“Strange Loops in Shanghai Time” by Conor Dawson
Year 1
In his cryptic e-book essay, Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time, the controversial philosopher Nick Land observes how real life and science fiction have converged in Shanghai. With a skittish intensity, Land describes this convergence in imaginative terms: “for over a century (but less than two) Shanghai Capitalism – despite dramatic interruption – has been building a real time machine.” To theorize this emergent temporal dimension of Shanghai, Land’s essay uses Rian Johnson’s 2012 science-fiction film Looper as a springboard. I have not seen Looper in a long time, besides one scene which I watch over and over. As far as I can remember, the film involves time-travelling gangsters in Kansas and so-called loopers, assassins who execute the orders of these time-travelling gangsters for bars of silver or gold. Conscientious and keen to cover up all traces of these time crimes, the gangsters eventually send the future assassin back in time to be murdered by his younger self. So it is that Joseph Gordon-Levitt stands in a field waiting “to close the loop” when an older version of himself played by Bruce Willis appears. Aspects of the film resonated with me, particularly what Land styles the film’s “Sino-Futurism.” Go east, young man, is basically the advice which Levitt receives from his time-travelling boss. After watching Looper, I became more receptive to similar pieces of advice, even if they were not voiced by time-travelling gangsters.
Ultimately, for Land, Shanghai becomes a city of the future because of the preservation of its variegated past: the premodern gardens and temples, modern housing blocks – the iconic lilongs and longtangs – and the modernist art deco of the International Settlement stand alongside the neomodern high-rises of international finance. Land’s term “templexity” describes the way in which these multiple times converge upon each other, the way in which we seem to loop through districts of time when we wander the streets of Shanghai.
*
The first time I visit Shanghai, I get lost. It’s Christmas, or Christmas Eve. I fly out from Hong Kong with my girlfriend at the time, Melody; her parents are Chinese, but she grew up in Australia. Stranded somewhere between the hyphen of her compound identity, she managed to forget most of her Mandarin during secondary school and university. Then she moved to Hong Kong and learned Cantonese. Dinner with her family used to require a complex set of translations which at the time made little sense to me.
To counter my fear of flying, I drop some off-brand benzodiazepine before boarding the flight. The bland, metallic taste of relief knocks me out. I blink and wake up in a kind of sleepwalk, mouth dry, disoriented, in Pudong International Airport long past midnight. We’re following the signs for a taxi stand; outside, Melody negotiates a price into the city in rudimentary Mandarin with a man who claims to be a taxi driver. Still dopey from benzodiazepine, the outskirts of the city strobe past in flashes of red light. As we approach the city itself, time passes smoothly, like the digital text on the surfaces of the looming skyscrapers of Lujiazui. We arrive at our Airbnb, an overpriced closet loft, and I blink into another sleep.
The next morning at our second Airbnb, a slightly bigger closet loft in Tianzifang, the ayi apologizes for the acidic smell of sick. Last night, two girls from Guangdong hit the baijiu and blacked out. Olfactory memories of the night before taint the air of the apartment for the entirety of our stay.
We spend the next few days wandering tree-lined streets, undeterred by the cold and rain. Together, happy in our own way.
On our second afternoon, we walk a 15-kilometre loop of the city. Tracing our steps backwards, we move from the Long Bar at the Waldorf Astoria on the Bund to the Museum of Contemporary Art in People’s Park to the former residence of Sun Yat-sen on Xiangshan Lu to our Airbnb in Tianzifang. On this loop of the city, we get lost several times, but an enjoyable kind of lost. We have nowhere to be, so it doesn’t bother us. Early evening finds us on the Bund, the Custom House bells ringing behind us. A gentle reminder that time passes, even as we pause to stare at the murky surface of the river and the futuristic cityscape of Lujiazui.
*
We enjoy our trip to Shanghai. So much so that upon return to Hong Kong, we begin to plan our move to Shanghai. Initially Melody is enthusiastic, despite her family’s difficult history in mainland China. Nine months later, I leave for Shanghai. Unlike Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in Looper, I arrive without an impressive stash of 100-yuan notes; just like Levitt’s character, I arrive alone.
