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Organizer of Shanghai Federation of Social Sciences
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Organizer of Shanghai Federation of Social Sciences
There are academic ideas EXPLORATION AND FREE VIEWS
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
The spirit of "flavor" - "well-off aesthetics" and the meaning of civilization
Luo Chengshu Associate Professor, Department of Chinese, Sun Yat-sen University
This article was originally published in Exploration and Controversy, No. 5, 2021
Unless noted, the pictures in the text are from the Internet
At the end of 2020, the urbanization rate of China's permanent population exceeded 60%. As a powerful engine of modernity projects, the steady advancement of urbanization has played a comprehensive role in bearing, driving and integrating industrialization, informatization and agricultural modernization. At present, the government further emphasizes: "Adhere to the new development concept, accelerate the implementation of a new type of urbanization strategy with the promotion of human urbanization as the core and the improvement of quality as the orientation." Compared with the previous incremental development of scale, people-oriented quality improvement development has become the main point of the new urbanization road. The new experience and new trends of contemporary Chinese urban culture should be considered in accordance with the complete new development concept of "innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing".
In the historical situation of the "post-epidemic era" and the "moderately prosperous society", to understand the reality and potential of contemporary Chinese urban culture, we must not be separated from the driving force and mechanism of modernity and globalization, but also should take root in the experience and dreams of the Chinese homeland, and carry out mutual learning among civilizations based on Chinese practice and Western theory. The essence of urban culture is the urban lifestyle and living experience. The key to the theoretical discourse construction of contemporary Chinese urban culture lies in how to give shape to the way of life and life experience of Chinese cities, to make a contemporary theoretical expression of the Chinese people's yearning for a better life, and to provide a road sign for the new urbanization map.
At the end of 2020, Changsha was included in the first batch of national cultural and tourism consumption demonstration cities announced by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In the past 20 years, with the rise of the "Tv Xiangjun", "Publishing Xiangjun" and "Literary Xiangjun", although Changsha has repeatedly won praise such as "Entertainment Capital", "Creative Capital" and "Media Art Capital", this selection has a unique idea. This paper attempts to focus on Changsha, a demonstration city of cultural tourism consumption, take the phenomenon-level cultural catering of Changsha Pozi Street as the object, strive to construct the cognitive space hidden behind the new cultural tourism consumption lifestyle and life experience, and through the analysis of the "aesthetic-ethical" mechanism, try to explore the theoretical characteristics and social implications of "well-off aesthetics" and reveal its possible civilization significance.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Organizer of Shanghai Federation of Social Sciences
There are academic ideas EXPLORATION AND FREE VIEWS
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
The spirit of "flavor" - "well-off aesthetics" and the meaning of civilization
Luo Chengshu Associate Professor, Department of Chinese, Sun Yat-sen University
This article was originally published in Exploration and Controversy, No. 5, 2021
Unless noted, the pictures in the text are from the Internet
At the end of 2020, the urbanization rate of China's permanent population exceeded 60%. As a powerful engine of modernity projects, the steady advancement of urbanization has played a comprehensive role in bearing, driving and integrating industrialization, informatization and agricultural modernization. At present, the government further emphasizes: "Adhere to the new development concept, accelerate the implementation of a new type of urbanization strategy with the promotion of human urbanization as the core and the improvement of quality as the orientation." Compared with the previous incremental development of scale, people-oriented quality improvement development has become the main point of the new urbanization road. The new experience and new trends of contemporary Chinese urban culture should be considered in accordance with the complete new development concept of "innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing".
In the historical situation of the "post-epidemic era" and the "moderately prosperous society", to understand the reality and potential of contemporary Chinese urban culture, we must not be separated from the driving force and mechanism of modernity and globalization, but also should take root in the experience and dreams of the Chinese homeland, and carry out mutual learning among civilizations based on Chinese practice and Western theory. The essence of urban culture is the urban lifestyle and living experience. The key to the theoretical discourse construction of contemporary Chinese urban culture lies in how to give shape to the way of life and life experience of Chinese cities, to make a contemporary theoretical expression of the Chinese people's yearning for a better life, and to provide a road sign for the new urbanization map.
At the end of 2020, Changsha was included in the first batch of national cultural and tourism consumption demonstration cities announced by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In the past 20 years, with the rise of the "Tv Xiangjun", "Publishing Xiangjun" and "Literary Xiangjun", although Changsha has repeatedly won praise such as "Entertainment Capital", "Creative Capital" and "Media Art Capital", this selection has a unique idea. This paper attempts to focus on Changsha, a demonstration city of cultural tourism consumption, take the phenomenon-level cultural catering of Changsha Pozi Street as the object, strive to construct the cognitive space hidden behind the new cultural tourism consumption lifestyle and life experience, and through the analysis of the "aesthetic-ethical" mechanism, try to explore the theoretical characteristics and social implications of "well-off aesthetics" and reveal its possible civilization significance.
Pozi Street, Changsha
Ichijing culture: The temporal and spatial aesthetics of "historic places"
Different from traditional logos such as "Huxiang Culture", "Red Origin" and "Happy China", the charm of Changsha spread in the media space is mostly related to food. In 2020, after half a year of epidemic suspension, a "National Day people all over the country want to come to Changsha" entry appeared on Weibo hot search, on October 3, a cultural catering enterprise in Pozi Street announced that the number of more than 30,000, it is recommended that tourists take the number online and queue up 500 tables in advance. Some netizens think that eating and drinking is so hilarious? But the question is: Is cultural catering consumption limited to eating and drinking? In the face of consumer culture, can it only be read and interpreted by Applying Western Critical Theory? Is the consumption transformation and upgrading of contemporary Chinese society just a Footnote to Baudrillard's "Consumer Society"? Does the Chinese-style consumer society have a unique "aesthetic-ethical" structure, which provides a different kind of civilization enlightenment for the development of contemporary urban culture?
At the end of 2019, a cultural catering enterprise on Pozi Street issued a corporate manifesto entitled "If we don't create, we can die". In the slogan "Never Say Anything To The End", the core idea is to see "creation" as the lifeblood of the self. "Creation" is not only the invention of gastronomic skills, but also the discovery of urban life and cultural ecology. A few years ago, the documentary "China on the Tip of the Tongue" sparked renewed public concern about Chinese food culture. Although the works adopt the method of telling the story of the characters, the themes of the series still focus on the visual presentation of food skills, conveying the traditional meaning of nature and family for Chinese. Comparatively speaking, the construction of cultural catering in Pozi Street not only exceeds the visuality and craftsmanship of the food skills shown in the documentary video, but also differs from the "quasi-farmhouse" aesthetic and cultural model such as rural nostalgia commonly used in mainstream Hunan cuisine marketing, and mainly relies on the local memory of Chinese cities in the past 30 years to reconstruct and reproduce ecologically, and its experience characteristics have distinct urbanity, history and sociality. The innovative development of the new cultural tourism path stems from a self-inquiry of contemporary Chinese urban culture:
Nine years ago, we started a business with a stall on Pozi Street, and then opened a shop on Golden Line Street, Taiping Street, Renmin Road, and Riverside. In the past nine years, in the process of continuous development of Chinese cities, we have been continuously relocated and copied, and in the process we have been thinking.......
