Interality and the City.

Zhang, Peter

Abstract: This article is the first explicit encounter between interality studies and urban studies. It is meant as a theoretical exploration and a cultural intervention. The concreteness of the city renders the concept of interality relatively tangible, whereas the potency of the concept as a heuristic helps reveal the aesthetic thrust and ethical valence of the city as a spatiotemporal configuration and a constitutive ground mutating and becoming in a milieu or a relational field beyond itself. In this sense, the article implicitly imagines the city as a khora (literally, uterus, receptacle) enveloped within a larger khora. The example of Xi'an at once grounds and furthers the discussion. The article puts forward the notion of a comprehensive interality index but cautions against its hypostatization. The project has been called forth by the collective angst toward the overdevelopment and wholesale makeover of urban China during the past two or three decades. The tacit agenda is to poeticize theoretical discourse.

Keywords: Interality, livability, sustainability, leisure, beyondness, heterotopia, intertopia "[Plato] believes that the true purpose of the city are its parks and gardens: they are the places of the search for wisdom, and it is from there that the city should be governed. "--Flusser, "Phantom City, " p. 2. "The true city offers citizens the love of freedom instead of the hope of rewards or even the security of possessions; for 'it is slaves, not free men, who are given rewards for virtue.'"--Deleuze, 1988, p. 26. "The city's active role in future is to bring to the highest pitch of development the variety and individuality of regions, cultures, personalities. These are complementary purposes: their alternative is the current mechanical grinding down of both the landscape and the human personality."--Mumford, 1961, p. 570. "... it is not enough to oppose concepts to learn which is the best, we must oppose the fields of problems to which they respond to discover what forces make the problems change and require the formation of new concepts"--Deleuze, 2007, p. 355. "The pollution of distance is grey ecology. One must keep one's distance. "--Virilio, 2009, p. 71.

"[E]tymology is like a specifically philosophical athleticism" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 8). The term interality [phrase omitted] comes from the Chinese ideograph [phrase omitted]. (1) It can mean in-between space, empty space, partition, break, gap, yin, nothingness, antiform, crevice, interval, interval in time, interzone, interface, interplay, relationality, reciprocity, each-otherness, betweenness, beyondness, spying on (peering through a crack to learn what lies inside closed doors; secretly observing), estrangement, and so on. Its semantic field encompasses that of the Japanese concept ma [phrase omitted] (spacing, negative space, absence, etc.), which is central to the Japanese sensibility. The original form of [phrase omitted] is [phrase omitted], which has remained in use as a different but closely related word, meaning "leisure," "idleness," "spare time." The study of interality is incomplete without taking into account both ideographs.

Words store human experience. Chinese characters offer a clue as to the Chinese mode of perception and style of thinking. The ideograph [phrase omitted] presents the picture of a traditional Chinese double door, which allows the moon to shine through since there is an interval between the two leaves. As such, it denotes an interval and implies throughness [phrase omitted]. The meaning of the ideograph derives from the relation or interplay between its two constituent elements. But that is not all. Without the sense-making human observer on the inside whose presence is implied, such a scene wouldn't have been registered. The ideograph brings into relation the celestial sphere and the human sphere, and symbolically enacts a communion or throughness between the two, although the throughness is filtered and framed by the door, which lies in between but has an opening in it.

Furthermore, one who sees the moon through a chink in the door is at leisure and therefore wise. For leisure "is the goal of life, the seat of wisdom" (Flusser, 2011, p. 149). One who is too busy [phrase omitted] loses his mind and brightness [phrase omitted]. A line by Zhuangzi reinforces the connection between leisure and wisdom: " [phrase omitted], [phrase omitted]," meaning, "Great intelligence is relaxed and open-minded, petty intelligence is partitioned and nitpicking" (translated by Richard John Lynn). The tricky part is that in Zhuangzi, the variant and now more common form [phrase omitted] is used to mean leisure, whereas [phrase omitted] continues to mean interval, partition, and the like.

Interality implies an ethics and an aesthetics, which are at one with Zhuangzi's philosophy of free and easy wandering [phrase omitted]. One who lives by such a philosophy is privy to the use of the useless and unused (such as empty space) [phrase omitted], and the wisdom that resides in paradox (para-doxa). Free and easy wandering presupposes both empty space [phrase omitted] (an unblocked way [phrase omitted]) and unoccupied time [phrase omitted]. Cultured people in ancient China cultivated themselves by wandering among four arts: the lute, the game of Go, calligraphy, and painting. In the final analysis, what people get from the four arts is a paideia in interality or an interological sensibility. In spirit, this paideia is no different than what we call liberal education today.

