces of traditional life are hidden, overtaken by the new
designs of life. Social communication has been thoroughly redesigned by
the cellular smartphone. Vision has been thoroughly redesigned by screens
of all sizes. (2015, pp. 191–192)
Lingering on this last point he notes how it suddenly struck him that in
fact “Screens are everywhere: big screens on the walls of skyscrapers,
medium sized screens in the railway’s stations lobby. But the small private
screens of the smartphones demand the undivided devotion of the passing
hordes, as they calmly and silently shuffle through the city, heads bowed”
(Berardi 2015, p. 192).
Such observations, triggered by an acculturated Westerner’s alienating
encounter with an unfamiliar East Asian urban ecosystem, also chimes
with our experiences of living and working in the city of Ningbo China
(albeit for a more extended period, just shy of a decade), wherein the con-
vergence and synergy of screen media and city life forced us to take pause
and confront something of what China, and the world of techno-driven-
semiocapitalism more generally, appears to be in the process of becoming
today. Accordingly, over a period that spanned 2010 to 2018 Ningbo
became a space that helped each of us grasp and rethink how global capi-
talism is not so much a system or process that makes us all the same but is
rather one that exploits and amplifies difference (in traditions, culture,
infrastructure, but also in wealth, social expectations, gender, class and
status), not least by innervating different fits and bursts of change and
growth in diverse geopolitical locales.
These differences are key to this book, which we hope might itself serve
the reader as a productive form of difference engine. With any luck, for
those familiar with Western urban studies, museum studies, education,
embodied cognition and so on, our Chinese studies offer alternative alien
examples that expose differences that may provoke fresh thought and
insight. To Chinese scholars and readers the book might equally provide
an enriching alien or barbarian perspective on the nature of the lived
ephemeral present. And for those more familiar with a single disciplinary
approach, our interdisciplinary melange of different perspectives and
aspects may also become constructively alienating and challenging. At
least we hope that any defamiliarisation and alienation we throw up might
be productive, as it was (reflexively speaking) for us.
So, while Berardi might note that there is today in Seoul—as is the case
in Ningbo—an explosive proliferation of material screens everywhere, in
our mosaic study we also aim to expose how the very principles and affects
of cinema and screen media have also become disarticulated from actual
screens and have moved into transformative co-composition with the very
fabric of China’s contemporary urban psychogeography, realising or actu-
alising something akin to the “universe of technologies of the screen in
which there is no longer a distinction between the real and the imaginary”
(Baudrillard 2014, p. 180).
Notes on Terminology 1: Films and “The Cinema”

While we always take care from chapter to chapter to hang our various shi-
nematic case studies alongside contemporaneous examples of film (or at
least films relevant to them), throughout Chinese Urban Shi-nema we
essentially reframe the “cinema” as being far more than just films, describ-
ing cinema as something more akin to a mediating substratum of contem-
porary social reality and ontology. For one thing, the confrontation with
millennial postsocialist Chinese cityscapes—with their proliferation of
embedded screens of all sizes and their science fictional architecture and
light shows—helped us grasp what a thinker like Beller means when, in
updating Marx, he notes that the socio-technological processes associated
with twentieth-century capitalism had ensured that “all that is solid melts
into cinema” (Beller 2006, p. 16). Or, as William Brown more recently
puts it, the imaginary of cinema has effectively restructured and
1 INTRODUCTION 7
reproduced the cultural imaginary so that “the cinema” increasingly

becomes the “measure of reality as opposed to reality becoming the mea-
sure of cinema” (2019, p. 231). All this to say, as aliens living among the
Chinese locals, it struck us that contemporary Ningbo (like other parallel
Chinese cities we visited) appeared to have stepped right out of the mov-
ies, meaning that (to paraphrase Baudrillard this time) in order to best
grasp its secrets, we should not simply “begin with the city and move
inwards towards the screen” but also consider (Chinese) screens in order
to concomitantly move “outwards towards the city” (Baudrillard 2015,
p. 56). And in the light of this, Chinese Urban Shi-nema necessarily
demanded that we stretch and twist everyday notions of what “cinema” is,
or means.
Of course, strict definitions of what “the cinema” is (or was, or is not)
has necessarily varied depending upon where—in space or time—a given
observer was situated, as well as what motivated their analysis and what
methods they prioritised when enframing it (technological, economic,
psychological, economic, social, political, ideological, philosophical, etc.).
For the purposes of Chinese Urban Shi-nema we try to deploy the term in
as broad and expansive (non-essentialist) a manner as possible, recognising
the cinema as a form of “philosophical perpetuum mobile” (Elsaesser 2008,
p. 239, emphasis in original), which always already refers to an ever-
shifting and evolving confederate of material parts and socio-political-
economic practices. Looking backwards, for example, we are happy to
follow in the footsteps of a philosopher like Jacques Ranciere by viewing
“the cinema” as an artistic idea that predated “the cinema as a technical
means and distinctive art” (2006, p. 6). Echoes here no doubt of an argu-
ment from the Film Theory annals that read Plato’s allegory of the cave as
the conceptual invention of the basic cinematic apparatus avant la lettre (à
la Jean-Louis Braudy 2004). Sticking with caves, a comparable belief also
finds film-philosophical expression in Werner Herzog’s The Cave of
Forgotten Dreams (2010), which implies through its (3D) form and con-
tent that a combination of wall paintings and promethean illumination by
our ancient ancestors (within the dark caverns of the Chauvet caves)
marked the dual emergence of the “modern mind” and proto-cinematic
forms of expression—aeons before Plato and the Greeks.
For some, such views no doubt simply expand a now century-old dis-
course that commonly framed the cinema as the ultimate “bastard art”—
which is to say, a complete art form that gradually came to re-combine,
re-mediate or expressively re-vision the properties, features and capacities
of older art forms and practices such as painting, literature, music, dance,
theatre, sculpture and opera. At their most extreme and bombastic, such
attitudes relegated the entire history of art to the status of “a massive foot-
note to the history of film” (Hollis Frampton in Beckman and Ma 2008,
p. 3). More conservative takes, such as those forwarded by the philoso-
pher Alain Badiou, paradigmatically frame the cinema as a “parasitic bas-
tard art” that “amalgamates the other arts without, for all that, actually
presenting them” (Ling 2010, p. 35).
In Cinema by Other Means (2012) Pavle Levi takes a different dialecti-
cal tack on such positions in order to expose the complex affects and
effects that the cinema reaped upon surrounding culture, here by specifi-
cally zooming in on Yugoslavian arts and avant-garde practices. As the
book’s title suggests, this is achieved by foregrounding how other con-
temporaneous practices (including poetry, art and optical devices) worked
to re-materialise and re-mediate the cinema, the absented centre of his
study—a method which recasts David B. Clarke’s idea that we now “move
through the world left in the wake of cinema” (2007, p. 29). With such
views in mind, we are also happy to look sideways and forwards from cin-
ema’s historical emergence as a prime mover and driver of modernity,2 and
to entertain the idea that cognate screen forms that were historically
derived from the cinema—such as digital cinema and videogames—can
also be comfortably housed under a “cinematic” category (without negat-
ing their obvious differences and specificities too, and more on which
throughout).3 Thus, following a philosopher of film like Berys Gaut, we
might trace the roots of kinematics back to “the study of things that
move,” meaning that the cinema at its broadest refers to “the medium of
moving images” (2010, p. 1). Tying such ideas back to Berardi’s observa-
tions above while interweaving thinkers like William Brown, we are also
content to see today’s smartphones—with their marketed abilities to
record, edit, post-produce, screen, stream, share and consume images—as
modern forms of “cinema-machine,” whose affordances and inbuilt mech-
anisms help amplify processes of control associated with semiocapitalist
structures and broader cultural processes of “becoming-cinema” (see e.g.
Brown 2019, p. 250; Beller 2006).
To similar ends, Badiou helpfully frames the cinema as a bastard mode
that has always purloined, borrowed and amalgamated features, parts and
processes from distinctly non-cinematic forms and non-art worlds too.4
With regard to blends of artistic and non-art forms that cross-pollinate,
and become re-mediated by the cinema today, in Chap. 3 we pick up an
1 INTRODUCTION 9
idea developed by the formalist Soviet filmmaker and film-philosopher

Sergei Eisenstein, who maintained that choice examples of pre-cinematic
architecture (part art, part craft, part industry) were always already proto-
cinematic in their form, function and affects/effects—a view that led him
to describe the Acropolis of Athens as a veritable “ancient film” (1989,
p. 112), whose spectacular ecological form and content helped (aestheti-
cally and epistemologically) nudge Western culture and civilisation towards
the invention of the cinema. But if Eisenstein saw architecture helping
pave the way towards cinematic cultures, in Chap. 4 we also explore how
the architecture that is emerging in a world after cinema, if you will,
becomes further modified by its encounters with today’s industrial prin-
ciples and practices, including digital-cinematic forms and semiocapitalist
technologies.
With the above perspectives in mind, our notion of “the cinema” might
thus be imagined operating somewhat like a “machinic phylum” (Guattari
1984, p. 120)—that is, an abstracted or self-contained unity or virtual
phase space, under the threshold of which various actual technological
classes and sub-species can be understood emerging and adapting (to spe-
cific ecological milieus), if not evolving and differentiating. As our brief
engagements with the likes of Debord, Baudrillard and Beller hopefully
have begun to make clear, we also take the cinema to be a form of symbi-
otic fantasy machine that infiltrates brains, bodies, thoughts and desires,
getting in between and (re)mediating the border zone between imagina-
tion and reality, inside and outside—synaptic notions that we will return
to in more detail when we begin our theory building in Chap. 2, after we
first turn to and set up our discussion of the unusual method we utilise
throughout this book.
Notes Towards a Vertiginous Method

