David H. Fleming, Simon Harrison: 动态余像：符号资本和中国电影城市
About the Authors
David H. Fleming 戴维·H·弗莱明
David H. Fleming is Senior Lecturer in the Communication, Media and Culture division at the University of Stirling, Scotland. His research interests gravitate around the intersectionalities of cinema, thought, and the material world. He is co-author of The Squid Cinema from Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulhumedia (with William Brown) (2020), Chinese Urban Shi-nema: Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China (with Simon Harrison), and the author of Unbecoming Cinema: Unsettling Encounters with Ethical Event Films (2017). He is currently working on projects exploring Infifinite Ontology and racializing machines in the streaming era.
Simon Harrison 西蒙·哈里森
西蒙·哈里森是香港城市大学英语系的助理教授。研究探讨了在各种社会、学术和职业环境中对语言的关系和体现的理解，重点在于对人们手势的研究。著有The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect(2018)，与戴维·H·弗莱明合著Chinese Urban Shinema: Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China (2020), 并正在准备下一部著作 The Body language Myth: Understanding Gesture in Language and Communication。
Simon Harrison is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. His research explores relational and embodied understandings of language in various social, academic and professional environments with a focus on people’s gestures. He is author of The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect (2018), Chinese Urban Shinema: Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China (2020, with David H. Fleming), and The Body language Myth: Understanding Gesture in Language and Communication (in preparation).
Shi-nematic afterimages: semiocapitalism
and Chinese cine-cities
动态余像：符号资本和中国电影城市
Abstract and Keywords
摘要：作者回顾了其对当代中国生活和中国城市“电影化”的跨学科研究方法，同时批判性探讨了其提出的“shi(势)-nema”（结合了汉字中“势”这一概念和“电影性”的迂回概念），并把这一概念看作启发性的"思想图像"，引发了现代电影研究的广泛关注。通过回顾多标量分形方法，作者在本篇文章中特别关注了符号资本图像和城市场所/景点的关系，这一关系展示了当代中国电影城市的心理地理环境是如何迅速演变和变异的。本文开篇引出了一个新的电影哲学概念“余像”，融合了电影、城市和概念的多样性，批判性探讨了新型采访和图像，这些图像来自中国的电影、电视、流媒体平台、社交媒体和商业房地产应用软件。
关键词：中国城市Shi(势)-nema, 电影性，《乡村爱情》，《三十而已》，房地产
Abstract: In this essay, we revisit our interdisciplinary approach to the “becoming-cinema” of Chinese life and cities in the contemporary era, while critically revisiting our notion of “shi-nema” (which combines the Chinese concept of “shi” (势) with a detoured notion of “cinematicity”) which we forward as a provocative “image for thought” that explodes the concerns of modern film studies. Revisiting our multi-scalar fractal method, on this outing we specififically engage with a nexus of new semiocapitalist images and urban sites/ sights that foreground how rapidly the psychogeographic circumstances in post-socialist Chinese cine-cities evolve and mutate. Our essay opens with a fresh film-philosophy conceptualisation of “afterimages”, blending cinematic, city and conceptual varieties before moving on to critically engage with a new constellation of interviews and images drawn from Chinese film, television, streaming platforms, social media and commercial real estate apps.
Keywords: Chinese Urban Shi-nema, cinematicity, Country Love, Nothing But Thirty, real estate
A Glimpse of the Article
1
To introduce what a Shi-nematic afterimage might be to those unfamiliar with our previous work, we can begin again by mapping out a moving kaleidoscopic picture of three dynamically interfacing and super positional terms: Shi-nema, cinema and afterimage. To work backwards from the latter, "afterimage" emerges in English as a compound that articulates the adjectival or temporal preposition “after”(which also might etymologically mean behind or against) with the suffix "image": the etymon of which derives from the Latin imāgō, meaning a copy, or likeness. In physiology and psychology, the notion of an afterimage can refer to a range of different sensory and psychological phenomena; the most common or garden variety being the lingering (positive or negative) visual impression that hovers in our eyes after exposure to an illuminated screen/scene. Also worth briefly lingering on in this regard is how, as Alain Badiou reminds us, the term image itself derives from the psychology of perception; wherein to have an image of something is to have a mental copy of it (2013, 222). Ergo, most images are always already a certain species of afterimage; in that the brain (re)produces a mental image of a prior perception-image focused by the body's sensory apparatus. Consequently, in the psychological and physiological sense, hard and fast distinctions between images and afterimages shift into a form of superpositional regress. Something that becomes complicated further when we tack on encounters with technological image-making apparatuses like the cinema.