In the case of the lute, for example, sound emerges out of, is punctuated by, and culminates in soundlessness. A tune expresses the aspirations of the player; it also impresses, inspires, and calls into being a like-spirited listener (a pattern of psychic energy is communicated intersubjectively), and ends up synchronizing the breath of both, so they con-spire (breathe together). The music mediates the relationship between the two bodyminds, making them sym-pathetic [phrase omitted] and com-passionate. The sensitive player not only affects but also intuits and responds to the mental state of the listener. The highest good of an apprenticeship in the art of the lute is the realization of dependent co-arising and impermanence [phrase omitted] [phrase omitted]. Those who can grasp the spirit of the lute without the lute are truly awakened. Or, as the Zen phrase has it: "When you appreciate the flavor of the lute, What need is there for sound from the strings?" (Hori, 2003, p. 443)

The game of Go is all about using interality (relationality between pieces) to maximize interality (air, breath, empty space). Each newly-dropped piece can only be named in relation to other pieces already on the board, but neither the pieces nor the positions are pre-coded. At the end of the game, the side that has more interality (breaths) wins - often by a very small margin. The wise player is one who is able to seize the kairotic moment [phrase omitted] recognize pivotal positions [phrase omitted], maximize one's own potentials [phrase omitted] with the fewest moves, and stake out empty spaces [phrase omitted] in dynamic interplay. Interality is the essence of all four aspects. The survival of Go pieces depends on their collective preservation of unoccupied spaces known as "breaths"; win or lose is a matter of comparative advantage in terms of space held in total. In a sense, Go is to chess as ritual war is to total war, or as infinite game is to finite game. Go is a decentralized, nomad game; chess is a centralized, royal game. Go pieces occupy smooth spaces, whereas chess pieces operate in striated spaces. Go pieces form a horde, whereas chess pieces, which have different valences, potencies, and mobilities depending on how they are coded, form a hierarchy. Interality plays a role in both games but plays out differently. The kind of interality in the one is qualitatively different from the kind in the other. (2)

The praxis of calligraphy is a matter of displacing emptiness [phrase omitted] with gratuitous form in the moment. It is an exercise in haecceity as the outcome is neither predictable nor replicable. Brush, ink, paper, inkstone, and calligrapher form an assemblage that wills singularity. The legibility and aesthetic value of the black strokes rest on what is left white. Therefore one executes the strokes with an eye towards the spaces that are left empty [phrase omitted]. A piece of calligraphic work with little empty space is literally breathless and spiritless, tautological as this may sound. Similarly, East Asian painting relies on empty space for its spiritual quality. Landscape painting in particular constitutes a perfect illustration of an interality-oriented philosophy. Francois Jullien's interological-minded book, The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting (2009), is pretty much the above point writ large. The title is telling: East Asian painting lays emphasis on interality rather than objects. Jullien's book belongs with the emerging body of literature on interality, and constitutes a timely counterweight against the so-called object-oriented philosophy, which is either misguided (although its value as an intervention into anthropocentrism is not to be denied, the discourse also has the consequence, intended or unintended, of serving to pave the way for a robot-centered world, among other things) or misnamed (presumably, its emphasis is as much on interobjectivity [phrase omitted] and field being [phrase omitted] as on objects per se), or both.

As with landscape painting, so with city planning. For an interological-minded people constituted partly by the four arts mentioned above, interality is what gives a city its qi/chi/ki [phrase omitted] (spirit, breath, energy, vitality). Without interality, the city will be suffocating, spiritless, and lifeless. Insofar as material constraints allow for it, the cityscape is simply a different artistic medium with which to enact the same set of aesthetic values enacted by landscape painting. The city of Hangzhou (formerly the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, now the capital of Zhejiang Province) is called a paradise on earth for a good reason. As the popular saying has it, Hangzhou has a cityful of mountains and waters and half a cityful of the West Lake--[phrase omitted]. The immensity of interality one finds in Hangzhou in the guise of unoccupied space is simply incomparable, thanks to the presence of the Qiantang River and the West Lake. For somebody who has a deep appreciation of interality, living in Hangzhou will be profoundly fulfilling. It's not that the city hasn't done anything to exploit or encroach upon nature, or that the city has been exempt from the massive real estate development sweeping across the country. Rather, the immense interality natural to Hangzhou has been largely immune from such exploitation and encroachment. Nature seems to favor Hangzhou, where it has played a significant cultural and constitutive role, as evidenced by Su Shi's famous poems about the West Lake and the Qiantang River.

The other paradise on earth is Suzhou (a city in Jiangsu Province not far from Shanghai, known for its classical gardens and Buddhist temples). Interality in Suzhou has its distinct style: smaller in scale than that in Hangzhou, but subtle and richly diverse. Known for its exquisite gardens, Suzhou feels like a classical beauty. This impression comes from the eye-nourishing white walls and black tiles [phrase omitted] (the colors connote cosmetic powder and eyebrow dye respectively), against the backdrop of which the flowers and plants come off as drawings [phrase omitted], [phrase omitted]. From the inside of the buildings in the gardens, the windows feel like painting frames. Walking from window to window, one gets a rich diversity of picturesque views, the freshness of which in spring can be intoxicating. The gardens have been designed in such a way that interality is put to utmost use to make a relatively small space feel much larger. Each step reveals a different sight. One is compelled to make constant stops and look around in case anything is missed. If there is a pond, sure enough it is partitioned into a smaller side and a bigger side, with a bridge in between --a small arch bridge if not a zigzag one, to motivate more stops along the way. The spatial layout literally invites one to wander and linger and forget about the flow of time. The experience is at once aesthetic and synesthetic. The entire sensorium is called upon, not just the visual sense. As a couplet from one of the gardens has it (English translation by Richard John Lynn): I lie on a rock to listen to waves, my entire shirt their color of pine; Or open the door to watch the rain, now a whole sheet of banana leaf sound.