Changsha Cultural Tourism Catering, which has cultural consciousness, has always paid attention to the changes in the city and the adjustment of the meaning of life. In the fluid and replicable modernity of "relocated" and "copied", it declares that it does not succumb to the passive transformation of urbanization, but gazes at the strange changes in urban space, from "setting up stalls" to "opening shops", adhering to the reflective nature of urban culture in the migration of time and space:
As the city progressed, many of the horizontal streets disappeared into vertical buildings, and many of our creations disappeared with them. Because of this, we have gained new opportunities and challenges, and we must think about how to insist on ourselves in a building and restore the real street and street neighborhood relationship.
At the moment when "everything solid is gone", the disappearance of the street does not only stir up the melancholy chants of the nostalgic, but the historical subjects who face reality can always see "new opportunities and challenges". The new type of cultural tourism restaurant aims to restore neighborhood relations in a building, highlighting the initiative of contemporary Chinese urban culture with a conscious ethical responsibility and a clear social consciousness. The persistence of Ichijing culture is the hidden life concept and value behind local cuisines such as crayfish, stinky tofu, and shallot oil.
Built in 2014, the "Huayuan Hua Center" is located at the intersection of Pozi Street and Xiangjiang Middle Road in the old town of Changsha, standing on the bank of the Xiangjiang River, overlooking Orange Island, overlooking Yuelu Mountain, the highest ground height of the four main buildings is 278 meters, and the seven-storey podium is Hisense Square. The exterior of the building is an ultra-white glass curtain wall, the interior is modeled on the old city of Changsha in the 1980s and 1990s to create a seven-story "old building", the entrance is jokingly called "time and space wormhole", in fact, more similar to Tao Yuanming's Wuling people found the entrance of Tao Yuanyuan, "the beginning is extremely narrow, only through people, repeat dozens of steps, suddenly cheerful". At the end of the passage, which is carefully made of old bricks, there is a huge patio enclosed by the façade of the old dormitory building. It opens up not only a "time-space" in the "technical-physical" sense, but also a "historical place" in a "humanistic-psychological" sense.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Organizer of Shanghai Federation of Social Sciences
There are academic ideas EXPLORATION AND FREE VIEWS
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
The spirit of "flavor" - "well-off aesthetics" and the meaning of civilization
Luo Chengshu Associate Professor, Department of Chinese, Sun Yat-sen University
This article was originally published in Exploration and Controversy, No. 5, 2021
Unless noted, the pictures in the text are from the Internet
At the end of 2020, the urbanization rate of China's permanent population exceeded 60%. As a powerful engine of modernity projects, the steady advancement of urbanization has played a comprehensive role in bearing, driving and integrating industrialization, informatization and agricultural modernization. At present, the government further emphasizes: "Adhere to the new development concept, accelerate the implementation of a new type of urbanization strategy with the promotion of human urbanization as the core and the improvement of quality as the orientation." Compared with the previous incremental development of scale, people-oriented quality improvement development has become the main point of the new urbanization road. The new experience and new trends of contemporary Chinese urban culture should be considered in accordance with the complete new development concept of "innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing".
In the historical situation of the "post-epidemic era" and the "moderately prosperous society", to understand the reality and potential of contemporary Chinese urban culture, we must not be separated from the driving force and mechanism of modernity and globalization, but also should take root in the experience and dreams of the Chinese homeland, and carry out mutual learning among civilizations based on Chinese practice and Western theory. The essence of urban culture is the urban lifestyle and living experience. The key to the theoretical discourse construction of contemporary Chinese urban culture lies in how to give shape to the way of life and life experience of Chinese cities, to make a contemporary theoretical expression of the Chinese people's yearning for a better life, and to provide a road sign for the new urbanization map.
At the end of 2020, Changsha was included in the first batch of national cultural and tourism consumption demonstration cities announced by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In the past 20 years, with the rise of the "Tv Xiangjun", "Publishing Xiangjun" and "Literary Xiangjun", although Changsha has repeatedly won praise such as "Entertainment Capital", "Creative Capital" and "Media Art Capital", this selection has a unique idea. This paper attempts to focus on Changsha, a demonstration city of cultural tourism consumption, take the phenomenon-level cultural catering of Changsha Pozi Street as the object, strive to construct the cognitive space hidden behind the new cultural tourism consumption lifestyle and life experience, and through the analysis of the "aesthetic-ethical" mechanism, try to explore the theoretical characteristics and social implications of "well-off aesthetics" and reveal its possible civilization significance.
Pozi Street, Changsha
Ichijing culture: The temporal and spatial aesthetics of "historic places"
Different from traditional logos such as "Huxiang Culture", "Red Origin" and "Happy China", the charm of Changsha spread in the media space is mostly related to food. In 2020, after half a year of epidemic suspension, a "National Day people all over the country want to come to Changsha" entry appeared on Weibo hot search, on October 3, a cultural catering enterprise in Pozi Street announced that the number of more than 30,000, it is recommended that tourists take the number online and queue up 500 tables in advance. Some netizens think that eating and drinking is so hilarious? But the question is: Is cultural catering consumption limited to eating and drinking? In the face of consumer culture, can it only be read and interpreted by Applying Western Critical Theory? Is the consumption transformation and upgrading of contemporary Chinese society just a Footnote to Baudrillard's "Consumer Society"? Does the Chinese-style consumer society have a unique "aesthetic-ethical" structure, which provides a different kind of civilization enlightenment for the development of contemporary urban culture?
At the end of 2019, a cultural catering enterprise on Pozi Street issued a corporate manifesto entitled "If we don't create, we can die". In the slogan "Never Say Anything To The End", the core idea is to see "creation" as the lifeblood of the self. "Creation" is not only the invention of gastronomic skills, but also the discovery of urban life and cultural ecology. A few years ago, the documentary "China on the Tip of the Tongue" sparked renewed public concern about Chinese food culture. Although the works adopt the method of telling the story of the characters, the themes of the series still focus on the visual presentation of food skills, conveying the traditional meaning of nature and family for Chinese. Comparatively speaking, the construction of cultural catering in Pozi Street not only exceeds the visuality and craftsmanship of the food skills shown in the documentary video, but also differs from the "quasi-farmhouse" aesthetic and cultural model such as rural nostalgia commonly used in mainstream Hunan cuisine marketing, and mainly relies on the local memory of Chinese cities in the past 30 years to reconstruct and reproduce ecologically, and its experience characteristics have distinct urbanity, history and sociality. The innovative development of the new cultural tourism path stems from a self-inquiry of contemporary Chinese urban culture:
Nine years ago, we started a business with a stall on Pozi Street, and then opened a shop on Golden Line Street, Taiping Street, Renmin Road, and Riverside. In the past nine years, in the process of continuous development of Chinese cities, we have been continuously relocated and copied, and in the process we have been thinking.......