Year 3
The second time I drop acid in Shanghai, I’m in the Botanical Gardens. It’s late October or early November; grey and cold in equal measure. Beyond the tree-lined perimeter of the park, the streetlights flicker on and tint the mist a shade of sepia. I watch a large flock of birds swarm the sky; they spiral and swerve overhead, diverging in clusters, later looping back to converge. By the time I leave the gardens, night drops. The temperature soon follows. At the riverfront, it’s even colder. I struggle against a sudden onset of nausea. A text from a good friend comes in over WeChat. He’s looking for someone to sub-in for a double date. The girl, Amy, is cute, he tells me. But the letters of the text message start to move against the green chat-box on my phone, the way digital text on the skin of a skyscraper might. I decline as politely as I can. After another pulse of nausea, I decide to walk to the Bund, a roughly 15-kilometre journey from my current location.
Over the next five hours, I follow the river northwards along the Xuhui Waterfront, the wind hounding down on top of me. The tactile chill of trance music inspires me to drop another tab in a public toilet along the riverfront. Later, the lights of the buildings across the river flare up, become fire-like, despite the cold. The moon doubles, divides itself. I listen to Ariana Grande’s “I’m So Into You” on a loop for several hours, the electropop melody vivid, kind, and sensuous, the algorithmically generated suggestions for my Xiami music app still quite confused from a previous loop.
Later again, I get lost. Long past midnight, I shelter in a 7-Eleven to escape the cold air. I watch the confectionery take on an otherworldly aura. The teenager behind the till doesn’t seem to mind me sitting around, idly listening to Ariana Grande. To my side, some young lad in his early twenties stares into his phone. Absorbed in his game of Candy Crush, or whatever, he doesn’t seem to notice me. From the teenager’s perspective behind the till, we’re probably not so different.
Outside again, back by the riverfront, I strike up a conversation with a security guard. In rudimentary Mandarin, I tell him that I think Shanghai is a great city. He smiles and asks why I am walking around at night by myself. Then he offers me a cup of hot water, tells me that my Chinese is good, even though it is not. I ask him how far away the Bund is. He laughs, tells me that it is too far to walk. Before we part ways, he suggests that I get a taxi.
Year 6
During my two years in Shanghai, I devise a series of loops. One such loop involves cycling from my apartment in Xuhui along the West Bund and back through the tree-lined streets of the former French Concession. Other loops involve walking from the Bund to Tianzifang to Xuhui and back to the Bund. I come to associate Shanghai with a light wind gusting off the surface of the river, the sound of the Custom House bells at my back: a reminder not only of the passage of time, but of a past time preserved in the present.
Year 10
The first time I drop acid in Shanghai, I am strolling along West Nanjing Road. A Saturday afternoon, late April or early May, humid and crowded in equal measure. After awkwardly tonguing the tab for 40 minutes, I dispose of it in the basement toilet of an upmarket shopping mall. A Gucci and Prada kind of place. For the next eight hours, I wander in a rough circle stretching from West Nanjing Road to the Bund and back. As the first waves of hallucinations and euphoria break, I happen upon People’s Park. By the pond outside of the Museum of Contemporary Art, I watch waterlilies turn impressionist. As the waterlilies dapple and blossom across the surface of the pond, I remember that I have been here before. That day we got lost, we saw an exhibition inside. For an hour or two, we wandered around the exhibition, happy in our own way.
I walk a slow loop of the pond, anti-clockwise, watching the impressionist waterlilies multiply. Soon, they cover the surface of the pond.
*
The Chinese novelist Ning Ken notes that “because time is going too fast, China’s cities are now strange things. They all look exactly alike, as if they were a series of exact computer copies.” Such comments remind me of the work of Shanghai-born visual artist Yang Yongliang, particularly his work from 2014, Artificial Wonderland II: Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, which we saw at the exhibition. This dystopic vision of the future effectively blends Song dynasty landscape painting with hypermodern skyscrapers, each a replication of the last. The layering of traditional painting and modern photography suggests some of the paradoxical aspects of contemporary China, simultaneously traditional and technological. Ghostly high-rises tower over the humpbacked hills of dynasties past. In Land’s terms, we seem to glimpse a form of templexity. Or, to interpret the painting with one of Land’s much more contentious theories, we seem to glimpse the results of accelerationism: the entire landscape now a record of social collapse brought about by the speed of technological development. Though where Land advocates this acceleration, Yang Yongliang might be said to implicitly urge a slowdown.