The gardens in Suzhou constitute a meaningful interality in the life of the city. Inside the gardens, mundane space is left behind, the linear flow of time is more or less suspended. Aesthetics overrides business and politics, strolling supersedes rushing. Although the city cannot be designed strictly after the fashion of the gardens, the latter still constitute an indispensable element of the city's aesthetic layout, and play a critical role in making the city spiritual. If the streets and roads in the city facilitate physical flow or transportation, then the gardens afford spiritual flow (which coincides with physical slowness in this case) or transformation. The gardens help make the city more polyrhythmic. A few words on the dry landscape gardens [phrase omitted] in Kyoto are in order here. The gardens are made up of a configuration of aesthetically laid out, differentially sized, shaped, and textured rocks against the backdrop of a sea of gravel, which has been carefully raked into eye-enchanting wave patterns. The gardens enact the Japanese concept of ma and put on display a peculiarly Japanese aesthetic, which is Zen-spirited through and through. One thing the gardens reveal is that interality is both the necessary and sufficient condition for beauty. The whole idea of dry landscape gardens has heuristic value for both urban designers and city dwellers precisely because the right kind of interality enhances the aesthetic quality and spiritual life of the city.

Conceptually speaking, interality belongs with the virtual, as against the actual. Vilem Flusser (2013) points out, "The Third World harbors virtualities not yet realized: it is poor in realizations but rich in virtualities. The First World has effected a great part of its virtualities: it is effectively rich and virtually poor" (p. 161). The logic applies to cities, too, in the sense that a city rich in virtualities and interalities is a youthful city, whereas depletion of virtualities and interalities marks the (oftentimes premature) aging of the city. Overdevelopment makes a city unlivable precisely because it squeezes out the city's interalities and exhausts its virtualities. Development literally implies aging. In this sense, a new city quarter, if overdeveloped, is already aged before people actually move in. The good urbanist values interality as much as elegant physical structures. In fact, the elegance of physical structures precisely resides in the relation between the physical structures themselves and the empty spaces surrounding them.

If there is such a thing called comprehensive interality index [phrase omitted], then speed makes a significant contributing factor. If a schoolyard is small but the students do not run, it feels bigger. As speed increases, the amount of interality available in a city shrinks psychologically. That is to say, the empty spaces and in-between spaces that used to be sufficient no longer feel adequate, thus making people feel claustrophobic. Speed enhances communication in the reductive, technical sense of transportation and transmission at the expense of communication in the humanly important sense of communion. It undermines relationality and makes proximity more or less irrelevant. If love is blind, then speed is glaucomatous by nature. Cars not only pollute distance (to allude to Paul Virilio's notion of grey ecology), but also take up space. When the number of motor vehicles in a city reaches a critical mass, speed flips into slowness, flow reverses into blockage. Lack of interality chokes the flow, so to speak. One can imagine bicycles coming back as a cool convenience, relative to which the city feels bigger, closer, less exhaustible, more interesting, and richer in interality.

Cars radically transform the cityscape because they imply their own interalities and necessitate an entire service environment. The more cars a city has, the more the city has to be organized around them. Every new technical object introduced into the city takes some space from it and a chunk of time out of people's lives. In a radically materialist culture, it is presumably harder for people to realize that true happiness does not reside in addition and acquisition but in subtraction or the elimination of clutter, including mental clutter. Put differently, the dwelling place of happiness is interality (optimum spacing, leisure time, and an unoccupied mind). Hence the slogan, "Mind the gap." Sages do not let their minds be loaded down by intellectual acquisitions. Superior people use things, whereas inferior people are used by things [phrase omitted], [phrase omitted] (the latter is well captured by the famous saying: "The things are in the saddle and they ride us"). If Socrates was right in pointing out, "Those who want the fewest things are nearest to the gods," then perhaps heaven is made purely out of interality. The point is that interality is central to the livability [phrase omitted] of a city.

One who conducts urban rhythmanalysis after the fashion of Henri Lefebvre eventually will realize that rhythm comes from no-thing but interality. Each cityscape has its own static or spatial rhythm, which is purely a matter of alternation between presence and absence, solidity and emptiness. After blocks of buildings, suddenly a public square, a body of water, a meadow, or a park. This rhythm can only be registered by one who moves in the city in this or that fashion. One's psychological rhythm is a measure of the city's spatial rhythm ("man is the measure of all things"), which may come off as being prosaic, poetic, steady, staccato-like, premodern, modern, postmodern, or all of these simultaneously. What is registered is really a relation between the psychological and the spatial, which is to say, an interality in and of itself. A pedestrian's paradise, a car driver's hell, since psychological rhythms are partly a function of people's habitual modes of moving.

