Li Jingze: Separated and Not Separated-If Du Fu has a mobile phone

2021/04/0722:50:08 technology 2906

The theme expressed today is connection. I remember reading an American Internet magazine called "WIRED" more than 20 years ago. The Chinese name is "Connected". The word Wired means "connection" in the meaning of computer and network.

So, connection is really a key word of this era. What is the opposite of "connection" when chanting poetry is a pair? I have been thinking about it and only came up with a "isolation"; and the "connection" in turn is of course "dropped", and the connection has "faulted". Carefully consider these two sets of words, "connection", "connection" and "isolation" and "fault". You will feel that the former is affirmative and normal, while the latter contains negative negativity, which is a deviation from normality. In the culture and experience of our time, we have become accustomed to normality and certainty. We have always thought that we are marching towards a far-reaching and pervasive connection. However, in 2020, experiencing the global epidemic of new coronary pneumonia, even the word "epidemic" suddenly exposed its hidden negativity. We found that the negativity did not dissipate, and the isolation and failure were accidentally exposed, as if it were Another aspect and another foundation of nature and life. As a result, we have to return to dialectics, to re-understand the negative and re-understand the positive.

I'm chasing a spy war drama these days. The background is Shanghai in the 1940s. It's exciting and can't stop. This drama is full of tense suspense, all sorts of mistakes, all sorts of critical issues, but when I watched it, I suddenly thought that such a TV series, such a long and precise story, is the reason why it can take me all the way down. , There is a fundamental condition-there was no mobile phone at that time. Almost every suspense, every critical moment, if the character has a mobile phone in his hand, the problem will not exist, there is no need to be nervous, and there is nothing wrong with Yue Baifengqing. The enemy caught the net outside the door and might rush in at any time. I had to inform the comrades in the house immediately. I ran wildly on the street looking for a public phone booth. I finally found one. The girl inside was discussing movies and lipstick with my girlfriends, and she was alive and well. Sudden death. If you take out your phone at this time, the problem will be gone.

So what am I watching all night and night? It is because there is no connection, because of weak connection, and because of connection failure, all negative situations are caused. In this situation,People are faced with huge contingency. What is contingency? Occasionality is accident. It is outside of your "imagination". Your intention is your plan. Your subjectivity, but you cannot fully connect with the world. Information is asymmetry. You are the tip of the needle and the world is a storm. So, if you Being a guy who is strong and smart and lucky enough, you will be in the drama, and your drama is completely tied to your own efforts to deal with the accidental storms roaring in all directions. Those accidents are doing everything possible to deny you. ——So far, this constitutes most of the human story, most of the drama.

Assuming that there were mobile phones in this world, the TV series last night will be gone, and many series and novels will not have it. In addition, we will lose many other things, such as many poems by Du Fu. There are more than 1,400 poems by Du Fu. If he has a mobile phone, at least one-fifth of them don't need to be written. "Beacon fire lasts for three months, family letters are worth ten thousand gold", "Life does not meet, moves like participating in business", all written about the barriers and discontinuities in space and time. This barrier, discontinuity, and disconnection makes Du Fu a one A poet who remembers, looks into the distance, misses and sighs. Wang Guowei talked about "separation" and "non-separation". He talked about the relationship between heart and scenery, words and emotions. A good poet should look all the way to the world and pierce the window paper. . But if there is no deep feeling of "separation", how can "not be separated". For Du Fu, "Gap" is a spiritual space, a lyrical field, his recollection and distant look, make the unreachable people, things and things return and form his world.

We all know that Du Fu and Li Bai have a very good relationship, at least Du Fu has admired Li Bai enthusiastically throughout his life. But in fact, the time they were together was very short. The first time they met was in Luoyang. At that time, Li Bai was 44 years old and Du Fu was 33 years old. Then they went around Henan and Shandong together. After that, there was "spring trees in the north of Weibei, and clouds in the south of the Yangtze River", and the world has never seen each other again. Because of this lack of meeting, Du Fu wrote more than 20 poems to miss Li Bai, miss Li Bai, and sing Li Bai over the long years. I think if he has a mobile phone, if he and Li Bai can talk on the phone and use WeChat at any time, then these poems do not need to be written, and their friendship and their feelings may not last for that long. The words come and go every day, they are closely connected, their personalities are so different, their worldviews and life outlooks are also very different, and they are born in a great era of disagreement and disagreement.I don't know which day when a word is disagreeable, the boat of friendship will turn over.

So fortunately not connected, not only the world has good poems, but the world is also worth it.

