Involutions and Excrescences
building some concepts on the dynamics of the world in which we now live together, somehow
What captures the times in which we find ourselves? What kind of decade is the 2020s turning out to be? What kind of century is the twenty-first; is it the future, in any way?
These are some questions I’m sitting with, as I also try to further what I committed to in a post from November last year:
“So I’m going to sharpen up the topics by writing more specifically
about alienation, shock, anxiety, loneliness,
in the context of ‘living together somehow’
in a period of disintegration.
And for those of you, including me, who finds that to be a real bummer set of topics,
I’m also interested in integration and creativity, imagination, utopia, courage, and techniques: ways through, whether good sailing technique or excellent nautical charts.
For ‘we are embarked’,
as Pascal says.
I’d like to propose two fruitful ways of conceptualising the dynamics of the world this decade: involutions and excresences.
~
The Age of Involutions: first sketches
In our bodies, involutions are constantly transpiring at the ordinary rate of human decay; they are a ‘curling within’ inside us, the atrophy of entropy.
In our language, involutions complicate syntax via the insertion of a clause within a clause, much like the ‘sanity clause’ in the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera.
In our mathematics, involutions can involve the multiplication of a quantity into itself many times over. An involution is a function whose inverse is itself: do it twice, and you end up back where you started.
In our society, involutions have many instances and meanings, but their common factor is our banal and unevenly distributed experience of getting ‘less for more’, while doing ‘more for less’.
Involution can mean working harder each year for wages bearing a decreasing relation to the spiralling cost of living and housing (as gridlock worsens). I looked at this last year, here, here, and here.
Involution can imply the trapping dynamic of increasing ecological demands on a planetary biosphere less and less able to cope with the ‘more’ that we keep demanding of it.
Involutions involve more grumpy, hungry polar bears crowding on to a greater number of shrinking icebergs. As in academia.
Involutions involve all of us squeezing that lemon harder, getting less juice, as we make lemonade with the lemons that we’ve been given (which is all we’ve been given again; fewer and less juicy than last year).
Involution (neijuan, 内卷) has been widely noticed in contemporary China, and in the Anglosphere, by journalists noticing what Chinese people have been saying about the neijuan they experience in their lives now.
Over the past half decade, neijuan has become a buzzword encapsulating the ‘rolling inward’ of contemporary urban existence. This went viral in 2020 with the video footage of a Tsinghua University student running computer programs on his laptop while cycling between class and some other location.
“On September 30, the student responded that he brought his computer with him on his bicycle because the program was not running and he was afraid that closing the cover would cause an interruption in the program, which would result in three to four hours of work being wasted.
He also stressed that he did not, and never tried to, perform such difficult acts as typing on a keyboard, editing a program, or reading a program while riding his bike, but only held the computer to avoid closing the lid.
He also said that carrying a computer on a bicycle is definitely not the right thing to do. Such actions are not only detrimental to his own safety but also endanger the safety of other drivers on the road. ‘I have come to realize the dangers of such behavior and will never engage in similar behavior in the future, and I hope that people will take this as a warning’1”.
In contemporary China, especially for the generation born after 1990, neijuan captures the double sense of the unavoidability-and-futility of grinding the grind: unavoidable, if one is to hang on to middle class prospects based on university entry or exam success (or ‘fail’, and fall all the way); futile, given that even if one ‘makes it’, one cannot escape the rat race norm of the 996 – a 9a-9p, Mon-Sat, 72 hour working week (996工作制).
With the tightening of the zero covid screws in late 2022 and the near crushing of civil society by Party surveillance capitalism over the past decade, for me as an outsider-observer to some of these dynamic, neijuan reached its apotheosis with the footage of students crawling on their hands and knees, a group left with nowhere they can go, nothing they can do, and nearly no other way to creatively protest their profound frustration.
In 2021, Yi-Ling Liu commented in the New Yorker about the depoliciticising aspects of using neijuan to describe the frustrations people endure in contemporary China: “In contrast to exploitation or suppression or even alienation, involution is presented as part of the natural order of things—like bad weather. You can’t point fingers at an abstraction or rally against a fusty term from an anthropology text”. In one sense, Liu is correct: involution does make it seem as if the rolling curling inward of a ruthless competitive society is something that has blown in, like snowdrifts in summer and cyclones in Auckland, is something happening because of the weakening of albedo and the slackening of the Gulf Stream.