When we speak of a city as having a fast or a slow rhythm, what we have in mind is its dynamic rhythm, which has a lot to do with speed but defies being simplified as speed. It is a matter of oscillation between activity and rest, speed and slowness, flow and stoppage, intensity and relaxation, work and leisure, structure and communitas, hierarchy and the leveling of hierarchy, striated time and smooth, appropriated time. The regularity of the weeks is interrupted and punctuated by holidays, festivals, carnivals, celebrations, strikes, accidental power outages, occasional snowstorms (a really big snowstorm works like magic, turning striated space into smooth space, giving time a qualitative difference) and so on. The interruptions energize the continuity just as the continuity culminates in the interruptions. The socioeconomic breeds the natural (e.g. smog) just as the natural impinges upon the socioeconomic. There is interplay between the two.

A city's individuality is neither dissociable from the kinds of activities and human relations it affords, nor from the collective personality it inculcates in its residents and visitors, which may be termed the city's second persona. San Francisco, for example, might be the right place for a moody person, but not Chicago. Vegas, for example, affords gambling and pleasure seeking, but does not afford philosophizing and community building. It precludes certain kinds of conversations among people. The paradox is that although it is a city dedicated to leisure, it totally subverts the philosophical (in a literal sense) function of leisure as the seat of wisdom. Culturally and psychologically, it functions more like an alibi: since Vegas is a sin city, the rest of the US must be sinless. In this sense, Vegas as a whole constitutes a special type of interological space. Foucault (1986) would call it a heterotopia [phrase omitted].

A city rich in interalities nurtures a magnanimous mental posture, ameliorates interpersonal frictions, and affords negentropic encounters and the irruption of creative energy. Shortage in physical interality motivates compensation via elaborate etiquette. This may well explain Japanese people's sensitivity to ma, investment in etiquette, and predilection for less bulky things. Etiquette is more associated with city dwellers precisely because urban life necessitates the formalization and lubrication of social interality. To be urbane is first and foremost to be privy to the art of etiquette. Shanghai used to be known for its narrow back alleys, where shortage in physical interality had served as the material ground for a peculiar collective persona proper to Shanghainese. Over the past decades, the once innumerable back alleys have found their way out of the cityscape and into museums and memoirs, to be replaced by generic buildings laid out in rational grids. Although historic quarters like the Bund, landmark buildings like the Oriental Pearl Tower, and the ever flowing Huangpu River still make Shanghai largely recognizable, to a certain extent, the city has lost its identity and individuality. In a sense, Shanghai has fixed its shortage in spatial interality in residential quarters only to bring in homogenization and gentrification. Another problem that has emerged, as explained below, is the prevalence of verticality (i.e., high-rises). These are problems common to many cities in present-day China, including Beijing.

People in the suburbs of Beijing used to live in houses with rooms on all four sides and a courtyard in the middle. It was not uncommon for the typical house to house all three generations of an extended family. The courtyard functioned as a common space for intra-familial communion before and after school and work. Each extended family had its shared private space which nurtured a singular kind of interpersonality and intergenerationality. Since the rooms were all single-story ones, people were in touch with diqi [phrase omitted] (literally, vital energy from the ground) all the time. Over the past two decades, such houses have mostly been bulldozed to make room for high-rises, which are literally vertical slums. Many apartments have little exposure to sunlight or none at all due to the buildings' proximity to one another. The residential quarters are more or less a concrete jungle. The problem with verticality is that it blocks social interality or relationality, and forestalls communitas. People are alienated not only from diqi but also from one another. A capital city like Dublin, which is categorically free of high-rises, will catch the Chinese imagination by surprise.

Marshall McLuhan anticipated much of this phenomenon, which is pervasive in present-day China, in his tetrad on the high-rise, according to which the highrise: amplifies privacy, solitude, and crowding, obsolesces community--everybody is a nobody, retrieves catacomb--an apartment is not a home, and, taken to an extreme, reverses into slum: community in crisis (McLuhan & Powers, 1989, p. 172; McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988, p. 138). Or, as a card in the DEW Line Deck (designed by McLuhan in 1969) has it: "High rise and mini-skirts, the end is in sight; i.e., instant slums." Yang Yongliang [phrase omitted], the contemporary artist based in Shanghai, has created a series of traditional style paintings to lay bare and lament the high-rise syndrome plaguing China today. At first sight, these paintings are no different than other traditional Chinese paintings. Upon closer examination, however, they start to reveal clusters of high-rises under construction that can easily be mistaken for mountains by the less careful viewer. An unmistakable incongruity between style and content characterizes these paintings. Stylistically, solid forms are interspersed with empty spaces or interalities, giving the paintings a misty quality, which may well be a statement about smog. Content-wise, the solid forms are made up of high-rises and tower cranes so crammed together that there are hardly any empty spaces or interalities among themselves. If Yang's paintings were the figure, then anxiety on the part of society at large about overdevelopment would be the constitutive, informing, and motivating ground.