So far we have argued that the cinema is a techno-art practice and politico-
industrial praxis that has driven change and impacted the world around it.
Not least because, as Daniel Reynolds puts it in his recent Media in Mind,
“minds are ecological phenomena,” and technologies such as cinema
essentially help (re)structure the modes of seeing and feeling of those
encountering/using them (2019, p. 50). Historical intuitions of such
ideas abound, of course, especially after the popularisation and industriali-
sation of the cinema—as can be evidenced by the work of Walter Benjamin,
who noted in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” that watching film led to “profound changes in the apper-

ceptive apparatus,” which became experienced not only on the individual
or subjective scale “by the man in the street” but also “on a historical scale
by every present-day citizen” (2007, p. 250).
The worlds of critical and philosophical thought have certainly not
escaped this ecological cinematisation either. For example, in the realms of
Film Theory Braudy (1999) began to perceive the cinema as a
metapsychological-technological reworking of human perceptive and psy-
chological processes, while a philosopher like Martin Heidegger moved in
the opposite direction by exposing how the mediatic impact of modern
optical technologies led humans to increasingly see “the world as picture”
(see e.g. Heidegger 1977, pp. 115–136; Beller 2006, p. 64). To take but
one more thinker to whom we will return throughout this book as another
illustrative case in point, we might recall how Baudrillard variously
described his unique sociological method as constituting a form of “cam-
era movement” or “tracking shot” with regard to the subject-objects of
his studies (2015, pp. 12, 13, 35). All of which to say that Chinese Urban
Shi-nema might also be taken as a productive exercise in cinematic-driven-
thinking, which invites its readers to view contemporary Chinese life and
lifestyles through and with the lens of cinema, which we frame as a particu-
larly privileged site/sight of concrescence, or growing together, of the
modern Chinese city and its citizenry.
To such ends we also forward here a detoured notion of cinematicity
with unique Chinese characteristics (what we will relate in the next chapter
as shi-nematic assemblages) that become palpable within and across differ-
ent scales of register—ranging from the individual, through various collec-
tive groups, up to and including a national community (a statistical
population of many millions). And it would be fair to say that at times
during the development of this book, the sheer magnitude of trying to
bridge—let alone synthesise—these different scalar levels of analysis has on
occasion given the authors the odd unsettling feeling of vertigo. But
reflecting upon these feelings inevitably brought us by degrees back to the
cinema, and specifically what some take to be cinema’s Ur text: Vertigo
(Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1958)—the form of which can help us to here
visualise certain aspects of our own cinematic method before we advance.
Indeed, the critical method developed hereafter might be fruitfully
thought of as actualising a form of “Vertigo effect”: a visceral visual tech-
nique (that in the study of film is sometimes referred to as a “dolly zoom”)
made most famous by Alfred Hitchcock, which entails the compositing or
1 INTRODUCTION 11
collapsing together of a rapid pull of focus (typically using wide-angle

lenses in camera to adjust the angle of view) and a simultaneous backtrack-
ing dolly movement within a single shot. In Chaps. 3 through 6, for exam-
ple, we expressly fold together a focusing zoom on different urban
phenomena (so that we can keep sight of their specific differences and
singular details), while concomitantly undertaking a contextualising back-
track that allows us to simultaneously frame their contours and operations
in relation to a broader horizon and dynamically changing bigger picture.
Closely linked to this dynamic of zooming and backtracking is another
useful concept, or image of thought, we borrow from the intersecting
worlds of mathematics and philosophy: the fractal. We will go into the
specificities of this modelling in more detail in the following chapter but
for now wish to note en passant that a fractal is a self-same repeating pat-
tern, or a nested set of sets, whose patternings recur or repeat at different
scales of observation or register. The dynamic fractal model we outlay
(which should not be taken as being closed, fixed, stable or indeed the
only pattern we might perceive) is directly tied to our Realist modelling of
social ontology, which, as encountered in the work of materialist thinkers
such as Manuel DeLanda, helps us to bridge the “link between the micro-
and the macro-levels of social reality” (including the intermediary of the
meso-level; see e.g. DeLanda 2006, pp. 4–5).
Drawing heavily on the material philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari,
DeLanda approaches cities as ecological “assemblages of people, networks,
organizations, as well as of a variety of infrastructural components, from
buildings and streets to conduits for matter and energy flows” (2006,
p. 6) wherein different kinds of catalytic replicators and converters such as
“genes, memes, norms, routines” all get mixed up in nonlinear recodings
(see DeLanda 2000, p. 212). DeLanda also encourages us to view cities as
assemblages of matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various
kinds, “with each new layer of accumulated ‘stuff’ simply enriching the
reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatronics available
for the generation of novel structures and processes” (2000, p. 21). If the
city constitutes one level of study, closely linked to this is the co-built sub-
jectivity of the postsocialist Chinese citizen, which is increasingly the prod-
uct of urban experience—which is to say, we must recognise a form of
entangled or transactional relationship emerging between the city and its
subjects, as well as between ourselves and the subject-objects or partici-
pants (to speak social-scientifically) who we have been studying.
Of course, in the language of contemporary physics or continental phi-

losophy we might concede that we are always already materially entangled
with our world, or it reciprocally with us. However, unlike other animals, as
far as we are aware, the human species frequently fills its lived environments
with ever-new forms of tool and machine—what Michel Serres refers to as
“Exo-Darwinian” drivers—that help to mould and reshape the individuals
and populations who originally moulded them (2018, p. 45ff).
Uncomfortable resonances here, then, with Debord’s observation that
“[u]rbanism is capitalism’s seizure of the natural and human environment,”
which has historically remade “the totality of space into its own setting,” by
moulding all of its surroundings, while developing special techniques for
shaping its very territory and arranging “the solid ground” for a very spe-
cific “collection of tasks” which developed “logically into absolute domina-
tion” (1983, p. 169). A picture that both reflects the flattened totalitarian
universe presented in Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1991) and antici-
pates Baudrillard’s take on later forms of consumer society which began
“laying hold of the whole of life,” so that “all activities are sequenced in the
same combinatorial mode, where the course of satisfaction is outlined in
advance, hour by hour, [and] where the ‘environment’ is total—fully air-
conditioned, organized, culturalized” (Baudrillard 1998, p. 37).
As this book will show, urban China has more and more been con-
ceived of as, and built into, a machinic-space of techno-capitalist transac-
tion: a concept that we use in two distinct but overlapping ways throughout
this book. Firstly, while the notion of “transaction” most commonly refers
to a commercial system of exchange, typically of goods, services or signs
for cash (or increasingly monetised data), we also here deploy the term
with a secondary philosophical and critical shade. This evokes a conceptual
notion of trans-actions that expose how the borders between inside and
outside, subject and object, human and media (and for us researcher and
researched) become blurred and smudged. Tied to this, we find it more
fitting to say that the commercial worlds we studied appeared to want
their human citizen-customers to become incorporated (as well as
immersed or entangled) into them. Or, put differently, Ningbo’s embed-
ded modern machines for living intend to incorporate individual and col-
lective desires into their operations, meaning that urban forms and
functions increasingly anticipate and co-constitute Sinicised versions of
homo economicus (Li 2016, p. 58).
Drawing inspiration from the influential assemblage models and meth-
ods of Elizabeth Grosz, we approach the corporeal body as a form of
1 INTRODUCTION 13
“socio-cultural artefact” that provides the material conditions for contem-

porary subjectivity (1999, p. 381). Worth recalling here is that Grosz’s
models were originally developed as a critique of causal and representa-
tional models of the body/city relationship, which typically granted prece-
dence to one or other of the elements in the duelling pair. Against such,
Grosz projected a radical third way that recognises only transitory
moments of connection and two-way co-composition:
What I am suggesting is a model of the relations between bodies and cities

which sees them, not as megalithic total entities, distinct identities, but as
assemblages or collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds
between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and often tem-
porary sub- or micro-groupings. (1999, p. 385)
A series of different assemblage interfaces in millennial Ningbo become

the throbbing and dynamic focal points of this book. Or more precisely,
our pars pro toto approach isolates five or so embedded forms of modern
urban assemblage emerging from within the entrepreneurial city. Each was
chosen because it expresses something important about the contemporary
Chinese city more generally, and by extension the phase transition cur-
rently impacting urban China and its citizens’ subjectivities. Without pro-
viding any spoilers, this is first and foremost related to new forms of
consumerism and consumer culture linked with China’s embrace of global
capitalism. Thus, while something like Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1999)
presented Paris as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” and cities such
as Berlin and New York came to embody and express the prevailing eco-
nomic and politico-aesthetic logic of the twentieth century (see e.g.
DeLanda 2000, p. 92; Baudrillard 2010), our book does something simi-
lar for China and its twenty-first-century city-building drives: albeit spe-
cifically harnessing Ningbo as a grounded case study that helps illuminate
how on-going processes of urbanisation see (second and first tier) Chinese
cities emerging as the capital case of twenty-first-century cine-city life. Or
again, taking China as “where the action is” in terms of the hyperreal city
culture, we offer a series of detailed soundings of heterogeneous commer-
cial and consumerist structures that “add themselves to the mix of previ-
ously existing ones, interacting with them, but never leaving them behind
as a prior stage of development (although, perhaps, creating the condi-
tions for their disappearance)” (DeLanda 2000, p. 271).
What is more, if in the Western context the coming together of urban

spaces and consumer politics resulted in the emergence of “postmodern-
ist” cities during the twentieth century, which Clarke describes as being
“less an identifiable city than a group of concepts—census tracts, special
purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei” (2003, p. 94), we report
back on similar phenomena currently defining the operations and topol-
ogy of what we might for reasons of symmetry here call “postsocialist”
Chinese cities.5 Inasmuch as the embrace of semiocapitalism and consumer
politics has resulted in the emergence of new forms of city in China, which
differ greatly from older feudal or Communist models, and expose the
Chinese city’s own “posthumous continuation, [in] its fractal form” (Clarke
2003, p. 94, emphasis in original).
On the State of a City