Changsha Cultural Tourism Catering, which has cultural consciousness, has always paid attention to the changes in the city and the adjustment of the meaning of life. In the fluid and replicable modernity of "relocated" and "copied", it declares that it does not succumb to the passive transformation of urbanization, but gazes at the strange changes in urban space, from "setting up stalls" to "opening shops", adhering to the reflective nature of urban culture in the migration of time and space:
As the city progressed, many of the horizontal streets disappeared into vertical buildings, and many of our creations disappeared with them. Because of this, we have gained new opportunities and challenges, and we must think about how to insist on ourselves in a building and restore the real street and street neighborhood relationship.
At the moment when "everything solid is gone", the disappearance of the street does not only stir up the melancholy chants of the nostalgic, but the historical subjects who face reality can always see "new opportunities and challenges". The new type of cultural tourism restaurant aims to restore neighborhood relations in a building, highlighting the initiative of contemporary Chinese urban culture with a conscious ethical responsibility and a clear social consciousness. The persistence of Ichijing culture is the hidden life concept and value behind local cuisines such as crayfish, stinky tofu, and shallot oil.
Built in 2014, the "Huayuan Hua Center" is located at the intersection of Pozi Street and Xiangjiang Middle Road in the old town of Changsha, standing on the bank of the Xiangjiang River, overlooking Orange Island, overlooking Yuelu Mountain, the highest ground height of the four main buildings is 278 meters, and the seven-storey podium is Hisense Square. The exterior of the building is an ultra-white glass curtain wall, the interior is modeled on the old city of Changsha in the 1980s and 1990s to create a seven-story "old building", the entrance is jokingly called "time and space wormhole", in fact, more similar to Tao Yuanming's Wuling people found the entrance of Tao Yuanyuan, "the beginning is extremely narrow, only through people, repeat dozens of steps, suddenly cheerful". At the end of the passage, which is carefully made of old bricks, there is a huge patio enclosed by the façade of the old dormitory building. It opens up not only a "time-space" in the "technical-physical" sense, but also a "historical place" in a "humanistic-psychological" sense.
The climbing indoor patio has hidden elevators that go up to the restaurants on all floors, as well as reinforced concrete steps that walk up the old building. On the third floor leading to the fourth floor, a "forever street" was created: "The vertical tower extends to more than 300 meters into the air, and we need to restore a 300-meter-long street to 'confront' it." Originally an old street in changsha's old town that connects Pozi Street and Xiahe Street, it has long disappeared with the large-scale renovation of the old city in the past 20 years, and has been rebuilt indoors in order to preserve the "place of stories and human feelings". On Yongyong Street, Changsha snacks such as "Qiao Bo Cold Noodles", "Li Ta Tofu Brain", "Aunt Mao Chicken Feet", "Kong Family Sweet Wine", "Laid-off Brand Stinky Tofu", "Liu Ji Sugar Oil Dumplings", "Wen's Scraping Cold Powder", "Nanmen Alley Pig's Feet" and so on are lined up one after another, and there is even a well-known local "Shugu Ancient Literature Bookstore". The traditional stalls and shops in the corners of the city continue their own small business here, and the principals strive to create a temporal and spatial aesthetic of neighborhood affection and neighborhood business inside the skyscrapers; buildings and streets, food and culture, memory and reality, the old and the new and complement each other.
As an aesthetic presentation of urban cultural ecology, "Forever Street" is a kind of "historic place". It is not a purely virtual utopia in the imaginary world, but a heterotopia that once existed in the historical world. Utopia and heterotopia, although both products of modernity, appear to be at odds with each other. Utopia originally referred to as "Utopia", which is a kind of spatial imagination. Carinesecu notes that its temporal connotations today far outweigh the spatial meaning of etymology, and that utopianism since the 18th century is "yet another piece of evidence of the growing importance of the modern era in belittling the past and the future," rooted in a specific Western sense of time, namely "the importance of reason on irreversible time." In view of this, modernity is based on a fluid, linear, irreversible sense of time, with the characteristics of "de-spatialization". Utopia both characterizes dissatisfaction with modernity and is more deeply attached to the temporal logic of modernity. Sawyer calls this temporal hegemony of modernity "historical determinism," arguing that "attaching space to time" thus "obscures the geographical interpretations of the variability of the social world." Heterotopia, as another spatial understanding, aims to escape from the trap of homogeneous, hollow temporality. Foucault reminds people to get rid of the fascination with time and should pay attention to the epistemological value of space, because people do not live in the void, and living space is always heterogeneous. In Foucault's view, utopias are "unreal spaces", and heterotopias are "real places". Heterotopias not only did exist, but were formed in the historical construction of society. Foucault used the example of the "mirror", the mirror is a utopia, I see in the mirror is not the real existence of the self, it is a virtual space; The mirror is also a heterotopia, and the real mirror reacts to me, allowing my eyes to pass through it and discover the absolute reality of the place I am in.
Foucault's discourse also hides the difference between "space" and "place". According to Chryswell, "space" is often "seen as a meaningless realm" that ", like time, constitutes the basic coordinates of human life"; "Place" is "a meaningful space created by human beings", and it needs to have three elements: geographical positioning, material visual form, human manufacturing and consumption meaning. It can be inferred that heterotopias have two characteristics: one is historical, distinguished from the imaginary space of literature or art, and has a basis for existence; the other is locality, which is different from the abstract space of maps or coordinates, and has social significance. Therefore, heterotopia is a kind of "historical place", which does not simply subvert temporality with spatiality, but re-incorporates historical and social in the double breakthrough of homogeneous time and abstract space. As a space-time aesthetic, it is neither the "physical space-time" of objective science nor the "virtual space-time" of subjective imagination, but the "historical space-time" and "social space-time" derived from practice and summoned practice:
We remodeled the façade and interior spaces of the shopping mall, boldly creating an old city where everything from the shantytowns of the old city around Changsha was rationally placed. In the process, we try to re-engage the new buildings with the old relocated communities so that they coexist in harmony.
The exploration of a new cultural tourism model is not only an innovative development, but also a coordinated development. The juxtaposition of the old and the new, the horizontal and vertical confrontation, is not a life-and-death struggle of a zero-sum game, but the re-recognition of the original intention of a life path. The "historic place" represented by "Forever Street" is not a simple opposition to the "time-space" utopia, but a soul-calling to the urban experience and life ethics of the past with the fading neighborhood streets and the "rematerialization" of their food culture as the main means. Different from the stereotypical nostalgia of Romanticism, the dialogue between the old and the new and the harmonious coexistence are the core concerns of the "historic place". As a time-space installation of urban culture, "Forever Street" is like Foucault's mirror, turning back the eyes of tourists and leading people to re-understand those fundamental questions: "Who are we?" Where do we come from? Where are we going?"