Elsewhere in that same essay, Ning Ken notes that due to the development of the internet in China, there is an instantaneous textualizing of experience. Information is almost a part of the landscape of contemporary China. Again, the work of Yang Yongliang is illustrative in this regard. The densely layered digital collage, From the New World of 2014, presents a natural landscape defamiliarized by technology. The 26-foot-wide collage captures the vastness of an urban future which stands superimposed over the vastness of a fading naturalistic past. This natural world is soon set to become a memory, as ethereal as the mist which stalks the background of the collage. High-rises seem to blend into the backdrop of mountains. Cranes and transmission towers stand atop these vertigo-inducing peaks. This landscape might be in the process of constructing itself, powered by the autonomous transmission towers. The collage almost suggests that humanity has constructed a landscape which no longer needs any human presence: the massive collage is as devoid of people as it is of colour. Conceptually, this interpretation is again close to some of Land’s more controversial pronouncements. One of Land’s aphoristic prophecies has it that “nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”
There is a narcotic intensity to Land’s writing which predates his arrival in the accelerationist capital of the twenty-first century, Shanghai. Trendy terms from critical theory madlib themselves alongside the imperatives of old avant-garde manifestos – the machine-obsessed Futurists in particular – while, occasionally, depersonalized alter egos ghost across the page. His blogpost “A Dirty Joke” recalls one such alter ego’s experiments with “the sacred substance amphetamine.” According to the narrator of the piece, “after perhaps a year of fanatical abuse it [the alter ego] was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane.” Towards the end, the narrator recounts a disintegration into “depressive nihilism” and “spiritual nausea.”
Land’s Templexity retains elements of this madness. Delirious abstractions drawn from his obsessive engagement with critical theory and cybernetics fuse with an eccentric interpretation of Looper and a kind of psychogeography. Despite the imprint of Land’s earlier madness, his descriptions of Shanghai and templexity resonate with the schizophrenic experience of living amid contemporary China’s acceleration, similarly expressed by Ning Ken and Yang Yongliang in their work.
Living in Shanghai, one can even sympathize with aspects of Land’s accelerationism. The daily flows of such a futuristic city lead naturally enough to anxieties regarding a techno-dystopian future. Actually desiring that this techno-dystopian future be accelerated forward into the present remains an entirely different matter; such accelerationist desires have influenced recent politics, however. In an article titled, “Nick Land: The Alt-writer (My PhD Supervisor Turned Out to Be Satan),” Nicholas Blincoe details how Land and his accelerationism have become philosophical grounding for the likes of Steve Bannon and his white supremacist ilk. While Bannon probably did not read Land during his stint in the White House, Bannon’s worldview at times echoes tenets of accelerationism; this is the nature of accelerationist thought; it moves quickly. What starts as self-consciously erudite and esoteric philosophy ends up as alt-right soundbites on Breitbart by way of red-pill Reddit. Another of Land’s aphorisms, “democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself,” could well be restyled as QAnon clickbait.
A more sober reply to the central assertion of accelerationism – that technology is moving too fast but should be sped up anyway – would be to slow down. But decelerationism does not sound as catchy. A parodic “Decelerate Manifesto” wryly notes that: “Decelerationists enjoy things like books, nice walks, and a hot cup of tea.” It sounds trite, and the truth often is, especially in the age of irony. The solution to that is to do as it says: go on a walk, look at flowers. If that’s still not enough, do it while on acid.
*
Later that night at the peak of my trip, I slouch up against a set of concrete steps towards the north end of the Bund and watch the lights of Lujiazui seethe in time to the music playing on my phone. Perplexed by the sudden, erratic switch in my musical taste – from heavy metal to light rock and electropop – the Xiami algorithm suggests “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers. I play the song on loop for several hours, even though I’ve never really liked The Killers. Tranced out, I see some strange things: the digitized surface of Lujiazui seems to copy itself, doubling, then dividing in my blissed-out vision. Like a vivid instance of retinal detachment. At times, the cityscape seems to become almost autonomous, superimposing further doubles of itself on top of each other. Layer atop layer. Eventually, it becomes a vertigo-inducing vision. When the visions begin to subside, I feel a brief sadness, like saying goodbye to an old friend at the end of a long visit; I pull out my headphones, palm myself upright. It’s long past midnight, the bells of the Custom House are silent. Before I take a taxi home, I explore the Waldorf Astoria and watch my image splinter in a mirror. Cubism overtakes the impressionism of earlier; I see myself through a mirror, harshly, falling apart, fragment by fragment.