What is a city? This is necessarily a complex question to answer in the
abstract or concrete specific in such a slim volume. But it is one that we
need to address nevertheless. In hazarding a working definition that we
might pick up on here, Grosz notes how the city, in its material form,
might be taken as a complex dynamic assemblage knitting together power
networks, economic flows and particular “forms of management and
political organization, interpersonal, familial, and extra-familial social rela-
tions, and the aesthetic/economic organization of space and place to cre-
ate a semi-permanent but everchanging built environment or milieu”
(1999, p. 382). With specific regard to the everchanging form cities take
within time, DeLanda points to how historians regularly remind us that
“urbanization has always been a discontinuous phenomenon,” defined by
fits and bursts, where periods of long stagnation are followed by rapid
bursts of growth, if not vice versa (2000, p. 29). Cities are also relational
entities, of course, that embody complex ever-shifting relations with other
cities, trade routes and nations. Which is to say, we are all too aware that
we can only ever gather partial and limited vantages, or fleeting glances, of
what any given city is.
For such reasons, it is perhaps best to approach cities as prime examples
of what Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects: dynamic extended arrange-
ments that appear massively distributed in both time and space and whose
spatial and temporal forms expose nonlocal effects of action at a distance.
Indeed, in a passage worth quoting at length Morton tallies some of the
1 INTRODUCTION 15
pertinent problems facing us when trying to conceptually define what a

city (in this case, London) is:
A city contains all kinds of paths and streets that one might have no idea of
on a day-to-day basis. Yet even more so, you could live in a city such as
London for fifty years and never fully grasp it in its scintillating, oppressive,
joyful London-ness. The streets and parks of London, the people who live
there, the trucks that drive through its streets, constitute London but are
not reducible to it. London is not a whole that is greater than the sum of its
parts. Nor is London reducible to those parts. London can’t be “under-
mined” downward or upward. Likewise London isn’t just an effect of my
mind, a human construct—think of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Nor is
London something that only exists when I walk through the Victoria Line
tunnel to the Tate Gallery at Plimco Underground Station, or when I think
about London, or write this sentence about London. London can’t be
“overmined” into an aftereffect of some (human) process such as thinking
or driving or essay writing. To this extent writing about music really is like
dancing about architecture—and a good thing too. Everything is like that.
[…] The streets beneath streets, the Roman Wall, the boarded-up houses,
the unexploded bombs, are records of everything that happened to London.
London’s history is its form. Form is memory. (2013, pp. 90–1)
And while the memory-form of the city is important to what follows,

pace Félix Guattari we also concede that cities operate through “abstract
machines,” which can be thought of here in terms of functions (see e.g.
Genosko 2012, p. 152). Our engagement with form and function
throughout this book in turn pays heed to the mediated or experiential
dimension of cities for their citizen-subjects. Which is to say, we remain
aware that we only ever meet the concrete-functional city half-way,
through an embodied and/or technologised interface. Here, the concrete
and abstract aspects of the city should be taken as key ingredients in the
social constitution of the body and mind of the urban subjects: constitut-
ing “a complex and interactive network that links together, often in an
unintegrated and ad hoc way, a number of disparate social activities, pro-
cesses, relations, with a number of architectural, geographical, civic, and
public relations” (Grosz 1999, p. 382).
Ningbo-a-Go-Go
The actual and virtual object of this book’s study, if you will, are (five or
so) processual urban interfaces emerging within contemporary Ningbo, a
sub-provincial port city located in Zhejiang Province on China’s eastern
coast, previously known as Ningpo in English, and which can be roughly
translated as 宁, ning “serene” or “tranquil” and 波, bo “waves” or
“waters.” Today Ningbo markets itself as being one of China’s oldest his-
torical cities—dating from around 4800 BCE. Recalling DeLanda’s point
that cities experience fits and bursts of growth and stagnation, the first two
decades of the new millennium have arguably overseen the most extensive
and rapid periods of urban growth and construction Ningbo has experi-
enced in its 6800-odd-year history, bearing witness to new-fangled forms
of ideology and politics that literally become concretised through urban
infrastructure and modern city planning (for more of infrastructure as ide-
ology see e.g. Thrift 2015). Consequently, the giant Ningbo-Zhoushan
port currently constitutes one of the busiest and deepest working seaports
in the world. This means that, no matter where in the world you might be
reading this book, and irrespective of whether you have ever heard of
Ningbo or not, this globalised place is intimately implicated in, and
expressly entangled with, the unfolding realities of your local milieu: even
if only through geopolitical notions of action at a distance. For, among
other things, Ningbo is continually mixed up with the circulation of the
100,000 or so shipping tankers (and the various products and goods
freighted within them) that are required to keep the global economy tick-
ing over (see e.g. Thrift 2015).
Of significance to the genesis of this book, as part of the then second
tier city’s millennial drive towards modernisation, the University of
Nottingham was invited to set up an overseas campus there in 2004, mak-
ing the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) the first Sino-
foreign university to open its doors for business in postsocialist China (not
withstanding a previous wave of Anglo-American missionary universities
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prior to the 1949 foundation of
the People’s Republic of China; Bolton 2002, pp. 189–190). The authors
of this book began working at UNNC in 2010 (a census year that recorded
a growing Ningbo population of over seven million) and 2013 respec-
tively, living and working there during an extended period of rapid change
and urban development, which as of 2017 saw the entrepreneurial city
1 INTRODUCTION 17
become recognised as one of China’s “new first-tier cities” (see e.g.

O’Donnell 2017).
As a consequence of UNNC’s arrival, the everchanging screenscapes of
Ningbo also, perhaps inevitably, began to serve as a form of standing
reserve for ever more anglophone studies and interdisciplinary academic
research projects. Over and above our own empirical, (auto)ethnographic
and ficto-critical work (together, alone or with other co-authors),6 and the
work of other known and unknown (to us) colleagues and scholars who
took UNNC as an academic, political, economic, pedagogical or ideologi-
cal object of study (and to which we will return in Chap. 5), one standout
example of critical urban work by Melissa Shani Brown and David O’Brien
warrants a brief mention here. This takes Ningbo’s Moon Lake mosque as
a singular case study that helps expose broader political drives associated
with the “sinicisation” of Islam within China more generally.
Although a study of the sinicisation of Islam may on first flush appear
to have little in common with the stated mission of Chinese Urban Shi-
nema, Brown and O’Brien’s methods and findings do reveal fertile paral-
lels and resonances with our own project. In the first place, the method of
analysing a contemporary Ningbo site/sight to expose broader trends
speaks to our own techniques, especially the way they show how a histori-
cally significant mosque gradually had its meanings, history and function
altered after becoming surrounded by a new assemblage of modern
machines and signs (including state-approved propaganda posters, surveil-
lance cameras, national emblems and commercial buildings). In this sense
Brown and O’Brien’s work, like ours, appears attuned to the material
expressions and transactional tensions emerging between a historically
transforming Chinese reality and the new forms of visual culture that over-
code it. In anticipation of what is to come, it is also of relevance that
Brown and O’Brien note in passing that since they first began visiting the
Ningbo mosque in 2013:
the majority of the old late Qing and early Republican era buildings sur-
rounding the lake and mosque have been demolished and replaced by newly
built constructions in generic “traditional” style. While some of these new
constructions reference the previous buildings on the site many more now
house Starbucks cafes, fashion boutiques, bars or chain restaurants. Though
evoking the Qing Dynasty streets, the “new old” neighbourhood includes
underground parking and security cameras. To the south of the mosque a
huge 30-storey luxury hotel has been built, towering over the faithful while
much of the land immediately surrounding the mosque has been cleared for
redevelopment. (2019, p. 8)
Brown and O’Brien’s isolation of an architectural space as an ethno-

graphic site capable of being mined for wider (implicit and explicit) mean-
ings and then articulated to broader political and discursive analysis also
chimes (albeit on a different scalar level) with our framing of Ningbo as a
type of universal Singular. That is, an object of attention that can be taken
as a “singular entity which persists as the universal in the multitude of its
interpretations” (Žižek 2007, p. xii), while also serving as a singular exam-
ple of a Chinese city that concomitantly indexes broader trends unfolding
in parallel places across the PRC.
Structure of Approach and Synopsis of Chapters

As is almost customary for books inspired by, or written in the wake of, A
Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a), we concede that this
book could pretty much be picked up and read in any order that the reader
sees fit. Someone with a research interest in Chinese museums might be
inclined to go directly to Chap. 4, for instance. Another reader interested
in commercial manipulation might go straight to Chap. 3 or 6, while yet
another interested in corporate universities or the embedding of transna-
tional higher education in China may want to hop straight into Chap. 5.
While admitting this, the book’s engineered structure does nevertheless
harbour an element of intent and functionality, with each chapter’s open-
ing, closing, focusings and backtracks forming into a broader pattern, or
series of movements, that build momentum and carry forward meanings
and understanding from one to the next.
Thus, both in anticipation of our forthcoming engagement with the
concept of shi—that which breathes life into landscapes and art, but is also
read and harnessed by military generals—and in memory of the restless
twisting murmurations of birds that so often kept us transfixed outside of
our office windows in the UNNC campus, we would like to quote at
length an instructive passage by Hans-Georg Gadamer that we feel speaks
to the nonlinear potential of this book and of taking our prearranged path
through it.
Experiencing like breathing is a rhythm of intaking and outgivings. Their