Living Things: The Material Aesthetics of "Contemporary Sexual Atmosphere"
In addition to the need to eat and drink, diet is related to the experiential reconstruction of self-identity and lifestyle. As a new type of cultural tourism consumption, "Super Wenheyou" has a double creativity: "what to eat" is a food culture, which is of course important; "Where to eat" is a cultural ecology, not to mention charming. Time and space and old things together constitute the flesh and bone of the ecology of food culture: on the one hand, old buildings, patios and streets provide time and space devices for urban culture; On the other hand, signs, neon signs, old furniture, old posters, and small advertisements for dredging pipes, repairing appliances, renting out houses, and even the enamel flat plates that diners used to eat and drink spicy food and drink under white porcelain kettles in the 80s, everything is full of old things that frame the atmosphere of city life:
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Organizer of Shanghai Federation of Social Sciences
There are academic ideas EXPLORATION AND FREE VIEWS
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
The spirit of "flavor" - "well-off aesthetics" and the meaning of civilization
Luo Chengshu Associate Professor, Department of Chinese, Sun Yat-sen University
This article was originally published in Exploration and Controversy, No. 5, 2021
Unless noted, the pictures in the text are from the Internet
At the end of 2020, the urbanization rate of China's permanent population exceeded 60%. As a powerful engine of modernity projects, the steady advancement of urbanization has played a comprehensive role in bearing, driving and integrating industrialization, informatization and agricultural modernization. At present, the government further emphasizes: "Adhere to the new development concept, accelerate the implementation of a new type of urbanization strategy with the promotion of human urbanization as the core and the improvement of quality as the orientation." Compared with the previous incremental development of scale, people-oriented quality improvement development has become the main point of the new urbanization road. The new experience and new trends of contemporary Chinese urban culture should be considered in accordance with the complete new development concept of "innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing".
In the historical situation of the "post-epidemic era" and the "moderately prosperous society", to understand the reality and potential of contemporary Chinese urban culture, we must not be separated from the driving force and mechanism of modernity and globalization, but also should take root in the experience and dreams of the Chinese homeland, and carry out mutual learning among civilizations based on Chinese practice and Western theory. The essence of urban culture is the urban lifestyle and living experience. The key to the theoretical discourse construction of contemporary Chinese urban culture lies in how to give shape to the way of life and life experience of Chinese cities, to make a contemporary theoretical expression of the Chinese people's yearning for a better life, and to provide a road sign for the new urbanization map.
At the end of 2020, Changsha was included in the first batch of national cultural and tourism consumption demonstration cities announced by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In the past 20 years, with the rise of the "Tv Xiangjun", "Publishing Xiangjun" and "Literary Xiangjun", although Changsha has repeatedly won praise such as "Entertainment Capital", "Creative Capital" and "Media Art Capital", this selection has a unique idea. This paper attempts to focus on Changsha, a demonstration city of cultural tourism consumption, take the phenomenon-level cultural catering of Changsha Pozi Street as the object, strive to construct the cognitive space hidden behind the new cultural tourism consumption lifestyle and life experience, and through the analysis of the "aesthetic-ethical" mechanism, try to explore the theoretical characteristics and social implications of "well-off aesthetics" and reveal its possible civilization significance.
Pozi Street, Changsha
Ichijing culture: The temporal and spatial aesthetics of "historic places"
Different from traditional logos such as "Huxiang Culture", "Red Origin" and "Happy China", the charm of Changsha spread in the media space is mostly related to food. In 2020, after half a year of epidemic suspension, a "National Day people all over the country want to come to Changsha" entry appeared on Weibo hot search, on October 3, a cultural catering enterprise in Pozi Street announced that the number of more than 30,000, it is recommended that tourists take the number online and queue up 500 tables in advance. Some netizens think that eating and drinking is so hilarious? But the question is: Is cultural catering consumption limited to eating and drinking? In the face of consumer culture, can it only be read and interpreted by Applying Western Critical Theory? Is the consumption transformation and upgrading of contemporary Chinese society just a Footnote to Baudrillard's "Consumer Society"? Does the Chinese-style consumer society have a unique "aesthetic-ethical" structure, which provides a different kind of civilization enlightenment for the development of contemporary urban culture?
At the end of 2019, a cultural catering enterprise on Pozi Street issued a corporate manifesto entitled "If we don't create, we can die". In the slogan "Never Say Anything To The End", the core idea is to see "creation" as the lifeblood of the self. "Creation" is not only the invention of gastronomic skills, but also the discovery of urban life and cultural ecology. A few years ago, the documentary "China on the Tip of the Tongue" sparked renewed public concern about Chinese food culture. Although the works adopt the method of telling the story of the characters, the themes of the series still focus on the visual presentation of food skills, conveying the traditional meaning of nature and family for Chinese. Comparatively speaking, the construction of cultural catering in Pozi Street not only exceeds the visuality and craftsmanship of the food skills shown in the documentary video, but also differs from the "quasi-farmhouse" aesthetic and cultural model such as rural nostalgia commonly used in mainstream Hunan cuisine marketing, and mainly relies on the local memory of Chinese cities in the past 30 years to reconstruct and reproduce ecologically, and its experience characteristics have distinct urbanity, history and sociality. The innovative development of the new cultural tourism path stems from a self-inquiry of contemporary Chinese urban culture:
Nine years ago, we started a business with a stall on Pozi Street, and then opened a shop on Golden Line Street, Taiping Street, Renmin Road, and Riverside. In the past nine years, in the process of continuous development of Chinese cities, we have been continuously relocated and copied, and in the process we have been thinking.......
Changsha Cultural Tourism Catering, which has cultural consciousness, has always paid attention to the changes in the city and the adjustment of the meaning of life. In the fluid and replicable modernity of "relocated" and "copied", it declares that it does not succumb to the passive transformation of urbanization, but gazes at the strange changes in urban space, from "setting up stalls" to "opening shops", adhering to the reflective nature of urban culture in the migration of time and space:
As the city progressed, many of the horizontal streets disappeared into vertical buildings, and many of our creations disappeared with them. Because of this, we have gained new opportunities and challenges, and we must think about how to insist on ourselves in a building and restore the real street and street neighborhood relationship.
At the moment when "everything solid is gone", the disappearance of the street does not only stir up the melancholy chants of the nostalgic, but the historical subjects who face reality can always see "new opportunities and challenges". The new type of cultural tourism restaurant aims to restore neighborhood relations in a building, highlighting the initiative of contemporary Chinese urban culture with a conscious ethical responsibility and a clear social consciousness. The persistence of Ichijing culture is the hidden life concept and value behind local cuisines such as crayfish, stinky tofu, and shallot oil.
Built in 2014, the "Huayuan Hua Center" is located at the intersection of Pozi Street and Xiangjiang Middle Road in the old town of Changsha, standing on the bank of the Xiangjiang River, overlooking Orange Island, overlooking Yuelu Mountain, the highest ground height of the four main buildings is 278 meters, and the seven-storey podium is Hisense Square. The exterior of the building is an ultra-white glass curtain wall, the interior is modeled on the old city of Changsha in the 1980s and 1990s to create a seven-story "old building", the entrance is jokingly called "time and space wormhole", in fact, more similar to Tao Yuanming's Wuling people found the entrance of Tao Yuanyuan, "the beginning is extremely narrow, only through people, repeat dozens of steps, suddenly cheerful". At the end of the passage, which is carefully made of old bricks, there is a huge patio enclosed by the façade of the old dormitory building. It opens up not only a "time-space" in the "technical-physical" sense, but also a "historical place" in a "humanistic-psychological" sense.
