Find your own words and connect with the times

【Editor's Note】

After a year of ups and downs, a year of ups and downs, time is about to open a new page. The surging commentary launched the year-end special plan "Let the Future Be Worthy of the Present", record and write you and me in 2021, and look forward to the new year, everyone can face the sunshine and warmth!

As the year draws to a close, there are naturally various important events that emerge in the media, which condense the picture of the year, prompting us to base ourselves on what kind of time and space, what kind of days we have passed, and let us have a sense of coexistence with the times.

However, this sense of coexistence is not a substitute for the individual's self-conscious perception of the times. Some people may think that something happens outside their own perception, so far away from them that they feel abandoned by the moving train in a lonely station; perhaps some people think that some things happen only because of the trend of the times, as long as they conform to and agree with it. Feelings like this actually reveal the lack of connection with the times.

In 1980, when I was in college, a lot of important things happened: Voyager 1 flew by Saturn, John Lennon was stabbed to death, the Iran-Iraq War broke out, Sony launched the Walkman, Nintendo's first game came out, Roland Barthes died, John Berg's The Way to See was published... But at the time, I didn't know anything about it. It wasn't until later that I became associated with these events at work, reading, and in my daily life, that their meaning to me slowly became clearer. It can be said that the lack of information and my hindsight have delayed my specific connection with the times.

In today's developed information, no one will be as slow as I was then; but to be able to quickly obtain a wealth of information, how the connection between the individual and the era marked by the information becomes more urgent and requires timely questioning. If there is no such questioning, even if we have database-like information, we may be overwhelmed and suffocated by it; if there is no such inquiry, even if we follow all the hot spots, we may feel out of touch with the times.

At the most basic level, our question is a look at the reality of the self in the information environment: Do you want to go against your heart and go with the flow? Is it to blame the slack heart to the "lying flat" trend? Is distraction attributed to the pervasiveness of the mobile internet? Is unscrupulous competition attributed to ubiquitous "inner volumes"? In the face of the most popular words, the most popular fashion, the most popular online articles, the most eye-catching Internet celebrities and the hottest hot spots, can we maintain basic rationality and not succumb to the release of dopamine? In the pursuit of myths and predictions of new technologies, do we lose both a basic sense of history and ignore the reality in which we live? In the various narratives and discourses that surround such things as the metacosm, can we discern the diffusion of autonomy anxiety and the battle of multiple voices?

Questioning requires reflection. The American scholar Peters' "Qiyun" had a Chinese translation at the end of last year, and this year it was read by the journalism and communication community. In his book, the author reminds us: "1964 was a good year for humanity to think about technology, culture and society. He listed a number of important books published this year, highlighting in particular what McLuhan's Understanding the Medium and Gurham's Gestures and Speech mean to us. The former regards technology as an extension of human organs, while the latter regards human organs as an extension of technology, which reflect each other and gain insight into the relationship between technology and people.

However, Peters did not elaborate on the one-dimensional Man, which was also published in the same year and became popular around the world. Marcuse's treatise on technological rationality and technological mythology is still revelatory today. Ignoring "The One-Dimensional Man" is related to the writing positioning, ideological concerns and value orientation of "Qiyun". Such neglect also means leaving open space for different thinkers, and it means that there are rich possibilities for thinking about any thought, any event. Migrant worker Chen Zhi's study of Heidegger reveals the power and possible charm of this kind of thinking. When we begin to pursue more possibilities, it is the moment when we have a concrete connection with the times.

Questioning and thinking do not just unfold at an abstract level, but are always connected to the vivid feelings of individual life in a particular situation. A few days ago, I visited Quyuan again, walking on the narrow road of Stone, Slab and Cement in Ma Yike Lane, making different noises under my feet. There is a cold wind blowing in the alley, but what is circling in the mind is "spring in". At the age of thirty, Yu Fan was rewarded by the examiner Zeng Guofan for saying that "the flowers are still falling in the spring". But he did not reach all the way from here, but ushered in more than 20 years of upheaval and displacement after a short period of glory. When Yu Yu built the Qu Garden and settled down, naming the most spacious and bright hall "Spring in the Hall", I think that he was feeling the joy of Bole and commemorating his youth, and he was also lamenting the hope and belief that he had experienced the harsh winter of life but never gave up - the eternal "spring in" in his heart. This feeling of life must be accompanied by the search and reflection on the true meaning of scholarship, and finally condensed in more than 500 volumes of the "Complete Book of Spring in the Hall". All the explanations, conjectures, imaginations, and empathies stimulated by "Spring in" all integrate the cognition and empathy of the latecomers, which is the meaning of the catalytic and generative "flowers falling in spring", and also shows that the keywords that originally belonged to Yu Yu's individual are connected to a broader and far-reaching time and space.

Yu Fan's "Spring in" allows us to see that an event condenses in a poem, condensed into a word, and becomes a node connecting the individual with the times. Here the power of words is revealed. As Quartyrolli emphasizes in The Digitally Divided Self: "Words are the basic medium of individual consciousness, the tools that connect us with the outside world... [We] understand the inner and outer worlds", when we explore the connection between the individual and the times, all our inquiries, thoughts and feelings are actually inseparable from language, and ultimately we must form language and speak in our own words.

But the cacophony of language is always a "life without language" – a dilemma that the writer vividly showed in a novel many years ago. In January this year, the establishment of the Douban group of the "Word Aphasia Mutual Aid Alliance" also shows that many people have realized the language dilemma we are in today. This online community, which has more than 240,000 members registered, shows us the self-consciousness of breaking this dilemma, and will surely inspire more people to find their own words and sincerely connect with the times in which we live.

Chief Planner Xia Zhengyu General Coordinator Chen Cai Special Production The Surging Commentary Department Poster Design Zhao Guanqun Yu Fei