November 13, 2006
weltsystemangst
Monday is a great day of the week to be living in China. There's something nicely easygoing about it. You've got at least a good 13 hours on the United States; you can catch up on work, fill people's inboxes for their Monday morning, and feel generally virtuous about being so productive when back at home they're still lazing around at the end of a Sunday.
This remarkable passage begins a Slate "diary" by Deborah Fallows, written from Shanghai. The weeklong travel journal takes as its opening gambit the consideration of how it feels to be a good worker. It might be understood as a sort of meditation of a maxim of Adorno's — "Every Sunday is too little Sunday" — but with the values reversed. Adorno wrote:
The consciousness of the unfreedom of all existence, which the pressure of the demands of commerce, and thus unfreedom itself, does not allow to appear, emerges first in the intermezzo of freedom. The nostalgie du dimanche is not a longing for the working week, but for the state of being emancipated from it; Sunday fails to satisfy, not because it is a day off work, but because its own promise is felt directly as unfulfilled; like the English one, every Sunday is too little Sunday. The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
It turns out that, in Shanghai, Sundays are satisfying — exactly because every Sunday is too much Sunday, and allows one better to keep up with (and, for a phantasmal moment, race ahead of) "the pressure of the demands of commerce." (Here we can't help but recall the Soviet science fiction novel translated as Monday Begins on Saturday).
The caricature of Marxist lit-crit's discoveries — that all writing these days (a couple centuries worth of days) is in some way about work — seems no longer caricatural, but merely quaint: why bother reading for the drama of labor, as opposed to, say, the emotional life of the characters, when these have become one and the same? Moreover, given that this confluence has not just perfected itself but fled the subtext for the text — rendering the concept of, say "the political unconscious" all but moot — why do we need literary criticism at all, anymore? In this passage we find an achieved position of such ideological purity that ideological analysis can be retired.
If any curiosity survives in Fallows' text, it's the seeming lack of specificity. After all, the diary is presumably somehow about Shanghai, cosmopolitan center of the new China. For the purposes of her unfolding of the conditions of her sense of wellbeing, it would seem that any spot in the time zone would do: Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Perth. The solution to this polite puzzle comes swiftly; the above-quoted passage is merely the first half of the first paragraph of the first day's report. It completes itself thus:
But as the end of the day approaches, and no one in the United States is awake yet, a bit of anxiety can set it. The camp counselor in me wants to cry out, "OK, gang, up and at 'em! There are 1.3 billion Chinese who are already a day ahead of you!"
If there is any figure of speech in the entire paragraph, it's the term, "camp counselor." For surely she means foreman, or manager, or factory whistle. But of course she can name everything but her specific job; to do that would be to see it as something limited, something she occasionally is not.
That one displacement aside, the motion of the thinking remains extraordinarily clear about its location. For not only does she identify herself and her happiness perfectly with her fate as pure labor (and isn't happiness, these days, always based on the success of that identification?), but she swiftly moves to identify her specific labor with its general place within, and contribution to, the world economy.
And this is the truly revelatory move — revelatory not in the least, again, because of how consciously and unproblematically it happens. This is why the report comes from China, and it's not simply nationalism in some abstract, patriotic form. One finds oneself in Shanghai, the laboratory and showroom floor of China's race toward becoming the leading regime of accumulation on the face of the globe. Every detail of Shanghai speaks of it, of the race forward; the pockets within the city of of foot-dragging tradition, in their charming difference, speak with equal force of the same race. These details, the sensuous here and now of it, serve to orient you in Shanghai no more and or less than they orient you to your place in the space of flows, the world economy. This is what it means to be a "traveler." To be a world citizen, albeit a world citizen of the managerial class, tied to the currency of the United States.
The anxiety of having to pay the rent, having to show up for work on Monday, is now only a start. There is a new anxiety into which that anxiety now hemorrhages. It's no longer enough to find relief in being always at work; that sense fades over the long Sunday. One must place that work and experience its sufficiency within the space of flows, within the interlocking, competing and colluding organizations of interstatal politics and transnational capital. And this knowledge comes with a price: weltsystemangst, "world system anxiety."
It would not be unreasonable to suggest that this sensation, this happiness that is always melting and resolving itself into weltsystemangst, is an echo of 2001, of the hole punched in the United States' horizon of sight so that it must look uneasily across the map — a view mostly banished after 1989. Indeed, Deborah Fallows' motion from "nicely easygoing" to "a bit of anxiety" begins to narrate something like weltsystemaffekt from the position of the United States over the years 1989-present, ending in this new feeling, this tomorrow-yesterday, this new Sunday of the world.
Posted by jane at November 13, 2006 07:50 PM | TrackBack