The climbing indoor patio has hidden elevators that go up to the restaurants on all floors, as well as reinforced concrete steps that walk up the old building. On the third floor leading to the fourth floor, a "forever street" was created: "The vertical tower extends to more than 300 meters into the air, and we need to restore a 300-meter-long street to 'confront' it." Originally an old street in changsha's old town that connects Pozi Street and Xiahe Street, it has long disappeared with the large-scale renovation of the old city in the past 20 years, and has been rebuilt indoors in order to preserve the "place of stories and human feelings". On Yongyong Street, Changsha snacks such as "Qiao Bo Cold Noodles", "Li Ta Tofu Brain", "Aunt Mao Chicken Feet", "Kong Family Sweet Wine", "Laid-off Brand Stinky Tofu", "Liu Ji Sugar Oil Dumplings", "Wen's Scraping Cold Powder", "Nanmen Alley Pig's Feet" and so on are lined up one after another, and there is even a well-known local "Shugu Ancient Literature Bookstore". The traditional stalls and shops in the corners of the city continue their own small business here, and the principals strive to create a temporal and spatial aesthetic of neighborhood affection and neighborhood business inside the skyscrapers; buildings and streets, food and culture, memory and reality, the old and the new and complement each other.
As an aesthetic presentation of urban cultural ecology, "Forever Street" is a kind of "historic place". It is not a purely virtual utopia in the imaginary world, but a heterotopia that once existed in the historical world. Utopia and heterotopia, although both products of modernity, appear to be at odds with each other. Utopia originally referred to as "Utopia", which is a kind of spatial imagination. Carinesecu notes that its temporal connotations today far outweigh the spatial meaning of etymology, and that utopianism since the 18th century is "yet another piece of evidence of the growing importance of the modern era in belittling the past and the future," rooted in a specific Western sense of time, namely "the importance of reason on irreversible time." In view of this, modernity is based on a fluid, linear, irreversible sense of time, with the characteristics of "de-spatialization". Utopia both characterizes dissatisfaction with modernity and is more deeply attached to the temporal logic of modernity. Sawyer calls this temporal hegemony of modernity "historical determinism," arguing that "attaching space to time" thus "obscures the geographical interpretations of the variability of the social world." Heterotopia, as another spatial understanding, aims to escape from the trap of homogeneous, hollow temporality. Foucault reminds people to get rid of the fascination with time and should pay attention to the epistemological value of space, because people do not live in the void, and living space is always heterogeneous. In Foucault's view, utopias are "unreal spaces", and heterotopias are "real places". Heterotopias not only did exist, but were formed in the historical construction of society. Foucault used the example of the "mirror", the mirror is a utopia, I see in the mirror is not the real existence of the self, it is a virtual space; The mirror is also a heterotopia, and the real mirror reacts to me, allowing my eyes to pass through it and discover the absolute reality of the place I am in.
Foucault's discourse also hides the difference between "space" and "place". According to Chryswell, "space" is often "seen as a meaningless realm" that ", like time, constitutes the basic coordinates of human life"; "Place" is "a meaningful space created by human beings", and it needs to have three elements: geographical positioning, material visual form, human manufacturing and consumption meaning. It can be inferred that heterotopias have two characteristics: one is historical, distinguished from the imaginary space of literature or art, and has a basis for existence; the other is locality, which is different from the abstract space of maps or coordinates, and has social significance. Therefore, heterotopia is a kind of "historical place", which does not simply subvert temporality with spatiality, but re-incorporates historical and social in the double breakthrough of homogeneous time and abstract space. As a space-time aesthetic, it is neither the "physical space-time" of objective science nor the "virtual space-time" of subjective imagination, but the "historical space-time" and "social space-time" derived from practice and summoned practice:
We remodeled the façade and interior spaces of the shopping mall, boldly creating an old city where everything from the shantytowns of the old city around Changsha was rationally placed. In the process, we try to re-engage the new buildings with the old relocated communities so that they coexist in harmony.
The exploration of a new cultural tourism model is not only an innovative development, but also a coordinated development. The juxtaposition of the old and the new, the horizontal and vertical confrontation, is not a life-and-death struggle of a zero-sum game, but the re-recognition of the original intention of a life path. The "historic place" represented by "Forever Street" is not a simple opposition to the "time-space" utopia, but a soul-calling to the urban experience and life ethics of the past with the fading neighborhood streets and the "rematerialization" of their food culture as the main means. Different from the stereotypical nostalgia of Romanticism, the dialogue between the old and the new and the harmonious coexistence are the core concerns of the "historic place". As a time-space installation of urban culture, "Forever Street" is like Foucault's mirror, turning back the eyes of tourists and leading people to re-understand those fundamental questions: "Who are we?" Where do we come from? Where are we going?"
Living Things: The Material Aesthetics of "Contemporary Sexual Atmosphere"
In addition to the need to eat and drink, diet is related to the experiential reconstruction of self-identity and lifestyle. As a new type of cultural tourism consumption, "Super Wenheyou" has a double creativity: "what to eat" is a food culture, which is of course important; "Where to eat" is a cultural ecology, not to mention charming. Time and space and old things together constitute the flesh and bone of the ecology of food culture: on the one hand, old buildings, patios and streets provide time and space devices for urban culture; On the other hand, signs, neon signs, old furniture, old posters, and small advertisements for dredging pipes, repairing appliances, renting out houses, and even the enamel flat plates that diners used to eat and drink spicy food and drink under white porcelain kettles in the 80s, everything is full of old things that frame the atmosphere of city life:
For many years, from the very beginning of the relocation and demolition of the home, we have been collecting discarded objects in the process and sorting them out and numbering them. Using the hundreds of thousands of architectural relics and daily objects collected, we can restore a complete past living place and a disappeared living place.
The key to the restoration of living places lies in the reconstruction of "things". Urban cultural scholars have defined scenes as "the aesthetic meaning of a place," which is about "people's definition of how a place is lived." According to this, scene theory is an aesthetic of life. Examining the characteristics of multidimensional complex scenes, the main carrier is "amenities". The term, which has its roots in economics, "usually refers to something that brings pleasure when using or enjoying related goods and services, but is difficult to quantify." Parks, art galleries, and cafes are all artificial comforts, while clean air and warm weather are natural comforts. According to this, scene theory is also a consumer aesthetic. However, Western scholars mainly focus on the significance of scenes for economic development, social movements, and public policy. As for aesthetic mechanisms, most of them are rarely theoretically given to humanistic descriptions such as "homeland" and "habitat", while scene theory is mainly aimed at North American post-industrial societies and their "Bourgeois-Bohemia" lifestyles.