succession is punctuated and made a rhythm by the existence of intervals,
1 INTRODUCTION 19
periods in which one phase is ceasing and the other is inchoate and prepar-
ing. William James aptly compared the course of a conscious experience to
the alternate flights and perchings of a bird. The flights and perchings are
intimately connected with one another; they are not so many unrelated
lightings succeeded by a number of equally unrelated hoppings. Each rest-
ing place in experience is an undergoing in which is absorbed and taken
home the consequences of prior doing, and, unless the doing is that of utter
caprice or sheer routine, each doing carries in itself meaning that has been
extracted and conserved. As with the advance of an army, all gains from what
has been already effected are periodically consolidated, and always with a
view to what is to be done next. If we move too rapidly, we get away from
the base of supplies—of accrued meanings—and the experience is flustered,
thin, and confused. If we dawdle too long after having extracted a net value,
experience perishes of inanition. (1995, p. 74)
Chapter 2 sets out the methodological mise-en-scène for all our subse-
quent analyses, providing the historical, theoretical and methodological
approaches relevant to our later case studies. It also sketches out how
theory and empirical data become articulated and synthesised. Beyond
setting context, we also work to define and illustrate a series of four (or so)
interrelating concepts important to our later analyses, first outlining what
we mean by cinematicity and shi-nema, before setting out our Realist frac-
tal modelling of Chinese life and our 4E Psychogeographic approaches.
Our next perching thereafter lands in the world of high-end lifestyle
consumerism and apartment building/buying (Chap. 3). We here frame a
series of ephemeral architectural assemblages—designed to advertise and
sell luxury lifestyle apartments—alongside contemporaneous examples of
“aspirational realist” Chinese cinema, the romantic versions of which
unabashedly promote consumerist lifestyle to a growing (predominantly)
female demographic that represents an increasingly important economic
force within contemporary China. However, while saying this, recent
studies have also illuminated how there is, by state-sponsored design, a
skewed gendered distribution of real estate wealth/ownership within
China today that asymmetrically favours (heterosexual) males (with
women ostensibly being systematically excluded from the biggest accumu-
lation of real estate wealth in history, courtesy of the state-backed resur-
gence of patrilineal gender norms; see e.g. Fincher 2014). It is therefore
notable that our key participant in this chapter was a local unmarried
Ningbonese woman who began visiting showrooms around the city in her
pursuit of buying real estate.
The photos and video clips that our participant naturally collected dur-
ing her showroom tours (to document her apartment-buying experience)
were subsequently shared with us, as were a raft of ephemeral promotional
posters, leaflets, flyers and web links that either she had procured from the
different sites or had been sent to her social media accounts. To add to this
archival data, we also joined our key participant on several visits (and
return visits) to the showrooms. The resulting wealth of materials, we
hope, allows us to reconstruct “the concreteness and materiality of the
situation which is [otherwise] hard to put into words,” while offering a
sense of “being there” to the reader “which is not just a report back”
(Thrift 2008, p. 16). Indeed, in and across five different examples of
showrooms, or modern affective environments (including the showroom
where our participant finally committed to the purchase of her boutique
apartment), we work to document and expose various tensions and affec-
tive forces used to steer the thoughts, feelings, associations and (trans)
actions of potential buyers. We ultimately argue that the various architec-
tural forms explored in this chapter (which we call “Commercial
Overground Shi-nema”) illuminate how aspirational cinematic imaginaries
(messages, products, desires and lifestyle affects) have become disarticu-
lated from the medium of cinema and put to work in different ways within
contemporary Ningbo streetscapes: specifically to increase the efficacy of
real estate showrooms as part of a wider politico-economic drive associ-
ated with stabilising the economy and promoting consumer lifestyles.
In Chap. 4 we then foreground some push back against these broader
drives, setting out to compare two singular artworks that although emerg-
ing from the distinct creative universes of museum architecture and art
cinema—Wang Shu’s Ningbo Historic Museum (2008) and Jia Zhangke’s
Shanghai World Expo film Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew (2010)
respectively—appear to be undergirded by the same “abstract diagram.”
For the former is built out of the remaining fragments of an old city that
was bulldozed to make way for newer commercial high-rise complexes
(such as those being discussed in Chap. 2), while the latter is a state-
commissioned art film whose mosaic body renews its auteur director’s
fascination with the processes of change and destruction associated with
China’s modernisation. This chapter, called “In-dependent Art Shi-nema,”
also necessarily puts a repurposed notion of assemblage theory into cre-
ative dialogue with the Chinese notion of shi, to illuminate how these
outstanding farrago projects emit discordant critical signals into China’s
processual cityscapes. Drawing on a hybrid model of image regimes from
1 INTRODUCTION 21
Deleuze’s Cinema 1 (2005a) and Cinema 2 (2005b) also allows us to

describe how artistic qualities help formally critique the temporal and tele-
ological narratives of progress that the Chinese state commissioners origi-
nally charged the artists with celebrating. This chapter accordingly works
to show how although Wang and Jia compose with radically different
media, the archival form of their rough and broken artworks directly com-
municate comparable ethico-aesthetic ideas to the viewer, which ultimately
interferes with, and deterritorialises, the dominant national zhu xuanlü
(main melody or leitmotif )—a dominant political elucidation associated
with the state’s embrace of modernisation and leading citizens into a bet-
ter future (see e.g. Lin 2010, p. 60; Zhang 2007, p. 2; Jaffee 2006, p. 98).
Chapter 5 then opts to rest in the campus world of a transnational
higher education institute located in Ningbo’s education zone. Specifically,
we zoom in on one of the better-known Sino-foreign ventures representa-
tive of the latest wave of Western higher educational franchises currently
doing business in the PRC—the University of Nottingham Ningbo China,
the self-proclaimed “first and best” Sino-alien university. This chapter,
entitled “Sci-Fi Shi-nema,” draws on contemporaneous Chinese movies
featuring neoliberal subjects and architectural simulacra (such as Zhang
Yuan’s Fengkuang yingyu/Crazy English (1999), Jia Zhangke’s Shije/The
World (2004) and Chen Kaige’s Sou suo/Lost in the Web (2012)) as well as
classic Western science fiction films (including Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (Don Siegel 1956) and Westworld (Michael Crichton 1973)) to
best frame the marketing and selling of alien “education experiences” to
the local population. Here, if the concrete buildings emerge as branded
simulacra of (other always already hyperreal buildings from) a Western
elsewhere, we also work to show how the actions and gestures of the
student-centred interactive teaching staff (and the paying customers/stu-
dents in turn) have likewise become subsumed within, and infected by, a
larger network of gestures and (trans)actions associated with life under
what we might here call “Capitalist Realism” with Chinese characteristics
(see e.g. Fisher 2010). The analyses in this chapter draw on: auto ethnog-
raphy; the university’s publically available promotional materials (includ-
ing its own media propaganda); examples of real technology-enhanced
and Starbucks-endorsed classroom interaction from a study of the univer-
sity’s English language samples; informal interviews conducted with vari-
ous past and present members of the student and staff bodies. Throughout,
we also strive to situate our discussions of this material within a broader
picture surrounding the desires, drives and realities of universities,
researchers and students in the context of education ideologies, language

policies and global capitalism.
To emphasise the interactive, participatory and ecological dimensions
of cinematicity, Chap. 6, “Shi-nematic games,” examines different forms
of casino-like gamifications of consumption taking place within uniquely
Chinese “non-places” (Augé 1995) or “any-now(here)-spaces” (Fleming
2014) emblematic of globalisation in millennial Ningbo. Here, we exam-
ine the natural history of a new lifestyle assemblage—a massive complex
which integrates apartment buildings, a mall and a boutique hotel—as it
evolved from an empty lot-cum-building site to a smooth and sleek aspi-
rational environ where visitors live, shop, purchase and consume against
the backdrop of a Southeast Asian tropical island theme. Another corpus
of recordings—including participant observation and digital promotional
materials—are here used to identify how in the build up to this site’s open-
ing, a series of participatory games indicative of Casino Capitalism were
set up in order to transform players into payers, and payers into players
(paradoxically in a state space that otherwise outlaws casinos and
gambling).
The diversity of our ethnographic materials helps evaluate the experi-
ence and impact of these shi-nematic games from the different worldviews
and roles of the actors in the evolving apartment-mall-hotel network,
including property moguls, interior design companies, commercial ten-
ants, migrant workers, customers (accompanied by grandparents and chil-
dren) and a range of non-human animals that also become part of the
material and semiotic assemblage. We here put the processes witnessed in
the mall into dialogue with illegal financial investment strategies associated
with contemporaneous “Huallywood” film productions (which saw the
wilful manipulation of viewing figures and false critical reviews in order to
turn cinematic flops into stock market gold). Above and beyond the gami-
fications of the film industry, this chapter also draws parallels between the
dramas that play out in and around such spaces as they develop and the
mediated staging of various games, with the latter ranging from morality-
lesson board games (e.g. Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders) and syndicated
game shows (e.g. The Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune) to the reality TV
shows popular in today’s Chinese attention economies (e.g. The Voice of
China, If You Are the One). Delving into these overlaps not only allows us
to better identify the winners and losers of millennial China’s cinematic
cities but also to see how these malls become symptomatic of an
1 INTRODUCTION 23
increasingly normalised landscape that exposes economic disparities, men-