In the olden days when people craved prosperity, interality was something taken for granted in the urban environment. In this age of overdevelopment, more and more people start to feel the crunch and realize that interality is something to cherish. That is to say, the stage has been set for interality to be commoditized. Indeed, at a time when interality is appreciated, the exchange value of interality naturally appreciates [phrase omitted]. The Qujiang Residential District in Xi'an makes a classical example. Property values there were high because of the Qujiang Pond--a desirable interality in a fast-developing city. Real estate developers seized the opportunity and put many more residential buildings in there to cash in on the interality, thereby diminishing it. As a consequence, people who bought apartments there at a premium ended up not being able to enjoy the interality they originally paid for. On the other hand, there are also many, many apartments that are owned but not occupied. People have allowed their exchange value to take precedence over their use value. Purchasing apartments for purposes of investment incentivizes real estate development and makes the property market hot. Development taken too far flips into vandalism. There is something poignantly true about this statement in contemporary China. It is time to entertain the notion of moderation, if not non-development.

To use McLuhan's metaphors of hot and cool, one can say that a city is cool if it is inclusive and rich in interality. Investment, however, leads to gentrification, exclusiveness, and the diminution of interality, making the city hot and cluttered. This tends to be a vicious circle. The development of commercial and residential property is not the only cause of urban clutter. Automobiles and, along with them, parking lots are another major contributing factor. One can get a good sense of whether a country already has too many automobiles based on how people drive, which is purely an outcome of social selection. One cannot drive in the typical city in China competently without a good sense of spacetime and a long apprenticeship in inter-vehicular proxemics. In those cities where road lines and traffic lights are only for reference, intervention and diversion on the part of traffic cops on duty have been a necessity for quite some years. The streets and roads constitute a significant part of a city's interality. Congestion on the road is an interality issue. Urban clutter leads to sensory fatigue and mental numbness. The more interality a city has, the less its residents have to resort to intensified stimulation to feel anything at all.

The way things stand now, livability and sustainability have become a real issue for a good number of cities in China. The solution to this issue necessarily has to do with the conservation, recovery, and reinvention of interality. Insofar as urban expansion will not lose its momentum anytime soon, interality has to be treated as a top priority in urban design and urban planning, and as a compulsory built-in feature in renovating old quarters of the city or in developing new quarters. Examples of interological spaces and heterotopias that can cool down the city include historical relics, temples, museums, college campuses, public squares, pedestrian streets, playgrounds, villages within the city [phrase omitted], morning markets, night markets, cemeteries, parks, zoos, botanic gardens, fountains, meadows, mountains, woods, ponds, lakes, and rivers, etc. The more interological spaces and heterotopias there are, the more interesting and livable the city is.

As college years are a liminal time, so the college campus is a liminal space. It is neither in nor outside of society but somewhere in between. Liminality is simply a special kind of interality. A properly functioning university is a space for leisure and pure play, paradoxical as this may sound. Over the past decades, most cities in China have gone through a wholesale physical makeover. Relatively speaking, the old campuses of certain universities (Nankai University in Tianjin makes a good example) have been able to resist the erosion of time, retain their original aura, and remain largely recognizable. Along with some other cool pockets of the city, they evidence and contribute to the city's historical depth. In a way, an excursion into an age-old college campus (such as Henan University in Kaifeng) feels like a time travel. The presence of college campuses makes for a rhythmic discontinuity or aberration in the city, thus enriching and diversifying its rhythmus. A mono-rhythmic city is a tedious and uninteresting place to live in. For lack of conspicuous seasonal variations, a city like Santa Barbara, California can be boring in its own way. Cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Xi'an, which have numerous universities in them, are tangibly cool and cultured compared with many other cities.

Leisure time [phrase omitted] is an important but easily ignored sense of interality. A city's livability is inseparable from the average amount of leisure time at its residents' disposal. Cities like New York, where people typically have a long commute, are at a disadvantage as far as this criterion is concerned. People carried away with the hustle and bustle of modern urban life tend to be oblivious of the following kinds of time: time for pure play, time to wonder (how many kids have had their childhood stolen by the examination-oriented education machine), time for doing nothing, time for nurturing mental tranquility and emptiness, time for walking just to walk or for sitting just to sit, festive time, time reserved for kinship sentiments, and so on. The average amount of disposable leisure time available to residents of a city translates into a more or less tangible psychological beat central to the personality of the city. The personality of Chengdu, for example, is inseparable from the leisurely pace of life for which it is known. Leisure is the seat of wisdom. A leisurely state of mind is a sign of spiritual aristocracy [phrase omitted]. Next let us examine the case of Xi' an, partly to venture beyond the senses of interality covered so far.