The collection and utilization of living objects is a hidden path for the construction of contemporary Chinese urban culture: a green, open aesthetics of life and consumption are emerging on the surface. Living things are not equal to comforts, and they show neither the bourgeois aesthetics of shielding Sontag from what Sontag called "the suffering of others", nor the bohemian aesthetics of pretending to be a libertine individual posture. In the Western civilization tradition, the aesthetic origins of comfort objects can be traced back to the spirit of Apollo, which centers on the beauty of the dream world and appearance, and the spirit of Dionysus, which feels the intoxication of tragic individuals from pain and destruction. As the ideal type of classical mirror image of the modern Western "Bourgeois-Bohemian", neither the Sun Nord nor dionysus can fit the material experience of contemporary Chinese urban culture:
Almost all the memories of our youth have been dismantled here and re-established. Clocks that always can't move, benches with one leg short, old fans that sweep away mosquitoes and flies on summer nights... All kinds of "broken copper and rotten iron" wrapped around the time of the 1980s is gradually drifting away.
Clocks, benches, and old fans only mean the nostalgia of the lost time, the old things of life are still the comforts of the beauty of dreams, and the reuse of "broken copper and rotten iron" actually looms a certain material historical potential. You may wish to suspend "comfort" and return to the "material" itself, in addition to the spiritual nostalgia of dreams and drunkenness, a material cognitive space needs to be opened urgently. According to Williams, "matter" originally meant "building materials", and later extended to "any tangible matter", which also refers to "the essence of anything". Since Plato's philosophy distinguishes between one and many, rational and phenomena, soul and body, "matter" has suffered a long forgotten compared to "spirit". After the rise of modernity, materialism (Materialism) was elaborated by Hobbes, Holbach and others, with physical, moral philosophy, metaphysical and other meanings. Marx criticized "mechanical materialism" and put forward "historical materialism", opposed the isolation of "things" as "objects", and attached importance to human activities and historical utility as "subjects". In the face of history and reality, Marx and Engels always understood people based on "materiality": "The production of ideas, concepts, and consciousness is initially directly intertwined with people's material activities, with people's material interactions, and with the language of real life. People's imagination, thinking, and spiritual interaction are still the direct products of people's material actions here. ”
Historical materialism influenced Benjamin, who loved to collect old objects, and in his review of collector Edward Fox, he discovered "the tradition of conducting the study of historical materialism in the history of spirit". Fox was a pioneer in the collection of European comics, but Benjamin realized that "what makes a collector is a clearer sense of historical conditions", calling him "a pioneer in the study of materialist art". Inspired by Engels, Benjamin's view of historical materialist art is based on reflection on two mainstream views: First, the "historicist view of history", always regarding new literary and artistic views, genres, and styles as "development", "opposition" and "overcoming" of previous views, genres and styles; The second is the "independence of the humanities", which always regards the history of science, religion, and art as independent fields, and avoids talking about their influence on the human spirit and the process of economic production. The problem with both is that the former's "continuous narrative" obliterates the unique value of different tomes, times, and lives, while the latter's "apparent detachment" reduces culture to a fetish object that avoids production. Taking Fox's collection of old objects as a reference, Benjamin proposed: on the one hand, replacing the "continuous narrative" with "definite construction", calling for "liberating the era from the material 'historical continuity'", aiming to affirm "every experience of history" and "for every present, history is initial"; On the other hand, the "apparent detachment" is broken with "dialectical destructiveness", emphasizing that "all this exists not only to the efforts of the great geniuses who created it, but also to varying degrees to the labor of their contemporaries". In other words, the former disintegrates the empty continuous consciousness of time and pays attention to the texture of life in every moment; the latter destroys the cultural consciousness of loneliness and self-discipline, presenting the production traces of overlapping dialectics. Respect for "things", "times" and "the public" is the true spiritual charm of Benjamin's material aesthetics.
The collection of old objects, as a material aesthetic rich in life emotions, growth experiences and local memories, consciously witnesses history rather than simply nostalgic history:
The West Long Street, Beizheng Street, and Pozi Street where we once lived were demolished in a large area. Over the course of the years, we have visited many neighborhoods, most of which are dilapidated, not new, not modern, and in the ruins we find many discarded objects, which we prefer to call "physical evidence of the past."
The material aesthetics that bear witness to history are dynamic and productive. In the face of "things" that are not new, not modern, and discarded, a feasible attitude is not the history of consumption but the history of production. The cultural tourism practice of Pozi Street not only collects old objects to restore living places, but also establishes an art museum to plan many cultural and artistic exhibitions around the life of the "old Changsha" city, such as the painting exhibition "Small Streets and Alleys little people", the old Changsha graphic and text video exhibition "Taiping Street Narrative", the poetry club "Dialect Poetry Recitation", etc. One of the exhibitions, "The Past Tense of the Future", is self-proclaimed:
We collected tens of thousands of bricks, thousands of old televisions, countless other objects. They are not antiques, nor do they have anything to do with the value of objects, their discarding is "physical evidence" of the past tense in the future, and we restore part of them to such a place to express our memory of the past and our examination of the future.
These "physical evidences" have materiality, epochality and popularity that Benjamin values. Relying on materiality, they affirm the empirical value of each era in memory and engrave the imprint of the people's lives in history. The mechanism by which this material aesthetic is generated can be called a "contemporary atmosphere." "Contemporaneity" is the historical consciousness of material aesthetics, a relationship that "is both attached to the times and at the same time distanced from it", a unique position that enables those who gaze at their own times to "feel the darkness of the times rather than its light" and help to "return to the present moment in which we were never in it". According to this, contemporaneity is intended to discover the shadow of linear time, to pick up the fragments buried by developmentalism, and to open up the possibility of re-understanding the heterogeneity of the present moment. "Atmosphere" is the aesthetic connotation of material aesthetics, which is a "unique, intermediate state between the subject and the guest", "filling the space with a certain emotional tone, to some extent like a mist". Unlike the traditional concern of judging aesthetics, symbolic aesthetics, and artistic aesthetics, "atmosphere can be created through the various qualities of things." Therefore, the atmosphere is a kind of "fascination of things", which has both a material basis and is related to the subject's physical feelings in space. In short, "let the object come out of itself in a certain way and appear on the stage, and in this way make the presence of the object perceptible."
The "contemporary atmosphere" empowers urban culture and regains old things, both to sink historical values and to conceal physical feelings. This aesthetic mechanism has both green meaning and more open potential. The material aesthetics of living things are not nostalgic utopias or consumer ideals, but take the material as the method, look downward, and salvage the "future past tense" in the process of urbanization of development and progress. It is neither opposed to development nor illusionary regression, nor is it stubborn and rigid. With a sober and prudent attitude without losing warmth, it re-evaluates the value of the "past" and the "public", and maintains a sense of the unity of contemporary Chinese urban culture for the "efforts of geniuses" and "the labor of contemporaries".