tal health issues, environmental damage and the abuse of other animals.
Our short epilogue thereafter attempts to draw together many of the
dispersed threads found weaving throughout the book by turning our
attention to Ningbo’s new “old district” Nantang: a “visually edible”
(Baudrillard 2005, p. 64) or selfie-friendly “old street” space full of mod-
ern restaurants and bars nested inside repurposed simulacral façades of
older Chinese buildings. This “Disneyfied” space, which was finished in
2017 near to Ningbo’s new bullet train station, is designed as a key site/
sight of Ningbonese cinematicity, and another entrepreneurial city-space
associated with a broader cultural process of becoming-cinema. We here
read this hyperreal consumer district alongside modern transnational
examples of Disney and DreamWorks cinema that use a Chinese “recipe”
to market their wares. Before getting there, however, we invite our readers
to now hop through these other Ningbo sites/sights, where they can
perch momentarily to explore. For as per Gadamer, meanings therein
await to be extracted and consequences to be absorbed, conserved and
carried forwards or backwards. The next chapter contains the historical
and theoretical fodder for this course of conscious experience.
Notes
1. He there examines the suicides of Wall Street bankers in the wake of the
global financial crisis, Chinese factory workers toiling for Apple and
Foxconn, Indian farmers trapped and enslaved by multinational GM corpo-
rations such as Monsanto and French workers driven to despair under
Orange’s unethical managerialism.
2. For Susan Sontag it was photography more precisely which was the technol-
ogy responsible for making cultures modern, driving individuals and institu-
tions towards the practice of image making and exchanging: As she notes,
“A society has become ‘modern’ when one of its chief activities is producing
and consuming images, when images that have extraordinary powers to
determine our demands upon reality and themselves coveted substitutes for
first hand experience become indispensible to the health of the economy,
the stability of the polity, and the pursuit of private happiness” (2008,
p. 153). In acknowledging this, we at the same time recognise that, pace
Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (2008), the still image persisted as the substra-
tum and “optical unconscious” of cinema during the celluloid era; however,
we also argue later that this became reconfigured and replaced in the digital
era with the selfie, arguably the paradigmatic image of our time revealing a
more cinema modality or ontology (see e.g. Brown 2019).
3. There is certainly much evidence of increasing eddies and feedback loops
emerging between different transmedial forms or platforms today. As Sou
suo/Caught in the Web (Chen Kaige 2012), which we engage with in Chap.
5 makes clear, smartphone screens and social media applets increasingly
overlay, become embedded in or begin to reconfigure the optics of more
traditional screen forms (here narrative film, but also television shows and
videogames), while smartphones themselves concomitantly become the
hardware device through which most modern Chinese viewers stream and
view their movies.
4. Especially when it comes to cutting-edge technological, industrial and scien-
tific tools and hardware. We can think here of contributions from photo-
chemical processes, lens technologies, electrical circuits, industrial practices,
digital computing, motion capture, drones and so on. Going further still,
while theorists such as Braudy famously took the cinema to be a technologi-
cal metapsychological modelling or hardware actualisation of human wet-
ware or (brain and body) perception and thought (1999), other thinkers
and philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Ronald Bogue and
Patricia Pisters have expanded such views by framing the universe itself as a
form of “metacinema” (for a survey of such positions see Pisters 2003,
p. 4 ff).
5. The term or concept postsocialism has gained a lot of currency in the new
millennium. In discussions of Chinese cinemas Zhang Yingjin maintains that
the term is best taken as a Chinese equivalent to Jean-François Lyotard’s
concept of “postmodernism,” which is expanded to account for a diverse
post-Maoist sociopolitical and artistic landscape that includes a broad range
of filmmakers from “different generations, aesthetic aspirations, and ideo-
logical persuasions [that] struggle to readjust or redefine their different stra-
tegic positions in different social, political, and economic situations” (2007,
pp. 50–2). Chris Berry on the other hand notes how postsocialism, like
postmodernism, should be read in terms of the stubborn persistence of
grand myths and narratives long after any real faith in them has been lost
(2007, p. 116).
6. In the collaborative process of marshalling and discussing the material for
this book, as well as then drafting the different chapters (and responding to
comments from peers and reviewers), we have found ourselves at times
adopting what we call dual-authored “ficto-critical” strategies. We detour
this term from what is often described as an indeterminate set of loosely
connected creative and experimental practices emerging out of the new
humanities known as “fictocriticism.” The idea of precisely defining what
fictocriticism is often troubles writers associated with these transgressive and
1 INTRODUCTION 25
defamiliarising practices (see e.g. Brewster 1996; Schlunke and Brewster

2006; Hass 2017). However, to aid readers here, we might note how ficto-
criticism is often associated with genre-bending, genre-blending, “genre-
defying” or “non-genre” (see e.g. Hass, p. 101) forms of writing, which can
get mapped alongside other loosely defined practices including creative criti-
cism, gonzo-anthropology, para-fiction or ethnographic fiction. These com-
monly strive to engage with the wrinkle that emerges between the so-called
disinterested academic scholar and the invested and entangled participant
(see e.g. Brewster 1996, p. 29; this wrinkle also is embraced in some psycho-
logical research, e.g., Busch-Jensen and Schraube, 2019, p. 226).
Fictocriticism is thus associated with a situated and reflexive style of writing,
or a contextualised first-person experience that embraces performative
experimental methods in-formed by critical thoughts and concepts. Often
ficto-criticism is adopted or triggered by an attempt to articulate otherwise
untellable stories (Brewster 1996, p. 32). Resonating with our multi-
perspectival approaches here, Katrin Schlunke and Anne Brewster note how
fictocritical strategies typically assume “the inventiveness of argument and
the creativity of truths,” with a key intention “of this kind of writing and
performance [being the] effort to convene new kinds of audiences” (2006,
p. 393). These experimental and performative practices often attempt to
express thinking through the style and practice of writing and can be linked
to attempts to open up new spaces for possibility and thought. As with our
ficto-critical work here, the method allows for creative re-orderings and
blendings that help us to convey ideas and observations in the sometimes
entertaining, amusing or shocking way they were experienced by us (p. 394).
In terms of practicalities or to offer concrete examples of this process, such
re-orderings and blendings could be seen to be occurring during our inter-
change of drafts, as one author began to layer the other author’s text with
additional details and alternative perspectives based on perceived overlap
and fruitful connection with his own material and experience. What we
referred to at the time as “layering” or “the appearance of a third author” is
what we now recognise as such dual-authored “ficto-critical” strategies.
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1 INTRODUCTION 29
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Filmography
Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Directed by Werner Herzog. 2010.
Fengkuang yingyu/Crazy English. Directed by Yuan Zhang. 1999.
Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew. Directed by Jia Zhangke. 2010.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Don Siegel. 1956.
Shije/The World. Directed by Jia Zhangke. 2004.
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Westworld. Directed by Michael Crichton. 1973.
CHAPTER 2
Shi-Story and Theory
…it is only through shi that one can get a grip on the process of
reality.
—François Jullien (1995, p. 31)
[T]he experience of film becomes deeply enmeshed in the
metropolitan experience as a whole.
—Zhang Zhen (2005, p. xxx)
Stupid and unreal film fantasies are the daydreams of society…
—Siegfried Kracauer (1995, p. 292)
This chapter tasks itself with introducing and setting out four overlapping
concepts that impact, or intraface with, the case studies that follow. These
include what we mean by cinematicity, which we begin to expand on
below as we move towards a related discussion of what we mean by
Chinese urban shi-nema. We thereafter attempt to set out our fractalised
Realist approach to different scales of analysis, wherein individuals, cities
and nation states appear embedded or set within each other. Finally, some-
what aligned with these, we shall speak to our transactional 4E psychogeo-
graphical approaches to the individual-milieu-continuum, explaining how
this informs our various ethnographic (and ficto-critical autoethnographic)
studies. Along the way we will also work to set out the historical context
of our study and explore certain tensions emerging between statistical and
subjective, macro and micro levels of analysis, which raise questions about
© The Author(s) 2020 31

D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_2
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Title: Papurikko-valakka. Ukkovaari

Kaksi novellia
Author: Sándor Petőfi
Translator: Meri Sulju
Release date: September 5, 2023 [eBook #71573]
Language: Finnish
Original publication: Hämeenlinna: Arvi A. Karisto, 1909
Credits: Tuula Temonen
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAPURIKKO-

VALAKKA. UKKOVAARI ***
PAPURIKKO JA VALAKKA. UKKOVAARI
Kaksi novellia
Kirj.
ALEKSANTERI PETÖFI
Suomentanut
Meri Sulju
Kirjallisia pikkuhelmiä XIII.
Hämeenlinnassa, Arvi A. Karisto, 1909.
SISÄLTÖ:
I. Aleksanteri Petöfi.
II. Papurikko ja valakka.
III. Ukkovaari.
Aleksanteri Petöfi.
Aleksanteri Petöfi (unkaril. kirjotustavan mukaan Petöfi Sandor),

Unkarin suurin ja kansallisin runoilija, syntyi Ris-Rörössä lähellä
Pestiä, jouluk. 31 pnä 1823. Riitaannuttuaan isänsä kanssa,
keskeytti hän 1840 opintonsa ja lähti maailman kylille. Ensin rupesi
hän sotilaaksi, mutta heikkoutensa tähden pääsi vapaaksi ja alotti
kiertolaiselämänsä, kuleksi ympäri Unkaria jalkaisin, usein ilman
penniäkään taskussa, antautui palavalla innolla milloin mihinkin
teatteriseurueeseen, mutta aina ilman menestystä, opiskeli ja
lueskenteli väliin, kierteli taas, teki puhtaaksikirjotusta, käänteli
englannin ja ranskan kielistä ja alkoi julaista lehdissä runojaankin,
joilla heti saavutti suurta suosiota. Seikkailujensa jälkeen saapui hän
v. 1843 Pestiin jalkaisin, sauva kädessä ja runojen käsikirjotuksia
povessa.
Pestissä otettiin hänet suosiollisesti vastaan, hänen runojaan

painettiin ja hän sai aputoimittajan paikan eräässä muotilehdessä,
jossa työskenteli vuosikauden. Mutta kansa ihastui hänen runoihinsa
päivä päivältä, niitä alettiin laulaa ympäri katuja ja kyliä. Ja kun hän
taasen lähti kiertämään ympäri maatansa, otettiin hänet vastaan
kaikkialla riemusaatossa, ja teattereissa, jossa hänet näyttelijänä oli
vihelletty alas, otettiin hänet runoilijana vastaan seisoaltaan
kunnioittaen ja kansallishymniä laulaen. Näillä matkoillaan oppi hän
tuntemaan Julia Szendreyn, erään tilanomistajan tyttären, ja pitkien
ottelujen jälkeen pääsivät nuoret naimisiin 1847.
Mutta kauvan ei perheonnea oltu madjaarien kansan laulajalle

suotu. Tuli myrskyvuosi 1848. Ensin hän julkaisi tulta iskeviä
vallankumouslauluja, mutta pian heitti kynän nurkkaan, läksi sotaan
ja nousi pian majuriksi. V. 1849 nähtiin hänet viime kerran eräässä
taistelussa. Tietenkin hän siellä kaatui ja haudattiin hänet muiden
mukana joukkohautaan. Hänen elämänsä oli kuin salaman välähdys,
hänestä ei oikein tietty mistä hän tuli, vielä vähemmin, mihin hän
katosi.
Mutta hänen runoissaan salaman välähdykset elävät ijät kaiket,

niissä elää luonnontuores kukkastuoksu, kotoisempi
kansanomaisuus kuin kenenkään muun unkarilaisen kanteleessa on
helkähdellyt. Niitä on jo ennen pienonen vihko suomeksikin
käännetty. Tässä tutustutetaan suomalaista lukijaa pariin hänen
parhaaseen kertomukseensa. Niistäkin kimmeltää jumalainen
neronkipinä, niissä pienimpiäkin olentoja kultaa todellisen runouden
päivänsäteily. Toivottavasti ennen pitkää saadaan suomeksi
enemmänkin hänen kirjallisia helmiään, sillä useimmat niistä ovat
käännetyt vieraammillekin kuin "veljeskansan" kielelle.
Papurikko ja valakka.
Voi merkittyä!
Yksin ja hyljättynä seisoo hän maailmassa, kuten kaupungin

reunalla hirsipuu, jota jokainen karttaa kammosta tai inhosta. —
Mieliimme on juurtunut, että surkastuneessa ruumiissa täytyy
asustaa turmeltuneen sielun. "Paetkaa häntä kuin ruttoa!"
huudamme. — —
Martti parka! Hänenkään ei käynyt paremmin.