The Case of Xi'an

Formerly known as Chang'an, Xi'an was the capital of ancient China for multiple dynasties, including Western Zhou, Qin, Western Han, Sui, and Tang. It is now the capital of Shaanxi Province. Chan Master Victor Chiang once observed that Xi'an is a city where spiritual energy under the ground surpasses human energy above the ground. Whether the observation is tenable or not is quite beside the point. What matters is that in Xi'an, one confronts an interface between history and the present moment at every turn. History is invoked not just by material artifacts and physical structures like the terra cotta warriors, the stone steles, the big and small Wild Goose Pagodas, and the Ming Dynasty city wall, but also by all the place names which can date all the way back to the prosperous Tang Dynasty or, in some cases, much earlier. This temporal interface is central to the personality of the city and the collective mental posture of its residents. Any given day, the rich history sedimented in the material-symbolic complex of Xi'an participates in the average Xi'anese's actions and passions as a subconscious ground. Each place always has a virtual aura of meaning hovering above its actual existence. The liminal space between the two is the ground out of which the average resident's life unfolds. Not that other cities do not have this interality between the actual and the virtual. It is just that in Xi'an this interality has a peculiar historical depth unmatched by most other cities. Whether people in Xi'an are supposed to feel enriched or trapped by this interality is a separate issue.

For the genuine interologist, a city's essence lies as much in its external relations with a whole constellation of other cities and the countryside as in its aesthetic layout and internal dynamics. The identity of Chang'an in the Tang Dynasty, for example, was indissociable from its positionality vis-a-vis other cities along the Silk Road. If "intertext" and "intertextuality" are necessary concepts, then so are "intercity," "interpolis," and "interurbanity," the serviceability and implications of which are yet to be spelled out. A city implies its sphere of influence and the myriad resources that sustain it but reside beyond itself. As such, its being had better be imagined as a field being [phrase omitted] and an interbeing [phrase omitted]. In this age of globalization and rhizomatic interconnectivity, this field can be as big as the entire globe. It is unthinkable for a city to exist in isolation from other cities. What one city does affects the next city, and vice versa. Cities do not simply compete with one another. They exist in each other's relational field. Synergy, functional complementarity, and intercity symbiosis are the rule rather than the exception. To keep the scope of this article manageable, the topic of intercity relationality, which has been touched upon by authors like Saskia Sassen (2002), will be bracketed for now, partly because this article is interested more in ethics and spirituality than in economics and commerce.

A thoroughgoing stocktaking of a city's interalities entails taking account of its lines of flight and beyondness, which define a city more than its interiority does. In a sense, a city is as good as its beyondness or constitutive outside. In the case of Xi'an, the Qinling Mountains to the south are well worth a mention. These mountains are at once a natural barrier separating Central and Southern Shaanxi from each other and a place for the true person [phrase omitted] to take deep, spiritual breaths. One does not have to be a deep-mountain hermit to take such breaths. The Qinling Mountains constitute an indispensable part of Xi'an's interological space precisely because they are practical destinations for over-the-weekend foot travelers, who are known as [phrase omitted] (a pejorative homonym of "travel companions" [phrase omitted]) in Chinese Internet neologism. With the right cast of mind, one can literally walk [phrase omitted] oneself into a true person. For there is no unbridgeable divide between an ordinary foot traveler and a true person.

There is a world of difference between walking on the treadmill and walking in the Qinling Mountains. Put simply, the one is muscular whereas the other is spiritual. The Qinling Mountains are deemed as miraculous partly because they are rich in medicinal herbs. Not only is the air fresher and moister, it also has a healing virtue. When climbing a mountain, one naturally takes deep breaths, and does precisely what the experienced Taoist practitioner does, but unwittingly or in a wuxin [phrase omitted] mode. So much the better. The way seasoned foot travelers see it, hiking in the Qinling Mountains serves to cleanse and oxygenate one's physical, mental, and emotional being, and allows one to actively enjoy an at once strenuous and deeply relaxed, idle mode of existence. The use of the mountains precisely lies in their apparent uselessness. To get away from the city and become one with the mountains and waters is to enter into a liminal spacetime, suspend mundane time, and live like an immortal. In a sense, the soul of Xi'an does not lie in the city proper but in the Qinling Mountains, which, as an immense interological space, have functioned as an inexhaustible source of spiritual energy to sustain the city. The fact that Xi'an's beyondness lies in the Southern Mountains instead of a vast body of water (such as the Qiantang River in the case of Hangzhou, the Yellow Sea in the case of Qingdao, or Lake Michigan in the case of Chicago) is not insignificant. The implication is that Xi'an's lines of flight are Taoist and Buddhist in nature, which is in keeping with ancient Chang'an's status as the capital of the Western Han and Tang Dynasties.

When asked what the Qinling Mountains to the south mean to Xi'an, a frequenter of the Mountains bearing the WeChat name "North-of-the-Mountains Idle Man" [phrase omitted] [phrase omitted] came up with a similar answer but put the emphasis on water instead of spiritual energy: "In a sense, without the Southern Mountains, there would be no Xi'an. Water from the Southern Mountains nourishes Xi'an's existence and prosperity. Since ancient times, the mountains have not only safeguarded Xi'an in a military sense, but also warded off the hot and humid air from the south, keeping it from permeating the city." The Southern Mountains literally collect water from the sky and channel it toward the city. The mountains have served as a mediator between the sky and the city ever since the latter came into existence. As an artificial environment, the city does not reside outside of natural processes. It is sustained by such processes, which can be disrupted if the city overreaches itself. The city's prosperity rests entirely on the resilience of its constitutive outside. If we are too civilized to remember this, a quick examination of the eight trigrams of the I Ching (understood as natural processes in dynamic equilibrium with each other) should be enough to bring us back to the essentials.