The embodied aesthetics of the "common ethic"
As mentioned earlier, the atmosphere of matter calls for the induction of the body. Gastronomic experiences not only induce self-taste and individual identity, but also involve local culture and group significance. In the construction of a new type of cultural tourism consumption, the streets and living objects of the city are the flesh and bones of the scene experience, and the local taste and local language have converged into its blood and even soul. "Slow time" must not only be seen with the eyes, but also with the ears, and must be tasted with the tongue. There are two different paths of aesthetic interpretation: epistemological aesthetics based on visuality, and embodied aesthetics based on auditory and tastefulness. Compared with the formalization and distance of "watching", the latter can more effectively reveal the immersion mechanism and emotional folds of "slow time". Therefore, the collection of living things is not only a collection of those erratic street smells, but also the more perishable slang dialects:
With our aesthetic, we walk through every street and alley in search of food that has disappeared or is about to disappear. Just as you are protecting the dialect, we are trying to protect the delicious food that is born in this place!
Protecting delicious taste and dialect is not a textual task in the ivory tower, but is taken from life and created. For example, the cultural shirt printed with Changsha slang is full of dialect words such as "ironing" (comfortable), "withdrawing" (neat), "rhyme" (happy) and so on. It uses an "objectified" eye to look at familiar and unfamiliar local languages, providing another opportunity to understand the culture of the city. For another example, the series exhibition "Chai Rice Oil and Salt of Old Changsha" (2015-2017) in the visual record of dialect protection presents everything about old Changsha Chai Rice Oil and Salt in Changsha dialect. In the eyes of the curator, "this gives a context two feelings": on the one hand, looking for "how did your favorite tastes and eating habits come about"; On the other hand, recognize that "dialect is the language of a place, the basic way of contact between the feelings of the people of this place, and the most basic and important cultural element." Dialects and tastes may be related to the soul of the city's spirit.
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Organizer of Shanghai Federation of Social Sciences
There are academic ideas EXPLORATION AND FREE VIEWS
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The spirit of "flavor" - "well-off aesthetics" and the meaning of civilization
Luo Chengshu Associate Professor, Department of Chinese, Sun Yat-sen University
This article was originally published in Exploration and Controversy, No. 5, 2021
Unless noted, the pictures in the text are from the Internet
At the end of 2020, the urbanization rate of China's permanent population exceeded 60%. As a powerful engine of modernity projects, the steady advancement of urbanization has played a comprehensive role in bearing, driving and integrating industrialization, informatization and agricultural modernization. At present, the government further emphasizes: "Adhere to the new development concept, accelerate the implementation of a new type of urbanization strategy with the promotion of human urbanization as the core and the improvement of quality as the orientation." Compared with the previous incremental development of scale, people-oriented quality improvement development has become the main point of the new urbanization road. The new experience and new trends of contemporary Chinese urban culture should be considered in accordance with the complete new development concept of "innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing".
In the historical situation of the "post-epidemic era" and the "moderately prosperous society", to understand the reality and potential of contemporary Chinese urban culture, we must not be separated from the driving force and mechanism of modernity and globalization, but also should take root in the experience and dreams of the Chinese homeland, and carry out mutual learning among civilizations based on Chinese practice and Western theory. The essence of urban culture is the urban lifestyle and living experience. The key to the theoretical discourse construction of contemporary Chinese urban culture lies in how to give shape to the way of life and life experience of Chinese cities, to make a contemporary theoretical expression of the Chinese people's yearning for a better life, and to provide a road sign for the new urbanization map.
At the end of 2020, Changsha was included in the first batch of national cultural and tourism consumption demonstration cities announced by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In the past 20 years, with the rise of the "Tv Xiangjun", "Publishing Xiangjun" and "Literary Xiangjun", although Changsha has repeatedly won praise such as "Entertainment Capital", "Creative Capital" and "Media Art Capital", this selection has a unique idea. This paper attempts to focus on Changsha, a demonstration city of cultural tourism consumption, take the phenomenon-level cultural catering of Changsha Pozi Street as the object, strive to construct the cognitive space hidden behind the new cultural tourism consumption lifestyle and life experience, and through the analysis of the "aesthetic-ethical" mechanism, try to explore the theoretical characteristics and social implications of "well-off aesthetics" and reveal its possible civilization significance.
Pozi Street, Changsha
Ichijing culture: The temporal and spatial aesthetics of "historic places"
Different from traditional logos such as "Huxiang Culture", "Red Origin" and "Happy China", the charm of Changsha spread in the media space is mostly related to food. In 2020, after half a year of epidemic suspension, a "National Day people all over the country want to come to Changsha" entry appeared on Weibo hot search, on October 3, a cultural catering enterprise in Pozi Street announced that the number of more than 30,000, it is recommended that tourists take the number online and queue up 500 tables in advance. Some netizens think that eating and drinking is so hilarious? But the question is: Is cultural catering consumption limited to eating and drinking? In the face of consumer culture, can it only be read and interpreted by Applying Western Critical Theory? Is the consumption transformation and upgrading of contemporary Chinese society just a Footnote to Baudrillard's "Consumer Society"? Does the Chinese-style consumer society have a unique "aesthetic-ethical" structure, which provides a different kind of civilization enlightenment for the development of contemporary urban culture?
At the end of 2019, a cultural catering enterprise on Pozi Street issued a corporate manifesto entitled "If we don't create, we can die". In the slogan "Never Say Anything To The End", the core idea is to see "creation" as the lifeblood of the self. "Creation" is not only the invention of gastronomic skills, but also the discovery of urban life and cultural ecology. A few years ago, the documentary "China on the Tip of the Tongue" sparked renewed public concern about Chinese food culture. Although the works adopt the method of telling the story of the characters, the themes of the series still focus on the visual presentation of food skills, conveying the traditional meaning of nature and family for Chinese. Comparatively speaking, the construction of cultural catering in Pozi Street not only exceeds the visuality and craftsmanship of the food skills shown in the documentary video, but also differs from the "quasi-farmhouse" aesthetic and cultural model such as rural nostalgia commonly used in mainstream Hunan cuisine marketing, and mainly relies on the local memory of Chinese cities in the past 30 years to reconstruct and reproduce ecologically, and its experience characteristics have distinct urbanity, history and sociality. The innovative development of the new cultural tourism path stems from a self-inquiry of contemporary Chinese urban culture:
Nine years ago, we started a business with a stall on Pozi Street, and then opened a shop on Golden Line Street, Taiping Street, Renmin Road, and Riverside. In the past nine years, in the process of continuous development of Chinese cities, we have been continuously relocated and copied, and in the process we have been thinking.......
Changsha Cultural Tourism Catering, which has cultural consciousness, has always paid attention to the changes in the city and the adjustment of the meaning of life. In the fluid and replicable modernity of "relocated" and "copied", it declares that it does not succumb to the passive transformation of urbanization, but gazes at the strange changes in urban space, from "setting up stalls" to "opening shops", adhering to the reflective nature of urban culture in the migration of time and space:
As the city progressed, many of the horizontal streets disappeared into vertical buildings, and many of our creations disappeared with them. Because of this, we have gained new opportunities and challenges, and we must think about how to insist on ourselves in a building and restore the real street and street neighborhood relationship.