I wake the next day convinced that I encountered some form of the divine, an urban immanence. To ground myself, I cycle a 30-kilometre loop of the city, starting along the south-western curve of the Huangpu River until I reach the Bund, only to turn back and begin again. On the second loop, I park my bicycle and watch the sun set over Lujiazui; a mild smog seems to disperse the smoky light.
Year 23
As far as I can remember there is only one scene in Looper set in Shanghai, a montage which juxtaposes Levitt’s descent into drug abuse and gang violence with Bruce Willis’s escape from the city. On YouTube it’s currently uploaded under the title, “Looper Scene: A Life in a Day.” Compressed into a single arc of the sun – from roughly midday to sunset – we see the arc of a life as it crashes against the backdrop of Shanghai, while on-screen text notes the passage of time. Twenty-five years are condensed into a clip of two minutes and two seconds, or thirty-one shots spanning six distinct time periods.
Year 1: Still in Kansas, Levitt gathers his silver, travels across the world to swap one high-rise apartment for another. Smog blanches the view from his empty, pristine apartment in Shanghai. Even early on, Levitt seems lonely. Year 3: Levitt doses himself with an ecstasy-like drug known as “dropper” by way of eyedrops in the cluttered dance floor of a nightclub. Earlier in the film, a Blade Runner-style closeup of Levitt’s eye shows his pupil dilating in response to the drug. Year 6: Levitt retraces his steps down the Bund, smoking a cigarette, almost scowling; back in his apartment, the charred-looking stack of his futuristic 100-yuan banknotes is now much depleted, while a syringe displaces the eyedrops. Year 10: What Don DeLillo might describe as a “postmodern sunset” over Shanghai, smog diffuses the light: the city seems endless, vast enough to trigger a panic attack in response to open spaces. Cut to a drive-by shooting, an explosion, then a blackout. Time slips away from Levitt.
Year 23: Bruce Willis amidst the chaos of a barroom scrap. He takes a punch, palms himself upright against the sleek blue surface of the bar, and gazes at a woman in green played by Qing Xu. He calls her back. She turns, he stares. Then she gives him the finger, and he smiles. Year 25: The happy couple retire to the countryside, free from the drugs, guns, and gangs of Shanghai. Through a spidery arc of tree branches, the sun sets in the distance; the camera pans down to focus on the couple dozing in their garden. An old Hollywood lie: the mysterious woman from nowhere saves the killer with a heart of gold. For much of the rest of the film, however, Willis will attempt to save her.
*
Twenty-five years in two minutes. An obvious but unavoidable point: film does enable a form of time travel. Watched one way, the montage documents Levitt’s escape from the city and loneliness. Reverse the flow of time, though, and the montage documents a retreat from an idyllic mountainside village to the loneliness and iniquity of the city.
Year 25
The first time I ever drop acid is in Hong Kong. We’re together, happy in our own way, with the promise of Shanghai ahead. Melody’s friend convinces her to try some; she soon convinces me to blunt my straight-edge lifestyle for a day. Along one of the shady paths which loop the jungled underside of The Peak, we take half a tab each. Over the course of a four-hour walk through the jungle, the drug’s ambient effects gently become apparent. Greens are a little greener, mountains a little grander. Even the electropop playing on Melody’s phone takes on a new colour.
I was 25 when I met her. Straightaway, we disagree on many things. Music, drug use, films. But something clicks. Time passes. Then, one day, the relationship ends. An obvious but unavoidable point: information and communication technology can lead to both a sense of connection and disconnection. We meet on Tinder, break up by text.
Back in Ireland, I’m getting ready to move to Shanghai; Melody’s on the other side of the world. It’s morning when I get the text, sent long past midnight. Melody tells me that she won’t be joining me in Shanghai. Though much of her reasoning seems generic, there’s a truth to it. Cold, emotionally distant. Unable to address or express my feelings directly. Even back then, I intuitively felt that she might be right. And to a certain extent, I’m still stuck in that particular loop.
*
Weeks later, I arrive in Shanghai; just like Levitt, I am alone. Upon arrival, I retrace the steps of the day we got lost. I take a taxi to the Waldorf Astoria, then walk a stretch of the Bund, crowded with tour groups. As I turn down Nanjing Road, the Custom House bells chime at my back; past, present, and future seem to converge in a brief moment of templexity.
Conor Dawson grew up in Ireland, where he studied English and Irish literature at University College Cork. He has taught English literature in Hong Kong and Shanghai. His literary criticism and personal essays have appeared in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and The Dublin Review.