We are more used to evaluating the mountains from the vantage point of the city than doing the opposite. The latter is precisely what we need to do. Viewed from the top of the Mountains, the atmosphere over the city appears on certain days to be made up of three layers, which are blue, gray, and black from top to bottom. That is a sure sign that the hustle and bustle in the city have crossed a threshold of sustainability, making the mountains to the south all the more indispensable as an interological space. It should come off as no surprise if residents of Xi'an, especially those who are retired, want to get a second home [phrase omitted] at the foot of one of the mountains. Those who do so, however, may soon get the feeling that they have moved to just another city. The pace of urbanization easily overtakes people's "escape velocity" these days.

In Beijing, the north side of the city is deemed as more desirable than the south side; in Xi'an, the opposite is the case. Xi'an's expansion has been subliminally conditioned by a southbound collective psychic drive. That is not to say that expansion in other directions has been stalled. Two decades ago, the Shaanxi TV Tower more or less marked the south end of Xi'an. The city has since expanded southward by half an hour's drive or more, depending on traffic. Xi'an used to be surrounded by eight rivers [phrase omitted]. Pretty soon, the eight rivers will be flowing within the bounds of the expanded city [phrase omitted]. The size of the city is well beyond the human scale, in the sense that it is impractical to go to places on foot. In this sense, the city is not walkable even if one can still walk there. It is not drivable either given the spatial and temporal length of congestion when most people need to drive to places any given day. If one day Xi'an has expanded all the way to the Southern Mountains, the latter will lose their meaning as a beyond or a getaway since the interality or distance in between has been eliminated or exhausted. The urbanization of everywhere means the obsolescence and becoming-cancer of urbanity. This propensity is symptomatic of a syndrome plaguing the material environment of present-day China. The essence of this syndrome is the depletion of interality. Yang Yongliang's mock traditional paintings, as mentioned earlier, are simply an expression of the broad-based anxiety thus created. For the most part, Xi'an is simply an epitome of China at large.

An inventory of a city's interalities is only partial if we don't take into account its productive interfaces, which make for the city's cultural diversity. In the case of Xi'an, three interfaces stand out. Demographically, there is an interface between Han Chinese and Muslims. Culinarily, there is an interface between flour-centered Shaanxi cuisine, Islamic cuisine which features beef and mutton, spicy Sichuan cuisine, and so on. Linguistically, there is an interface between the vernacular, territorial Guanzhong dialect (the Xi'an dialect is an urbane variation thereof), the diasporic, gritty Henan dialect, and the artificial but professional-sounding Mandarin. Although English is not actively spoken by the average person, it has infiltrated the educated person's linguistic consciousness. Over the past thirty years, by and by, the Henan dialect seems to have lost its value as a resource for bluffing. Behind each dialect resides a different sensibility or mental posture. The coexistence of multiple ways of speaking the same written language creates a sense of play and a degree of pleasure, enhances the flavor of the local cultural milieu, and augments the typical resident's receptivity and resourcefulness. To say dialects are different ways of breathing life into the same written language, however, is to commit the fallacy of putting writing before speech. On the other hand, if the difference between dialects is a matter of style, then style is a difference that makes a difference.

The Miniaturization and Mediation of Interalities in Urban Life

Along the temporal dimension, given the penetration of computers and smartphones and the speeding up of people's pace of life, interalities or durations proper to human actions and inactions are being miniaturized and fractalized. Mini-encounters are proliferating. Increasingly, the average person's waking hours are being minced into micro-durations--a sure sign of busyness and mental clutter. Now that most people are object-driven and other-driven, the relevance of the phrase, "stream of consciousness," is becoming increasingly salient. Most people's consciousness is literally made up of an ongoing stream of undigested and indigestible bits and ephemeral quasi-impressions. In the typical city dweller's life, interruptions are the rule rather than the exception. Thanks to the latest technologies of attention and inattention, people are constantly being distracted from distractions. Homo sapiens has mutated into homo distractus. Weixin (literally, "micro message," also known as "WeChat") has been a formidable contributing factor, especially among urban residents in China over the past few years.