Hän oli kelpo poika, parempaa sydäntä ei ollut kellään; mutta
luonto oli rumentanut hänen kasvonsa ja ihmiset karttoivat häntä.
"Olkoon niin!" ajatteli hän. "Te minua vastaan — minä teitä

vastaan!"
Ja vastarinta alkoi…
Hänen isänsä oli suutarimestari Daniel Csigolya, joka nuoruutensa

päivinä oli ahertanut kokoon kohtalaisen varallisuuden.
Äkkiä pälkähti hänen päähänsä, kuinka kaunista olisikaan, jos hän

sepittäisi runojakin eikä ainoastaan kenkiä. Parasta näytti hänestä
olevan alottaa ottamalla tihkipäätä viinisiemaus, koska rypälemehu
oli paras runollisten mielialojen herättäjä; tällöin olivat hänestä
kaukana tunnonvaivat, että hän tuhlasi rahaa, päinvastoin hän sitä
vielä käärisi kokoon.
Daniel Csigolyan oli täytynyt olla sangen oppivainen ihminen,

koska hän juomataidossa pian pääsi mestariksi; ja se ei ole niinkään
helppoa, sen tiedän omasta kokemuksesta. Minun täytyy nimittäin
huomauttaa, että minäkin pyhitin näille opinnoille muutamia vuosia
siihen aikaan, jolloin suurta juopottelua vielä pidettiin hyveenä. Se
aika on mennyt — luojan kiitos — ja minä olen saavuttamani tiedot
unhottanut siinä määrin kuin en olisi niitä koskaan tiennytkään.
Poloiset ravintoloitsijat! Surkuttelen teitä sydämestäni, mutta yhtä

sydämestäni toivon, että hyvin monet seuraisivat esimerkkiäni.
Mutta kuten sanottu: herra Daniel Csigolya oli ahkera viinamäen

mies herran edessä. Ei kestänyt kauvan, kun hän jo joi vanhan
tuomarin ja kanttorin pöydän alle, ja nämä olivat, täällä kuten
kaikkialla, väkevimmät kapakkasankarit.
Ennenkuin vielä oli kaksi vuotta vierinyt, oli hänen omaisuutensa

hävitetty; talon osti raajarikko turkkuri, viinitarhan huusi
huutokaupassa kunnianarvoisa kirkkoherra. Vähitellen mentiin niin
pitkälle, että lestit ja muut työkalut vaelsivat nekin kapakkaan…
Rouva Csigolya oli säästäväinen, kelpo emäntä, joka ei

tietystikään iloinnut miehensä uudenlaatuisesta taloudenhoidosta.
Hän vuodatti katkeria kyyneleitä, kun hänen miehensä juopuneena
toikkaroi kotiin, ja valitti, kun sydämensä oli ylen täysi, väliin
naapurivaimoillekin hätäänsä. Miehensä edessä hän vaikeni, osaksi
sentähden, ettei hän oikein uskaltanut lausua nuhteita, osaksi, koska
hän ajatteli miehensä itsestään palaavan järkiinsä ja
velvollisuuksiensa täyttämiseen.
Hän odotti pitkän, pitkän aikaa — mutta turhaan!
Mutta vihdoin ei hän sentään voinut kärsiä sitä vaieten:
"Laupiaan Jumalan nimessä! Mies, mitä tästä on tuleva? Sinä juot

ja juot yhtä mittaa etkä enää koskaan työtä ajattelekaan."
Tämän puhuttelun aikana koetti Daniel pörhistää selälleen

viininraukaisemia silmäluomiaan, hän levitti hajalleen horjuvat
säärensä näyttääkseen mahtavammalta ja huusi sitten vakavalla
arvokkuudella:
"Hiljaa!"
"Rakas mies", jatkoi vaimo, "kun minä vihdoin puhun, niin tahdon
keventää sydämeni kaikesta siitä, mikä sitä rasittaa. Olen vaiennut
kyllin kauvan."
"Vaimo, älä poraa!"
"Mutta minun täytyy —"
"Vaikene!"
"Vaieta? Miksi?"
"Siksi, koska minä — koska — minä olen herra Daniel Csigolya."
"Ja minä olen rouva Sofie Csigolya."
"Vaimo! Älä napise taivasta vastaan. Pyhässä raamatussa seisoo

— mitä siellä seisookaan? — seisoo, että Jumala loi maailman
kuudessa päivässä, seitsemäntenä lepäsi hän. Sentähden asetu."
"En ennenkuin olen puhunut."
"Mitä? — Sinä tahdot puhua vielä? — Onko se totta vai leikkiä?"
"En ole nyt leikintekotuulella."
"No, koska se ei ole mitään leikkiä, tänne sitten partaveitsen kera,

että leikkaan kielesi pois."
"Ja vaikkapa. Minun täytyy puhua, koska — — —"
Julmistuneena karjui Daniel:
"Vaimo, nimesi on: vaiti!"
Samalla aikoi hän antaa vaimo raukalle iskun, joka ei kuitenkaan

sattunut paikalleen, niin että hän pyyhkäsi vaan päähineen pois.
Sitten heittäytyi hän tyydytettynä vuoteelle heti kohta kuorsaten kuin
raihnaisen sotilaan vanha piippu. Vaimo hiipi kyökkiin, valvoakseen
lieden ääressä itkien läpi yön.
Siten kuluivat päivät päästään. Mies oli juovuksissa, vaimo rukoili,

riiteli, torasi — lyhyesti, koetti kaikkensa johtaakseen hänet pois
harhapolultaan; mutta lopuksi kävi aina niin, että Daniel herra pakotti
julmistuneena vaimonsa olemaan vaiti. Vaimo älysi nyt kuinka kaikki
oli turhaa, hän ei itkenyt eikä valittanut enää, vaikeni, kun mies
palasi myöhään öisin juopuneena kotiin. Mutta mies oli sillä välin jo
tottunut iltaripitykseen, niin ettei hän voinut olla ilman sitä ja alkoi
rähistä, kun hänen vaimonsa ei virkannut sanaakaan.
Niin kuluivat päivät, niin katosivat yhä vähemmiksi myöskin tavarat

ja vihdoin astui autioon tupaan tuhlaavaisuuden nälkäinen, ryysyinen
lapsi — hätä! Se hiipi sisään kutsumattomana vieraana ja oli pian
talon valtiatar; ja tämä tapahtui aikaan, jolloin rouva Csigolya tunsi,
että pian tulisi kolmas huolehdittavaksi, siellä missä kahdenkin täytyi
kärsiä puutetta…
"Tuli ja leimaus!" murisi Csigolya, kun hän kuuli lähestyvästä

isänonnesta. "Tuli ja leimaus! — Nyt en voi antaa eukolle enää
kunnollisesti selkäänkään, sillä se voisi olla sikiöparalle pahaksi,
eikähän se voi mitään sille, että hänen äitinsä on sellainen — —
sellainen — —"
Hän etsi kauvan oikeaa sanaa, mutta ei löytänyt, vaikka paljon

ajattelemisen tähden alkoi aivan ruveta hänen päätään
huimaamaan.
— Silloin ajautui hänen mieleensä kysymys, miksi hän oikeastaan

antoi vaimolleen selkään.
— Ja silloin hämärteli hänen mielessään tunnustus, että hän
oikeastaan oli itse syypää siihen. Hän päätti vastaisuudessa pysyä
kapakkasakista loitolla.
Ja hän piti sanansa, hän karttoi kapakkaa, mutta — ei kauvan…
Eräänä päivänä poltti jano jälleen kirveltävänä hänen kurkkuaan;

mielellään olisi hän tämän hehkun sammuttanut, mutta talossa ei
ollut enää mitään, jolla olisi saattanut suorittaa kustannukset.
Murheissaan tuijotti hän kohden taivasta, josta päivänterä
häikäisevänä säteili häntä vastaan.
"Ah", huusi hän, "voisinpa edes tuon auringon siepata taivaalta!

Heti tahtoisin sen myydä kilveksi parturi pahaselle, sillä hänen
entisensä onkin jo kurjan risainen. — Mitä tehdä? — Niin, mitä
tehdä? Saanhan kysyä, mutta kukapa minulle vastaisi! Minä
näännyn! — Sata dukaattia antaisin kunnollisesta viinikulauksesta tai
paremmin sanoen: en antaisi yhtä kulausta sadasta kultakolikosta.
— Jospa tietäisin suonissani virtaavan viiniä veren sijasta, avaisin ne
kahdestatoista kohden ja virkistäisin kurkkuani, viisi siitä, vaikka
silloin päättäisinkin päiväni. — — Ah, miksei minua ole luotu
viinitynnyriksi, tuollaiseksi kauniiksi, täpötäydeksi, sadan ämpärin
vetoiseksi viinitynnyriksi! Laupias vapahtaja, olisin jo tyytyväinen,
vaikkapa olisin edes kannunpullo; tai olisinpa vain tuollainen
savilautanenkaan, joka vetelehtii tynnyrin tapin alla! No, olisipa se
kylläkin alhainen asema! — Mutta yhdellä ehdolla: pian — heti
täytyisi sen tapahtua!"
Niin kuului herra Daniel Csigolyan surumielinen yksinpuhelu.