However, as I see it, neijuan shows us the political effects of trying to remove politics from everyday life. The reason why the examples are so stark is because in, in a curious irony, in contemporary China, capitalism is all that is allowed, alongside fealty to Xi Jinping Thought. Neijuan describes the recursive effects that occur when a population is fed into a political economy with a cultural logic of personal-material success tied to a Party state among whose explicit purposes in the 2010s has been the suppression of civil society. Under Deng Jiao Ping, to get rich was glorious. Under Xi, there has been a collective realisation that 99% of people cannot even get rich any more, and there is less and less glory, but ‘we’ still must die trying. This has in effected transformed the real American Dream in 50 Cent’s album title, into the following: Get Rich orDie Tryin’. In the absence of an increasing share of a growing pie, with the grim realisation of having to accept a decreasing share of a shrinking pie, and in the absence of early any public pressure valves or discussable alternatives (or anywhere for most people to flee), what we see is the all-too-human human experience of terminal frustration in the face of the bare operation of global capitalism – with Chinese characteristics, at China scale.
In 2022, the ever perceptive, invaluable reporting of Peter Hessler told us about neijuan via the story of North, an ex-student of his who had developed an initially thriving business retrofitting elevators to older apartment buildings in Fuling. Hessler:
“But North worried that he had started too late. Nowadays, Chinese often speak of neijuan, a word that’s usually translated as ‘involution’: a kind of self-defeating competition. When North started his elevator business, there were only a few competitors, but by 2020 there were more than a dozen. The margins were falling fast, and every time I visited North there was a neijuan quality to the surveillance-camera feeds on his phone: all these little boxes, all over town, all of them potential sites of conflict and negotiation. North said that the hardest part was dealing with people who resided on lower floors. They paid nothing for a new elevator, but even when they agreed to a project they tended to change their minds as construction proceeded. They couldn’t bear the idea of upstairs neighbors getting benefits: after an elevator was installed, upper-floor property values increased dramatically, whereas those of the lower floors changed relatively little”.
To me, North’s experience is relatably epigonic to me as someone whose life has involved the repeated, unearned fortune of being a little late to the party, but still catching the tail end of some good times, from grunge, rave and techno, to Japan in the early 2000s, to Anglocapitalist tertiary education after its demand-driven Gold Rush in the 2010s. As a friend dotpointed in the shifts in the past five years to their line manager (a pointillist picture of ‘anywhere’, in the still very padded, gold-plated conditions many people like myself tend to experience here), we can still see the ‘end’ of this, the ‘all too late’ sense of things being gone, over, the good times passing, and the 2020s being a meaner, shittier version of the 2010s (because we’re lucky, if we remain so):
resources have declined significantly; this affects hiring and retaining of young casuals, to the point where one cannot even find them, then only offer them miserable work
but for ‘locked in’ work conditions, ‘deal’ conditions for ongoing ‘winner’ employees have declined noticeably
prospects for those coming up are now worse (I never would have made it ‘in’ now)
most established colleagues do okay, but many junior colleagues flounder alone
everything is routed through the spreadsheet ‘boss’, who deals with declining resources, increased scrutiny (including surveillant monitoring), while agency and decisionmaking is centralised and ‘bolted down’ to clunky platforms
there’s less point mentoring talented young minds, as they go elsewhere or leave
2020s workload modelling does not account for the pandemic and lockdowns of 2020-1, ‘demands’ we do things harder to do after and because of the pandemic; allocates more attentional resources to ‘chores’ we didn’t do before the pandemic
In my own professional life, what I despair of, even in the midst of my good luck, is the intergenerational theft much of the bureaucratic dealing out has come to imply as the involutions unfold, as the curling inward unfurls. As I was trying to distill this to a colleague at an adjacent institution, whose birth lottery privilege and job luck has insulated them from this for now. For me, what involution means for me is that I can no longer look after the younger people who are working for me, I can’t make them any guarantees, any firm promises. Everything becomes contingent, hazy, up for grabs: ‘this is what you can probably expect, but to be honest, you need to notice the risks and do what you need to do to look after yourself here. I’ll do my best, but you’re on your own’.
~
In the West, Alex Hochuli reframed a too often Anglocentric, Eurocentric self-regard by showing the US its involuted future as brazilianisation. As he writes,
“We now find ourselves at the End of the End of History. Unlike in the 1990s and 2000s, today many are keenly aware that things aren’t well. We are weighed down, as the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, by ‘the slow cancellation of the future’, of a future promised but not delivered, of involution in the place of progression”.