My current job includes managing a museum: the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature-an advertisement. This is the world's largest literary museum, which contains a large collection of manuscripts and letters of writers since modern times. Of course, we are facing a problem. Now there are no more manuscripts and letters. What will we collect in the future? What did the scholars who governed the history of literature study? It will never be a writer who donates his life's chat history and WeChat screenshots to us. The act of writing letters, together with those letters, has now been placed in the museum. This year we held an exhibition of letters between Ba Jin and his friends. I carefully read the letters and suddenly thought, this kind of writing, this This kind of connection is not only for communicating news and information, but also for exchanging thoughts and feelings. Besides, it has a kind of "spiritual atmosphere" and "spiritual halo" that Benjamin said when talking about old photos. "You can feel that the two communicating people are "separated" by space and time. They overcome this barrier by writing and looking into the distance. However, there is a "separation" inherent in their "unseparation". ", a kind of "separation" from "no separation", a kind of cherishment, cherishment, tenderness and warmth born from "separation".

The Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, established in 1985, the current curator Li Jingze

As there is no mobile phone, due to poor connection or difficulty in meeting, there is a distance between people. This distance may be negative and sinister The unpredictable wasteland breeds separation and hostility. However, this distance and this space also reminds and summons people to cross the wasteland cautiously, with value and patience, to know, understand, and even fall in love with that "he" or "she." In other words, this "separation" makes us clearly aware that I am "me" and he is "he", and we have prepared enough patience to get along with a different "he".

If this continues, I will soon have a bowl of paste. To put it bluntly, connection is human nature, and our nature must pursue "non-separation". On the other hand, "separation" or non-connection is also our nature, and even I think it is our deeper nature to some extent. Deeper spiritual foundation. That’s how people are, it’s difficult to connect with others,We are not even connected to ourselves, and we don't need to learn Freud to know that each of us probably cannot say that I know myself completely. And each of us is also facing an absolute disconnection, that is, disconnection from death, we cannot connect to our death. That is to say, there is an absolute negativity here, and people must start by the side of this absolute negativity as Hegel said before they can begin their spiritual journey and affirmation. ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

In other words, people must first distinguish themselves from the world and turn themselves into an opaque existence, and then they can talk about connecting with other people and the world. In our time, why do all of us care so much about our privacy? Under the highly connected Internet and big data, why does the protection of personal information constitute widespread anxiety? The essence of the problem is certainly not that each of us has secret secrets. The essence is that I must have something unconnectable. If I open up all the unconnectable areas, am I still "me"? If the "I" are gone, and each "I" becomes a connected thing, then what is the meaning of this connection? Isn't this "thinking about the extreme"? Isn't this the foundation of human existence?

It is in this sense that I particularly like the concept of "flowing boundaries". "Flow" implies connection and the technologically omnipotent connection ability of our time. At the same time, we must face the "flow boundary" and think about where this "boundary" is. This is precisely the need for technology. The place where there is dialogue with humanities is the place where science and technology need to talk with humanity and society.

At the 2020 Tengyun Summit Roundtable Forum held recently, the author Li Jingze asked a question: If Du Fu had a mobile phone, would his poems still be created? This issue has caused extensive discussion.

In 2020, in the global pandemic and the resulting shocks, we are more eager to go beyond barriers to achieve connection and understanding. But also in 2020, we are also strongly aware that as a person, I must confirm who I am. I am different from others. It is because we are aware of "separation" and the difficulty of connecting, we also have a clearer awareness. You must start from the place "I am me" to start connecting with others. By extension, a country, a nation, and a civilization must also confirm where their borders are.Why "I am me", a civilization that cannot confidently establish cultural and spiritual boundaries for itself, has almost no reason to exist. It can only be connected, and it cannot be the subject of the connection. When we create and shape the future, apart from technology, this inner boundary should be a more fundamental force.

Therefore, I believe that even with mobile phones and big data, what inspires humans to explore and create to travel far and fight is still accidents and accidents outside of the algorithm. When the black swan rises, when the gray Rhino stood up, accident and accident aroused people's fear and shock, people's will, imagination and creation. Similarly, even though we are connected and open to each other scatteredly and all the time through our mobile phones, I also believe that Du Fu, who holds the mobile phone, will still maintain a distance for himself from others and the world, so that he can look into the distance, recall, and remember. Remembrance and love. Without this distance, these fundamental values related to human beings may no longer exist.

This is what I want to say: there is affirmation in negation, and there is negation in affirmation. It must be separated and separated. In order to be better separated, better separated.

Li Jingze, born in 1964, graduated from Peking University in 1984. He used to be the editor-in-chief of "People's Literature" magazine, and is now the vice chairman and secretary of the Secretariat of the Chinese Writers Association. Won the Outstanding Young Critic Award of the Feng Mu Literature Award of the China Literature Foundation, the Annual Literary Critic Award of the 3rd Chinese Literature Media Award, the 15th Chinese Literature Media Award of the Year Prose Award, and the 4th Lu Xun Literature Award for Literary Theory Many awards such as comment awards. He has authored more than 10 collections of theoretical criticism and essays, such as "Blue Bird Story Collection", "Wing and Return", "Plain for Literature", "Anti-Travel Notes", "Xiaochunqiu", "Pingxin", and "To Ideal Readers". In 2018, CITIC Publishing Group and Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House respectively launched "Conference Room and Hill" and "Meeting Notes".