Hänen toiveensa muuttua viiniastiaksi, oli pettävä, hän pysyi sinä,
mikä oli, ainoastaan hänen janonsa tuli yhä tuntuvammaksi. — Hän
antoi katseensa, joka oli pelkkää toivoa ja epätoivoa, harhailla
yltympäri, eikö mistään keksisi mitään, mikä kelpaisi kapakassa
maksuksi tai pantiksi.
Ei mitään, ei kerrassaan mitään!
Huolellisesti penkoi hän kaikki taskunsa, vaikkakin hän tiesi, että

ne jo aikoja sitten olivat olleet vain tyhjää täytenään. Kentiesi olisi
sittenkin johonkin sopukkaan kätkeytynyt jokin kokoonrypistynyt
seteliraha.
Masentunein mielin antoi hän turhan etsinnän perästä käsiensä

vaipua.
Äkkiä juolahti hänen mieleensä aatos. Hän pani kätensä otsaansa

vasten ja napsutteli sormillaan.
"Nytpä tiedän! — Tänne lukko ovesta! Se on sitäpaitsi tarpeeton

siellä, missä ei ole mitään varastamista. — Daniel Csigolya, sinä olet
sentään kekseliäs mies!"
Hän etsi kirvestä toteuttaakseen aikomuksensa; hän unhotti aivan,

että tämä työkalu oli jo aikoja juotu. Hän etsi ja etsi, vieläpä
pöytälaatikostakin; vihdoin ryömi hän myös vuoteen alla. Siellä
pimeässä sinne tänne haparoidessaan, sattui hänen käteensä
pikkumytty, joka oli kätketty kaukaisempaan nurkkaan; hän veti sen
esille, katseli sitä kynttilänvalossa ja huudahti riemastuneena:
"Nyt en tarvitse lukkoa, se voi jäädä vastaiseksi, täksi päivää riittää

tämäkin! — Vaimoni juttelee naapurissa, voin sen siis häiritsemättä
viedä. Jos hän huomaa sen myöhemmin, niin kylläpähän hänestä
aina selvitään! — Muuten ei hän tarvitse tätä rääsyä enää. — — Ja
nyt: tule veli Dan!"
Pahaksi onneksi astui, juuri kun hän tarttui säppiin, hänen
vaimonsa tupaan.
"Minne sen kerällä?" kysyi hän hämmästyneenä.
"Ulos, hiukan tuulettamaan, vaimoseni. Vuoteen alla on liian

kosteaa, sehän voisi siellä kokonaan mädätä."
"Tuulettamaan! — Niin! — Kenties! kapakkaan! — Siitä ei tule

mitään, heti vaan tänne se! Se ei saa mennä toisten tietä. Siinä
astuin minä alttarin ääreen, siinä tahdon myös astua Jumalan eteen,
se oli morsiuspukuni ja pitää olla myös kuolinverhonani. — Oi! etten
tiennyt sitä paremmin kätkeä, sillä enhän olisi voinut ajatellakaan,
että nuuskit kaikki, sinä onneton!"
"Jos tahdot nähdä minut onnellisena, niin laita tie vapaaksi."
"Mene, mikäs estää, mutta pukuni jää tänne."
"Kiitos kaunis!"
"Kokonaisena ei se lähde käsistäni!"
"Vaimo! Tiedät, että saan sinua käskeä, koska olen sinun herrasi.
Mutta minä en käske, minä pyydän: Anna minulle puku! Pyydän
sinulta, rakas, hyvä Sofie."
"En!"
"Vielä kerran pyydän sitä sinulta."
"En, en!"
"Ja viimeisen kerran pyydän minä".

Vaimo ei antanut mitään vastausta, vaan tarttui yhä lujemmin
myttyyn, jonka hän oli temmannut mieheltään.
"Vihoviimeisen kerran, Sofie!"
"Turhaan!"
"Koska kaikki on turhaa: Tuoss' on!"
Samalla löi hän vaimoraukkaa vasten kasvoja, niin että tämä

kaatui takaperin. Mies sieppasi pudonneen mytyn ja kiiruhti
kapakkaan.
Silloinkos riemu alkoi!
Viini virtaili kuin olisi hän saanut sen ilmaiseksi. Herra Daniel
päätti, ettei hän ennen nouse pöydästä, ennenkuin on juonut koko
morsiusleningin hinnan suuhunsa.
Mies piti sanansa!
Kun taskut ja pullot olivat tyhjentyneet, toikkaroi hän laulaen kotia

kohden. Tiellä alkoi hän tanssia, mutta ryhtyi siihen pahimmalla
paikalla, suuren lammikon rannalla, jossa sikojen oli tapana rypeä.
Tanssinpyörteessä kadotti hän pian vaivalla pitämänsä tasapainon,
hän putosi syvänteeseen, ja kun yövahti hänet huomasi ja veti ylös,
oli hän jo lammikossa tukehtunut.
Vartija laahasi ruumiin asuntoon, missä vaimo oli tunti sitte antanut
elämän lapselle.
Pimeässä tuvassa oli nyt kolme: kuollut isä, pikku poika, jonka
elämä oli juuri alkanut ja äiti, joka horjui elämän ja kuoleman välillä…
Leski hautautti miehensä ja kastatti lapsen. Hänet nimitettiin
Martiksi. Tästä menevä maksu papille oli aivan hyödytön menoerä,
sillä elämän keväässä eivät toiset lapset kuitenkaan nimittäneet
poikaa muuksi kuin "punaiseksi koiraksi", ja myöhemmin, kun hän
vanheni, tunnettiin hänet vain nimeltä "Papurikko". — Jokainen
lyönti, jonka hänen äitinsä ennen pojan syntymistä oli tämän isältä
saanut, oli merkittyinä hänen kasvoihinsa, joiden oikea puoli oli
hehkuvalla punalla peitetty.
"Mene sinne missä on — Papurikko!" —
"Kammoan häntä kuin — Papurikkoa!" —
"Välitän hänestä yhtä vähän kuin — Papurikosta!" —
"Suutelonko tahdot? — Suutele — Papurikkoa!" —
"Ja niin edelleen! Ja niin edelleen! — Papurikko!" —
Se oli puheenpartena kylässä, kaiken epämieluisen

ilmaisumuotona…
Monen ihmisen elämän täyttää tuska ja kurjuus. Mutta jokaisella

on kuitenkin aika, lapsuuden päivät, jotka ovat onnelliset, riemun
päivät, joiden muistoihin ajatus palaa niin mielellään kuin pääskyset
syksyn kolkkoina päivinä aurinkoiseen etelään.
Martilla ei ollut tätäkään aikaa; hänen lapsuuttaan ei mikään

valokohta kirkastanut enempää kuin myöhempiäkään päiviä. Pojat
eivät tahtoneet leikkiä hänen kanssaan, he antoivat hänen joko
seistä syrjässä tahi ajoivat pois; silloin oli hänen tapana juosta kotiin
itkien äidilleen välittääkseen, kuinka hän oli kaikkien tiellä. Ja äiti
puristi hänet sydäntään vasten ja itki hänen kerallaan…
Kouluvuosina oli vielä tuskaisempaa.
Kukaan ei tahtonut ottaa "punaista koiraa" naapurikseen ja kun

opettaja hänelle vihdoin määräsi paikan, kiusasivat ja pilkkasivat
pojat häntä niin, että hän sen mielellään jätti; hän sai paikkansa
viimeisimmässä penkissä ja etäisimmässä nurkassa. Kun joku
häiritsi opetuksen rauhaa jutellen tahi vinkasten ja opettaja vihaisena
etsi syyllistä, niin osotettiin Marttia aina yksimielisesti pahantekijäksi;
se oli aika riemu, kun hän sitten viattomana kärsi kipeän kurituksen,
joka häntä kuitenkin vähemmän piinasi kuin selkäsaunat ja
herjaukset, joita hän sai tovereiltaan…
Miehensä kuoleman jälkeen vetäytyi rouva Csigolya omaisuutensa

vähäpätöisten jäännösten kanssa veljensä, kylänsepän luo, joka oli
vanhapoika; ystävällisesti otti hän vastaan nuoremman sisarensa ja
tämän pojan. — Kukaan ei tiennyt, miksi hyvinvoipa mestariseppä oli
jäänyt naimattomaksi; juorukellot tosin kertoivat, ettei kukaan tyttö
tahtonut ottaa häntä, mutta se oli vaan tyhjää puhetta, sillä ei ollut
ainoatakaan todistusta siitä, milloin hän olisi oikeastaan koettanut
kosia…
*****
Martti oli kahdentoista vanha, kun hänen enonsa sanoi hänen

äidilleen: "Sisar Sofia, kuinka pojan tulee nyt käymään? Tuleeko
hänestä renki vai ajuri?"
"Sitä en voi sanoa", vastasi rouva. "Hänen isänsä oli

käsityöläinen" samalla huokasi hän — "voisi kai hänestäkin se tulla."
"Sitä minäkin luulen ja siksi tahdoinkin asiasta puhella kanssasi.