Hochuli’s very interesting interpretation of brazilianisation puts paid to Liu’s idea of the West as a place of ‘cut-throat meritocracy’ (in contrast to neijuan China): China and the US are both cut-throat competitive, but involution means that the US is no longer a meritocracy (if it ever was). On Hochuli’s reading, the West has already become a place in which ‘the future’ becomes the tragicomic horizon, the forever unreachable point producing the frustratingly pointless process of ‘reaching toward it’. Involution means striving has no purpose, throughout the West, including in America. ‘You thought it wasn’t like this in America, but look: your future is like Brazil’:
“The West’s involution finds its mirror image in the original country of the future, the nation doomed forever to remain the country of the future, the one that never reaches its destination: Brazil. The Brazilianization of the world is our encounter with a future denied, and in which this frustration has become constitutive of our social reality. While the closing of historical horizons has often been a leftist, indeed Marxist, concern, the sense that things don’t work as they should is now widely shared across the political spectrum”.
Although I’m skeptical of the anti Dorian Gray2 metaphorics of ‘mirror images’ in Hochuli’s evocation of the involutions of ‘The West’, it could be salutary for the United States to start seeing Brazil as a country that matters and that we could learn from, both in and for itself (not just as a case study that ‘serves’, or as part of BRICs), and in part because it does show America aspects of its now-future, from a certain angle in a certain light. But we could even flip the mirror: Brazil’s future is looking more and more like the US’, and that is what is scary.
Outside and beyond these two American hemispheres, beyond the undeniable value of bringing them into a proper, substantive comparison, what happens if we keep thinking about involution by adding back in what I sketched above by way of neijuan China and post-covid, postneoliberally involuted Australia?
China and Australia now: two very different places, subject to very different civilisational and cultural logics3, political settlements, material, demographic and ecological constraints. I notice an involutionary dynamic in play in both societies. Perhaps we are witnessing the slow cancellation of the future, in other words, in a future ‘which is already here, just unevenly distributed’ (Mark Fisher meets Peter Frase meeting William Gibson). And perhaps we also share some gut feeling that this should not be happening, alongside the sinking intuition ‘yet it is’, and that ‘there’s little we can do’. As I tried to get at last week, this raises a profound set of feelings inside and between us all, because we may be fucked and we know it, and very often we do not have an agentic way of responding well enough to the ‘big ticket’ causal items in all this.
This is where excrescences enter the picture – again, unevenly, and always, with regional, cultural, intersectional patterns that render all comparisons approximate and any ‘mirror’ metaphorics very provisional. It’s not at all difficult to see why and how a term like neijuan has resonated so much in China over the past several years. In fact, the Chinese ‘miracle’, such as it appeared until the later 2010s, perhaps 2018, was that the extraordinary toil and sacrifice of ordinary people managed to raise so many out of rural poverty and intergenerational peasantry, producing a huge middle class and dynamic urban life in cities of >10 million people most Westerners have still never heard of: Shenzhen, Chengdu, Chongqing. But was involution’s inward curling unfolding already in play ten years ago? And if so, what were its excrescences, and what can this concept add to involutions to help us better understand how and why we’re stuck, and how we might get unstuck – or, at least, clear on how stuck we are?
One way of colouring this in is by thinking about disruption: first ‘there’, in mid 2010s Beijing and Shanghai, and now back ‘here’, in 2020s Australia, a decade on from its inception. I’ll return to this next week….
https://cntechpost.com/2020/10/04/video-of-chinese-student-running-program-on-laptop-while-riding-bike-goes-viral/
Insofar as Dorian’s portrait ‘absorbed’ the ageing and cruelty wrought on his likeness by his debauched life, leaving his actual face ageless and deathless, whereas in America, you have a narcissist like Trump, who is actually a seventy-six year old with orange skin and a combover, and an octogenarian President who fluffs and mangles his lines and kinda looks like he’s had work, and the overlord of all this, Rupert Murdoch, who at ninety-one resembles no one so much as Professor Farnsworth from Futurama.
Of course, Australia has been an avowedly multicultural country since the 1970s, and one of its major communities comprises Chinese people from the many different Chinas, and Chinese migration has been one of the main cultural sources of Australia’s land appropriating populations, especially during the latter half of the 19C and the past half century to the time of writing. Australia also shows many ways of being Chinese, some of which are less probable or just unavailable in mainland China (analogous to the many ways of being Jewish outside of Israel now).