什么是动态余像？它就像一个不断变化的万花筒，里面游动的是三个相互联系、相互重叠的术语：Shi(势)-nema、电影和余像。从后者开始倒推，"afterimage "在英语中是一个复合词，它将形容词、时间介词“after”（在词源学上也可能是后面或反对的意思）与后缀 "image"衔接起来（image的词源来自拉丁语imāgō，意思是复制或相似）。在生理学和心理学中，余像的概念可以指一系列不同的感官和心理现象；最常见的是在接触到发光的屏幕/场景后，徘徊在我们眼中挥之不去的（积极或消极的）视觉印象。正如Alain Badiou所说，图像这个词本身就来源于知觉心理学，对某物产生图像就是对此物进行心理复制。因此，大多数图像通常已经是某种余像，是在大脑（重新）产生的一个由身体感官系统聚焦的先前感知图像的精神图像。因此，在心理学和生理学的意义上，图像和余像之间的硬性区分转变为一种叠加再现。当涉及到像电影院这样的技术性图像制造装置时，余像这一概就变得更加复杂。
2
The long-standing popular TV series Country Love sets its scene in a small countryside municipality of China's North East. The 2021 season offers a pedagogical case study in becoming a technologically advanced image-hungry society, with smartphones, video streaming sites and online supermarkets appearing introduced to this remote village, whose inhabitants demonstrate in a compressed form (afforded by the series format) what happens when the connection between images and money is made clear. For, even the "country cousin" citizen-subject (caricatured by super-wealthy actor-celebrities) here comes to realise that looking is a form of labour and that images can produce value. By such means, Country Love helps reify and make palpable Beller's claim that the "mining of human bodies of their power always has been the goal of capital”(2006, 20), by showing villagers scramble to tap into their creativities - singing, dancing, playing the sorna (double-reeded horn) and storytelling/gossiping - as a means to attract the attention of "outsiders" to whom they may sell the village's produce (e.g. by unboxing bottled water, beef jerky and mushrooms). Here, it primarily becomes a neural and nervous activity that the attention economy demands and extracts, as a prelude to selling material commodities. Returning to our vertiginous blending of reality and fiction, screen sights and the real world, these fictional "main melody" storylines of adapting to modern semiocapitalist systems also afford Chinese online supermarket giants like Taobao advertisement spaces, demonstrating another instance of the blurring between images and advertisements (qua advertisigns), looking and labour in the semicapitalist consumer society. Echoes here too of Sontag's presentiments that a change in ideology is a change in image regimes and that modernisation is equated with the producing and consuming of images.
电视连续剧《乡村爱情》故事背景设置在中国东北的一个小镇。本片2021年的最新一季是一个很好的研究个案。故事发生在一个偏远乡村，但是这里不算落后，人们的生活中充斥着来自手机、视频网站、网上购物的种种图像。本剧对村民进行速写，当人们发现在网上发图和视频能用于谋利，戏剧冲突自然而然产生了。Beller认为“挖掘人类身体的力量一直是资本的目标”，《乡村爱情》使Beller的主张变得真实可感：通过展示村民争先恐后地挖掘自身创造力，利用包括唱歌、跳舞、吹唢呐和讲故事、八卦来吸引 “村外人（即观看直播者）“的注意，他们可以向这些“村外人”出售村庄的产品（例如通过开箱瓶装水、牛肉干和蘑菇卖货）。在这里，图像作为销售物质商品的必要准备，成为注意力经济所要求和提取的一种神经和精神活动。回到现实和虚构、屏幕景象和现实世界的眩晕性混合，这些虚构的适应现代符号资本的 "主旋律"故事情节也为淘宝等中国电商巨头提供了投送广告的机会，展示了另一个图像与广告、半资本主义消费社会中的“观看”与“劳动”之间愈加模糊的例子。这里也呼应了Sontag的观点，即“意识形态的变化就是图像制度的变化，现代化与图像的生产和消费是等同的。”
Country Love
乡村爱情
3
We can gain yet further insight into the operations of these powerful object signs (both bags and gestures) if we turn to the Nothing But Thirty . Indeed, in episode 31, bored at being the housewife to her successful husband, Gu Jia (Tong Yao) seeks investment opportunities in Shanghai and must penetrate a rich wives circle for contacts. Her first meeting turns to drama when she notices that all the rich wives have the latest Hermès bags, whereas Gu Jia only has a more common Channel bag (that cost precisely 50,000 RMB according to the script). In a closing scene to the encounter, the wives assemble for a group photo, each prominently holding their Hermés object-signs in front of them, including Mrs. Fu who displays a rare 2.6 million RMB variety. Confronted by the wealth gap between herself and these other wives, Gu Jia subtly/semiotically repositions her own body to shield her cheapskate Channel bag from the look of the camera, and from viewers by an extension. This we perceive as a gesture of shame, which directly contrasts the trashing gesture of contempt.