Olisi kai parhainta, että opettaisin hänelle ammattini; kun
myöhemmin erkanen työstä tahi kun kuolen, voi hän ottaa pajan
haltuunsa. Poika parka! En rakasta häntä liioin, mutta säälin häntä ja
siksi tahdon hankkia hänelle toimeentulon, ettei hän olisi
tulevaisuudessa määrätty ihmisten armoille, sillä siinä tapauksessa
täytyisi hänen kuolla nälkään. Muuten onkin hän työhön sopiva,
ponteva ja voimakas kuin Herkules. Ja jos häneltä joskus puuttuu
hiiliä, tarvitsee hänen vaan asettaa rauta poskelleen, niin se tulee
hehkuvaksi. Hahaha!" —
"Hannu", sanoi rouva alakuloisena, "miksi teet sinäkin pilkkaa

raukasta. Eikö siinä ole kylliksi, että hän on koko kylän
pilkkatauluna!"
"No, no! Pieni pila ei lyönyt läpeä pääkoppaan!"
Mestari Hannukin kuului niihin, jotka hyväntekeväisyydestään

mielellään kantavat pienen koron, joka vähentää lahjan arvoa…
Seuraavana päivänä erkani Martti koulusta, mikä oli hänestä

mieluista. Kirjojen sijaan otti hän vasaran käteensä, sillä mitäpä
hyödyttikään turha päänvaiva. Eihän hänestä olisi kumminkaan tullut
pappia, vaikkapa olisikin istunut kirjojen ääressä päivät päästään.
Nyt vasta huomasi hän, mikä voima piili hänen jäsenissään.
"Hei! Olisinpa tiennyt ennemmin, kuinka vahva olen", puheli hän

itsekseen, "niin olisin hankkinut jo aikoja rauhan itselleni!" Ja
vihaisena löi hän rautaa kuin olisi se ollut hänen tuskiinsa syypää…
Kylän lapset rakastivat pajoja! Tuntikausia vetelehtivät he siellä,

ilokseen kuunnellen palkeen pauhinaa ja vasaran kalsketta ja
katsellen hehkuvaa rautaa, jonka kipenet joka lyönnillä täyttivät
ilman, ikäänkuin metalli olisi suuttunut kovan painon tähden. —
Mestari Hannun pajalle eivät pojat tulleet ainoastaan uteliaisuudesta,
mutta melkein yksinomaan pilkatakseen ja haukkuakseen Marttia. —
"Pojat, katsokaas, kuinka musta ja likainen hän on; punaisesta

koirasta on tullut musta piru!" huusi joku joukosta.
"Nyt on hän kauniimpi kuin ennen!" pilkkasi toinen.
"Mutta noki ei peitä hyvin. Mustan alta paistaa punainen

irvinaama!"
"Menkää tiehenne, tai viivyttelijä voi katua!" huusi Martti.
Mutta pojat nauroivat ja menivät ilkeydessään yhä pitemmälle,

kunnes Martti kadotti kärsivällisyytensä. Kädessään kanki, jota hän
Juuri takoi, syöksyi hän vintiöiden joukkoon ja alkoi huimia, jotta he
epäilemättä olisivat menneet mäsäksi, jolleivät olisi olleet
lujempitekoisia kuin muutaman pojan jalka, jonka hän löi poikki; hän
liikkaa vielä tänäkin päivänä…
Pitkiin aikoihin ei kukaan uskaltanut lähestyä pajaa, jokainen

pelkäsi hänen tanakoita jäseniään; kuukauden perästä oli löylytys
kuitenkin unohtunut ja pilkkasanat satelivat taas.
Martti kiskotti särkynyttä vaununreunaa, kun lurjukset taas

saapuivat ja räkyttivät pahemmin kuin koskaan.
"Hiljaa!" tiuskasi hän huimapäille.
Ivanauru oli vastaus! — Yhä karvaammiksi kävivät pistopuheet,

kunnes Martti, riehuen raivoissaan, heitti hehkuvan raudan erään
pojan kasvoihin. Kauhistuneena hajaantui poikasakki.
"Mene!" huusi Martti, "mene, kanna sinäkin Jumalanmerkkiäsi! —
Ja jos eksyt, löydetään sinut kyllä polttomerkistäsi!"…
Tämä tapaus saattoi Martille paljon pahaa, mutta myöskin hyvää,

sillä yksikään pojista ei uskaltanut häntä enää pilkata…
Kuusi vuotta kului; jokainen karttoi Marttia ja hän jokaista!
Työpäivinä oli hän työssään ja juhlahetkinä sekä lepopäivinä pysyi

hän kotona. Ainoastaan sunnuntaisin meni hän kirkkoon, kumminkin
siihen aikaan, jolloin kaikki kyläläiset olivat jo menneet sisään; hän
asettui pimeään nurkkaan, oven viereen, ja kun pappi oli lausunut
aamenen, kiiruhti hän ulos ja oli jo kotona, kun toiset vasta lähtivät
kirkosta. Iltapäivin, kun oppipojat huvittelivat kirkkoniityllä pallosilla
tai muilla leikeillä, istui hän äitinsä luona tupasessa ja luki hänelle
raamattua. Tämä lukeminen ei tosin häntä suuresti huvittanut, mutta
hän kärsi mielellään ikävääkin, kun siten voi hankkia äidilleen iloa,
hänelle, joka häntä niin hellästi rakasti, ja oli ainoa kaikkien
joukossa, joka ei koskaan ollut lausunut hänelle pahaa sanaa…
Myöskin Martin kuusi oppivuotta kuluivat, hän suoritti

opinnäytteensä ja — oli kisälli!
Tärkeä käännekohta käsityöläiselämässä!
Suurempi on oppilaan riemu, suurempi hänen ylpeytensä sälliksi

päästessään kuin sällin, suoritettuaan mestarinäytteensä ja
päästyään mestariksi. Martti Csigolyakin tunsi tätä onnea. "Nyt on
minusta kumminkin tullut toinen mies", ajatteli hän. "En ole enää
poika, vaan nuorukainen, en renki, vaan vapaa kisälli. Kun nyt
saavun ihmisten luo, ei kai kukaan uskalla tehdä sitä, mitä he ovat
tehneet hyljätylle, avuttomalle pojalle. Niin — tuskinpa he tuota

Chinese Urban Shi Nema Cinematicity Society and Millennial China David H Fleming Full Chapter PDF

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Chinese Urban Shi Nema Cinematicity Society and Millennial China David H Fleming Full Chapter PDF

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Chinese Urban Shi-nema: Cinematicity,

Society and Millennial China David H.

Living with the Party: How Leisure Shaped a New China

The Theory of Guanxi and Chinese Society Jack Barbalet

Wanghong as Social Media Entertainment in China

The Rise of China and International Law: Taking Chinese

The Insurgent's Dilemma David H. Ucko

Urbanization and Urban Governance in China: Issues,

The University and the Global Knowledge Society David

Urban Chinese Daughters 1st ed. Edition Patricia

David H. Fleming · Simon Harrison

“Fleming and Harrison have produced a deftly-written psychogeography of the

ISBN 978-3-030-49674-6 ISBN 978-3-030-49675-3 (eBook)

Getting Started: And Learning from Our Students

After spending the best part of a decade marking Chinese undergradu-

Fig. 1 Wedding shoots at DongQian Lake, Ningbo

were eroding in contemporary China. Channelling Baudrillard she con-

witness to an unfolding mutation in the relationship between subjectivity

Stirling, UK David H. Fleming

(from 2010 to 2017): Paul Gladstone, Stephen Quinn, Adrian Hadland,

2 Shi-Story and Theory 31

3 Commercial Overground Shi-Nema: Some Notes on

4 In-dependent Art Shi-Nema: Decomposing the Main

5 Transnational Sci-Fi Shi-nema: Or, Diary Notes from

6 Shi-Nematic Games (Casino Capitalism)185

7 Epilogue: Disneyfied Dreamwork Shi-nema—Tracing a

Fig. 3.1 Approach to the salesroom 73

Fig. 5.5 Captured website image: “UNNC recognized as one of

© The Author(s) 2020 1

attendant mnemonic practices have radically reshaped modern life and

Notes Towards a Method

instead make reference to Berardi’s present-day work for an altogether

Notes on Terminology 1: Films and “The Cinema”

reproduced the cultural imaginary so that “the cinema” increasingly

idea developed by the formalist Soviet filmmaker and film-philosopher

Notes Towards a Vertiginous Method

Reproduction” that watching film led to “profound changes in the apper-

collapsing together of a rapid pull of focus (typically using wide-angle

Of course, in the language of contemporary physics or continental phi-

“socio-cultural artefact” that provides the material conditions for contem-

What I am suggesting is a model of the relations between bodies and cities

A series of different assemblage interfaces in millennial Ningbo become

What is more, if in the Western context the coming together of urban

On the State of a City

pertinent problems facing us when trying to conceptually define what a

And while the memory-form of the city is important to what follows,

become recognised as one of China’s “new first-tier cities” (see e.g.

Brown and O’Brien’s isolation of an architectural space as an ethno-

Structure of Approach and Synopsis of Chapters

Experiencing like breathing is a rhythm of intaking and outgivings. Their

Deleuze’s Cinema 1 (2005a) and Cinema 2 (2005b) also allows us to

researchers and students in the context of education ideologies, language

increasingly normalised landscape that exposes economic disparities, men-

defamiliarising practices (see e.g. Brewster 1996; Schlunke and Brewster

Baudrillard, J. (2014). The Matrix Decoded. In R. G. Smith & D. B. Clarke

Guattari, F. (1984). The Plane of Consistency in Molecular Revolution. New York:

Thrift, N. (2008). Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London:

Shi-Story and Theory

© The Author(s) 2020 31

Title: Papurikko-valakka. Ukkovaari

Author: Sándor Petőfi

Translator: Meri Sulju

Release date: September 5, 2023 [eBook #71573]

Stirling, UK David H. Fleming

2 Shi-Story and Theory 31

3 Commercial Overground Shi-Nema: Some Notes on

4 In-dependent Art Shi-Nema: Decomposing the Main

5 Transnational Sci-Fi Shi-nema: Or, Diary Notes from

6 Shi-Nematic Games (Casino Capitalism)185

7 Epilogue: Disneyfied Dreamwork Shi-nema—Tracing a

Fig. 3.1 Approach to the salesroom 73