'GO TO CHINA': WHEN AMERICA BECAME CHINA IN OCTOBER 2020 [archival]

A return to the 'go to China' in Laurence Rickels' Critique of Fantasy.

Everything, they tell us, is now at stake between China and the United States. We make some brief observations here about this idea, or rather about and around this passage from Laurence Rickel’s Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 1: Between a Crypt and a Date Mark, which came out in June 2020:

How does one explain—at depth—the importance of the events that accelerated on 14 October 2020 when Twitter Inc. blocked the sharing of the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story on its timeline and even in direct messaging? The detail is relatively unimportant—that can be left to the journalists. We note only that, as Tucker Carlson said at the time, in that one moment America became China. In its attitude to online suppression and blocking, America made a kind of Pax Sinica in November 2020. What is proposed here is a note on this ‘blocking’ as a symptom. What happened when America became China at the end of 2020 as ‘block’ technology? What happens when we ‘go to China’—allegorically, cosmically, literally, and so on?

We are saying for example that the real question concerning technology is not the question concerning China as the eliciting of a desire, new or not. For example to be swallowed whole by another state, a supposedly ‘totalitarian’ one that knows better than my own how to guide us into an inhuman future and changeful Gestell. This is the fantasy of The Other State. The grand projection (the Chinese grand tour of babble) of the ‘go to china’ command that Rickels studies at the end of Critique of Fantasy I. An erotogenesis of the Sino domain can therefore be limited. The obsession with China as the new thing, the big thing, is partly cerebral—not just sexual. If ‘intelligence’ of a sort is involved here, whether Chinese or American, then of it we must say what Malabou has recently said of the brain, that it ‘deconstructs in its structure all the oppositions that have been structuring the study of [conventional] intelligence’.

Go To China

What is the real question concerning technology then? Chinese intelligence cannot be structured. Rather, it is structured, and the same must be said of any American over- and interposition. But what then does the structuring Rickels reads China and the going to China through movies and their titles do, that is to say, through the real structure and critique of ‘fantasy’? Rickels writes for example that Ridley Scott’s The Martian ‘tells the story or history of the new millennial prospect of the one-world exploration of outer space that’s looped through the integration of China’. The question concerning getting beyond the gravity well (real social distancing, as Rickels will go on to say) is here handed over to the theme of world incorporation—as a loop. Contrary to the fantasy that Covid is China eating and mourning (the) us, the science fiction fantasia element entailed by Scott’s film is of a joint future and of China’s integration.

At some point or other the mirror image/import-export question between China and the US becomes one of mutual intro-projection and code incompatibility. China eats and mourns the US, which eats and mourns China. What is the economy of giving and taking here, of global fascination? What are China and the US trying to work out between each other? What do they have on each other? Is it a ‘turning’? Should we take this seriously or not? Where President Trump trolled China and tempted historical accuracy, by calling Covid ‘the China virus’, Xi on the other hand is on record as calling the virus a ‘demon’ or ‘devil’. This is only less apparently racist. Pepe Escobar explains as follows:

Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means ‘white devils’ or ‘foreign devils’: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.

One racism faces the other. Xi Dadda’s racism, more coded and elegant, fights with Trump’s autistico-empiricist racism: well, it started in China, didn’t it?

Critique Of World Fantasy

Rickel’s ‘Go to China’ afterword achieves, like the whole of Critique of Fantasy, a kind of critical dream language. The descriptions of films act as a form of poetry and prophecy, Science fictions films—when written out—contain the loop of not only futural global relations, but of how the Chinese and Americans embrace more psychoanalytically and figure the stars. Think for example of the moment from Arrival (2016) where Banks (Amy Adams) prevents China’s General Shang causing war when he issues an ultimatum to his local alien craft. The message given to Banks is that the aliens are here not to attack but help the humans, because in three thousand years the humans will need their help. The aliens’ language, mistaken as a weapon by the Chinese, is actually a time travel technology. Language and inscription allow the penetration of past and future events, and the working out of a time block.

What else can be worked on here is the word ‘go’. When we say ‘go’ what do we now mean? Let’s say we say it as simply as follows:

go

When we say go as simply as that, what does it mean? Go where? China? If we encourage ‘go’, might we encourage a certain going away, for example a going extinct? Does the animal world say to the anthropic world ‘go’? What does ‘go to China’ mean? Who orders who? Does the ape, or even the silent fish, now say to man ‘go’? Go, you have done enough. Go before it is too late. Go to China, as in escape the gravity well, this too before it is too late. ‘Go.’

Full access to Rickels’ text is here.