China as Cultural Hyperobject

About to land in China.

Some notes.

- Schedule stays the same (4:30AM wake to 8-830PM bedtime)

- Diet stays the same but have to find alternatives to Amazon

- No cell-phone policy stays the same (some workarounds)

One of my goals is to be careful about adding to the cultural hyperobject that is “China” as many of us perceive it. It is a place with over a billion individuals that we simply don’t have the cognitive machinery to process. It's a hyperobject because it is viscous, and it feels omnipresent. But this is mainly a consequence of our cognition. We typically use such cultural hyperobjects to get a grasp on vast entities. It’s why we are able to say weird statements like China has x characteristic. Or America has this type of personality. We can anthropomorphise even the largest of entities. But we must know that understanding doesn’t really work this way.

It is the case, that members of large groups most mostly imagine the rest of the community, hence why perceived solidarity is so important along with the news that keeps us up to date on these imagined communities.

China is many things including a process, culture, country, presentation, for many people and things (nonhumans) and not just any one of these. It isn't a deterministic system; you can’t go and look at a few components within it and gain a good summary of how it works.

In fact, any statement we might say about such a large entity (time / space) is likely to be somewhat true. But then we run into the law of the excluded middle. Probability gets us closer since we can talk about averages but this collapses the nuance and the narratives we layover averages often doesn’t reflect the actual distribution.

It should be clear that my two months (or 20 years for that matter) in China will not give me “true” clarity on China. It’s not only over Dunbar’s number, it is also isn’t one thing; it can be defined in an infinite amount of ways, and surely if I surveyed people without closing down the categories, I’d get nearly as many definitions. Lastly, I am always and already in symbiosis with it, just as I always have been. The cultural hyperobject itself, as well as the actual people and things “within” it.

Goals:

- Probe my relation to the cultural hyperobject

- Learn a version of patchwork on Mandarin

- Individuate everyone I meet ( good trick is to stay for more than a split second to avoid cognitive shortcuts )

Hyperobjects - Timothy Morton.

Imagined Communities - Benedict Anderson.