As people migrate on a massive scale into cyberspace for their social life, social interality is increasingly mediated, not only by screens but also by invisible, behind-the-scenes bots and algorithms. People appear to each other as apparitions or metaphors of themselves. If people assume personas (literally, "masks") when facing each other in person, then their on-screen apparitions would be meta-personas (i.e., masks of masks). If face-to-face interaction is a matter of interpersonality (literally, "inter-persona"), then screen-mediated interaction would be a matter of meta-interpersonality, which is susceptible to Big Brotherhood (as George Orwell means it) and cybernetic control. Digital mediation of social interality paves the way for automated surveillance, so to speak. Sooner than we expect, knowingly or unknowingly, people will be tele-interacting with robots or artificial intelligences. Algorithm-orchestrated meta-personal encounters with myriad others, be they human, posthuman, or nonhuman, will become a mundane fact of life. People will assume transient meta-personas fluidly on a contingent basis, which is to say, in function of their virtual encounters in cyberspace. The virtual "I" will be conjured up thanks to an equally virtual other, and vice versa. "Dependent co-arising" [phrase omitted] and "impermanence" [phrase omitted] will become the most natural notions to accept. Interological thinking will finally prevail over ontological thinking - at a time when social interality has been largely virtualized. Those who intuited being as interbeing long before the inception of the age of technologized interconnectivity must be exceptionally sagacious. The virtualization of social interality dilutes the meaning of the distinction between physical vicinity and distance. For cybernauts are all equidistant from one another. As far as discarnate souls are concerned, the city (i.e., polis) is already obsolescent. (3) So is politics as we knew it once upon a time. To some extent, the distinction between city as center and country as periphery is giving way to the online vs. offline distinction. Cyberspace, let us remember, is not an urb and will not make people urbane. Loss of civility is on the horizonless horizon.

Closing Remarks

In China and a good number of other places in the world, liberal education [phrase omitted] has grown from a desirable educational praxis into a line of inquiry in its own right. In a sense, what makes liberal education liberal is precisely interality, in the manifold senses of pure play, interplay, productive interface, dialogue, the spontaneous irruption of creative energy, time to wonder, to muse, to contemplate nothingness (which is a special sense of interality), to engage in vacuum behavior (to be ludic), to be truly liminal (to reach that singular point where one is ready to cross a threshold any given moment). Interality implies throughness [phrase omitted], which entails the overcoming of compartmentalization or the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries. This is precisely what liberal education means in both English and Chinese. In play, people get the sensation of freedom. Between work and play, the latter serves a higher purpose, which is the ritualistic, epideictic enactment and celebration of the free spirit. Work culminates into play; play is the telos of work. True happiness resides in the transformation or sublimation of work into play. Play takes space and time and gives space and time a qualitative difference. In interology, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and a liberal, idleness-oriented mode of existence fuse into one. The dharma of interology is a dharma of nonduality.

The implication is that not only should interality education [phrase omitted] be included as an integral element of liberal education, it also needs to be treated as the very core and essence of liberal education. Interality implies an anti-environment, a heterotopia or intertopia (liminal space) as distinguished from a utopia or an atopia (cyberspace is an atopia par excellence as far as present-day life is concerned). A city with insufficient interality is a stupid, unethical city since interality is the seat of wisdom, the locus of ethics. If, as Felix Guattari (1985) points out, "[t]he main function of the city... is the production of subjectivity," we should realize that the subjectivity or intersubjectivity the city produces is as good as its interality, which is both quantitative and qualitative (p. 460). In this age when interality is being exploited and exhausted, the conservation, recuperation, and reinvention of interality should be treated as a default priority. Urbanists should reexamine the livability and sustainability of the city under the guidance of a comprehensive interality index, which at its best is "a qualitative calculus of the optimum," rather than something to be hypostatized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 364-365). That is to say, they should treat it as a heuristic or a pointer rather than a thing or the real thing.

Notes

(1) McLuhan and Watson (1970) point out: "The Chinese symbols are ideograms, that is to say, graphs of an idea, and therefore are not pictures of abstract things or nouns, as we know them in Western linguistics, but actions, shorthand images of natural process and operations..." (p. 101).

(2) Deleuze and Guattari (1987) offer a fascinating comparison between chess and Go and associate them with striated space and smooth space, respectively (pp. 352-353). Relatively speaking, China is more like a Go player well steeped in The Art of War authored by Sun Tzu, whereas the US is more like a chess player whose imagination goes only as far as a four-dimensional chess game.

(3) Fortunately, most people do not see themselves as discarnate souls. Many young tech workers, for example, prefer to live in cities (e.g., San Francisco or Seattle) rather than the countryside. For one thing, embodied sociality still matters to them.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Richard John Lynn [phrase omitted] for translating some Chinese textual fragments and mini-texts into English upon request. He also thanks Janell Watson, Robert L. Ivie, Randy Lumpp, and Yu Xuanmeng [phrase omitted] for their productive criticism, You Xilin [phrase omitted] and Zhang Li [phrase omitted] for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this article at Shaanxi Normal University, Zhang Hong [phrase omitted] ([phrase omitted], Wang Yunle [phrase omitted], and Chan Master Victor Chiang [phrase omitted] for sharing their thoughts on Xi'an, Yuan Ying [phrase omitted] and Bao Xiao [phrase omitted] for revealing to him the artistic brilliance of the Master of the Nets Garden [phrase omitted] in April 2013, and Deneb Kozikoski Valereto for bringing Yang Yongliang' s paintings to his attention.

Peter Zhang

Grand Valley State University, USA

Correspondence to:

Peter Zhang

School of Communications Grand Valley State University 290 LSH, 1 Campus Dr Allendale, MI 49401 Email: zhangp@gvsu.edu

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Peter Zhang

Grand Valley State University, USA

[Peter Zhang. Interality and the City. China Media Research 2017; 13(4): 38-47]. 5

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