通过分析《三十而立》这部电视剧，我们可以了解物体符号（包括手包和手势）的作用。在第31集里，顾佳（童瑶饰）不想只做一个成功丈夫背后的女人，她在上海寻找投资机会，而这就就要求她必须进入富太太们的圈子里进行社交活动。当顾佳注意到所有的富太太都有最新的爱马仕包，而她只有一个普通的香奈儿包（价格大概5万人民币）时，她与富太太们的第一次会面就变成了一场戏。在本集最后一幕中，富太太们聚集在一起合影，每个人都把她们的爱马仕标志放在前面，傅太太则展示了一个价值260万人民币的罕见手包。知道自己和其他太太财力悬殊，顾佳用身体挡住了她寒酸的香奈儿，这也是一个符号学意义上的动作，它使得手袋从摄影机和观众的视野中隐身了。顾佳的姿势表示了她内心的羞耻，与其他夫人蔑视的姿势形成鲜明对比。
Rich wives circle in Nothing But Thirty
《三十而立》中的富太太们
Gu Jia later sees in her social media newsfeed that members of the rich wives circle have posted the posed photo online. However, to her horror, she sees that she has been photoshopped out of the (after)image.In a society built on the implanted desire to become-image and attract attention through the mobilisation and arrangement of signs and supersigns, Gu Jia’s shame is to become a literal non-image, deemed a void unworthy of attention, in part due to the lack of (adverti) signs she is able to mobilise and display. Understanding this, she resolves to purchase a Hermès bag to gain access to the magic circle of rich wives. Commentary online made during this apotheosis appears to pity the fictional character, though, noting that when she does eventually manage to purchase a handbag by “blowing up” her credit cards and mobilising her Guangxi network, her success can only be fleeting. It is well understood that the rich wives must alternate their Hermès bags to prove that they actually have access to an ever-moving (cinematic) series of these object-(adverti)signs.
顾佳后来在朋友圈中看到，富太太圈的成员把合照发到了网上。然而，令她惊恐的是，她发现自己被P掉了。当今社会建立在人们根深蒂固的欲望之上，即想要通过利用和安排符号及附属符号变得“图像化”并吸引注意力，顾佳的羞耻变成了一种写实的“非图像”，被认为是一种不值得注意的空白图像，造成这一后果的部分原因是她并不拥有能够利用和展示的(广告)符号。了解到这一点后，她决心购买一个爱马仕包，以获得进入富太太圈的机会。关于这个片段，网上的评论似乎都对顾佳表示同情，指出当她最终通过刷爆信用卡和变卖身家来购买一个包时，她的成功只是暂时的。众所周知，富太太们必须换着背爱马仕包，以证明她们能够接触到一系列（电影中）不断移动的物体-（广告）符号。
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To Cite This Article
Fleming, David H. and Harrison, Simon. "Shi-nematic afterimages: semiocapitalism and Chinese cine-cities" Journal of Chinese Film Studies, vol. , no. , 2021, pp. 000010151520210015. https://doi.org/10.1515/jcfs-2021-0015
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