Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Imagining Chinese Cities
- 1 Speed and Spectacle in Chinese Cities
- 2 Planned Demi-monde and its Aestheticisation in Singapore
- 3 Coming of Age in RMB City
- 4 The Architecture of Utopia: From Rem Koolhaas’ Scale Models to RMB City
- 5 Imagining a Disappearing and Reappearing Chinese City
- 6 Tuning Urban China
- 7 The City's (Dis)appearance in Propaganda
- 8 Claiming the Past, Presenting the Present, Selling the Future: Imagining a New Beijing, Great Olympics
- 9 Shanghai in Film and Literature: The Danger of Nostalgia
- 10 Nostalgia, Place, and Making Peace with Modernity in East Asia
- 11 Femme Fatales and Male Narcissists: Shanghai Spectacle Narrated, Packaged and Sold
- 12 City Regeneration and Its Opposition
- 13 Law, Embodiment, and the Case of ‘Harbourcide’
- Contributors
- Index
3 - Coming of Age in RMB City
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Imagining Chinese Cities
- 1 Speed and Spectacle in Chinese Cities
- 2 Planned Demi-monde and its Aestheticisation in Singapore
- 3 Coming of Age in RMB City
- 4 The Architecture of Utopia: From Rem Koolhaas’ Scale Models to RMB City
- 5 Imagining a Disappearing and Reappearing Chinese City
- 6 Tuning Urban China
- 7 The City's (Dis)appearance in Propaganda
- 8 Claiming the Past, Presenting the Present, Selling the Future: Imagining a New Beijing, Great Olympics
- 9 Shanghai in Film and Literature: The Danger of Nostalgia
- 10 Nostalgia, Place, and Making Peace with Modernity in East Asia
- 11 Femme Fatales and Male Narcissists: Shanghai Spectacle Narrated, Packaged and Sold
- 12 City Regeneration and Its Opposition
- 13 Law, Embodiment, and the Case of ‘Harbourcide’
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
From the start of the book, where Li Guangtou spies on Lin Hong's buttocks, to his real father's death by drowning after also spying on women in the public toilet, to the ferocity of Li Guangtou's sexual desire and his early maturity, to his virgin beauty contest, his promiscuity, his vasectomy, the peddling of hymens, the obscenity of the cigarette-smoking factory manager, to Song Gang selling virility pills and breast-enhancement cream, to the blacksmith Tong visiting prostitutes, all the tales of the cripples, idiots, mutes and blind people at the social welfare workshop – all this is disguised as an ironic exposé of reality, but in fact it is only an enticement of the grossest kind. The book simply panders to the tastes of the lower type of reader for spectacle and voyeurism.
– Cang Lang, Pulling Yu Hua's TeethThe spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.
– Guy Debord, The Society of the SpectacleThe ‘Integrated Spectacle’
As Cang Lang's fury mounts, he creates a spectacle. Readers cannot but be entertained by the critic's breathless litany of the titillating events he lambasts in Yu Hua's bestselling novel, Brothers (兄弟, 2005a: 2005b). Funnier still is his frustrated attempt to extricate himself from the voyeuristic practices of spectacular society. As Guy Debord remarked in 1988, reflecting back on his 1967 opus, The Society of the Spectacle, ‘That modern society is a society of spectacle now goes without saying […] What is so droll, however, is that all the books which do analyze this phenomenon, usually to deplore it, must sacrifice themselves to the spectacle if they’re to become known’ (Debord 1998: 5).
In The Society of the Spectacle Debord analysed the transformation of societies organised around production into those organised by the late capitalist consumption of ‘an immense accumulation of spectacles’. ‘Spectacle’ for Debord was a complex term that referred to a media society organised around the consumption of images, commodities, and staged events and to the vast institutional and technical apparatus that relegates subjects to passivity. Debord's basic claim is that what we see in the world – how the world is architected – is a reflection of triumphant ideologies (Gilman-Opalsky 2010: 120).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Spectacle and the CityChinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture, pp. 43 - 60Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013