At the moment when "everything solid is gone", the disappearance of the street does not only stir up the melancholy chants of the nostalgic, but the historical subjects who face reality can always see "new opportunities and challenges". The new type of cultural tourism restaurant aims to restore neighborhood relations in a building, highlighting the initiative of contemporary Chinese urban culture with a conscious ethical responsibility and a clear social consciousness. The persistence of Ichijing culture is the hidden life concept and value behind local cuisines such as crayfish, stinky tofu, and shallot oil.
Built in 2014, the "Huayuan Hua Center" is located at the intersection of Pozi Street and Xiangjiang Middle Road in the old town of Changsha, standing on the bank of the Xiangjiang River, overlooking Orange Island, overlooking Yuelu Mountain, the highest ground height of the four main buildings is 278 meters, and the seven-storey podium is Hisense Square. The exterior of the building is an ultra-white glass curtain wall, the interior is modeled on the old city of Changsha in the 1980s and 1990s to create a seven-story "old building", the entrance is jokingly called "time and space wormhole", in fact, more similar to Tao Yuanming's Wuling people found the entrance of Tao Yuanyuan, "the beginning is extremely narrow, only through people, repeat dozens of steps, suddenly cheerful". At the end of the passage, which is carefully made of old bricks, there is a huge patio enclosed by the façade of the old dormitory building. It opens up not only a "time-space" in the "technical-physical" sense, but also a "historical place" in a "humanistic-psychological" sense.
The climbing indoor patio has hidden elevators that go up to the restaurants on all floors, as well as reinforced concrete steps that walk up the old building. On the third floor leading to the fourth floor, a "forever street" was created: "The vertical tower extends to more than 300 meters into the air, and we need to restore a 300-meter-long street to 'confront' it." Originally an old street in changsha's old town that connects Pozi Street and Xiahe Street, it has long disappeared with the large-scale renovation of the old city in the past 20 years, and has been rebuilt indoors in order to preserve the "place of stories and human feelings". On Yongyong Street, Changsha snacks such as "Qiao Bo Cold Noodles", "Li Ta Tofu Brain", "Aunt Mao Chicken Feet", "Kong Family Sweet Wine", "Laid-off Brand Stinky Tofu", "Liu Ji Sugar Oil Dumplings", "Wen's Scraping Cold Powder", "Nanmen Alley Pig's Feet" and so on are lined up one after another, and there is even a well-known local "Shugu Ancient Literature Bookstore". The traditional stalls and shops in the corners of the city continue their own small business here, and the principals strive to create a temporal and spatial aesthetic of neighborhood affection and neighborhood business inside the skyscrapers; buildings and streets, food and culture, memory and reality, the old and the new and complement each other.
As an aesthetic presentation of urban cultural ecology, "Forever Street" is a kind of "historic place". It is not a purely virtual utopia in the imaginary world, but a heterotopia that once existed in the historical world. Utopia and heterotopia, although both products of modernity, appear to be at odds with each other. Utopia originally referred to as "Utopia", which is a kind of spatial imagination. Carinesecu notes that its temporal connotations today far outweigh the spatial meaning of etymology, and that utopianism since the 18th century is "yet another piece of evidence of the growing importance of the modern era in belittling the past and the future," rooted in a specific Western sense of time, namely "the importance of reason on irreversible time." In view of this, modernity is based on a fluid, linear, irreversible sense of time, with the characteristics of "de-spatialization". Utopia both characterizes dissatisfaction with modernity and is more deeply attached to the temporal logic of modernity. Sawyer calls this temporal hegemony of modernity "historical determinism," arguing that "attaching space to time" thus "obscures the geographical interpretations of the variability of the social world." Heterotopia, as another spatial understanding, aims to escape from the trap of homogeneous, hollow temporality. Foucault reminds people to get rid of the fascination with time and should pay attention to the epistemological value of space, because people do not live in the void, and living space is always heterogeneous. In Foucault's view, utopias are "unreal spaces", and heterotopias are "real places". Heterotopias not only did exist, but were formed in the historical construction of society. Foucault used the example of the "mirror", the mirror is a utopia, I see in the mirror is not the real existence of the self, it is a virtual space; The mirror is also a heterotopia, and the real mirror reacts to me, allowing my eyes to pass through it and discover the absolute reality of the place I am in.
Foucault's discourse also hides the difference between "space" and "place". According to Chryswell, "space" is often "seen as a meaningless realm" that ", like time, constitutes the basic coordinates of human life"; "Place" is "a meaningful space created by human beings", and it needs to have three elements: geographical positioning, material visual form, human manufacturing and consumption meaning. It can be inferred that heterotopias have two characteristics: one is historical, distinguished from the imaginary space of literature or art, and has a basis for existence; the other is locality, which is different from the abstract space of maps or coordinates, and has social significance. Therefore, heterotopia is a kind of "historical place", which does not simply subvert temporality with spatiality, but re-incorporates historical and social in the double breakthrough of homogeneous time and abstract space. As a space-time aesthetic, it is neither the "physical space-time" of objective science nor the "virtual space-time" of subjective imagination, but the "historical space-time" and "social space-time" derived from practice and summoned practice:
We remodeled the façade and interior spaces of the shopping mall, boldly creating an old city where everything from the shantytowns of the old city around Changsha was rationally placed. In the process, we try to re-engage the new buildings with the old relocated communities so that they coexist in harmony.
The exploration of a new cultural tourism model is not only an innovative development, but also a coordinated development. The juxtaposition of the old and the new, the horizontal and vertical confrontation, is not a life-and-death struggle of a zero-sum game, but the re-recognition of the original intention of a life path. The "historic place" represented by "Forever Street" is not a simple opposition to the "time-space" utopia, but a soul-calling to the urban experience and life ethics of the past with the fading neighborhood streets and the "rematerialization" of their food culture as the main means. Different from the stereotypical nostalgia of Romanticism, the dialogue between the old and the new and the harmonious coexistence are the core concerns of the "historic place". As a time-space installation of urban culture, "Forever Street" is like Foucault's mirror, turning back the eyes of tourists and leading people to re-understand those fundamental questions: "Who are we?" Where do we come from? Where are we going?"
Living Things: The Material Aesthetics of "Contemporary Sexual Atmosphere"
In addition to the need to eat and drink, diet is related to the experiential reconstruction of self-identity and lifestyle. As a new type of cultural tourism consumption, "Super Wenheyou" has a double creativity: "what to eat" is a food culture, which is of course important; "Where to eat" is a cultural ecology, not to mention charming. Time and space and old things together constitute the flesh and bone of the ecology of food culture: on the one hand, old buildings, patios and streets provide time and space devices for urban culture; On the other hand, signs, neon signs, old furniture, old posters, and small advertisements for dredging pipes, repairing appliances, renting out houses, and even the enamel flat plates that diners used to eat and drink spicy food and drink under white porcelain kettles in the 80s, everything is full of old things that frame the atmosphere of city life:
For many years, from the very beginning of the relocation and demolition of the home, we have been collecting discarded objects in the process and sorting them out and numbering them. Using the hundreds of thousands of architectural relics and daily objects collected, we can restore a complete past living place and a disappeared living place.
The key to the restoration of living places lies in the reconstruction of "things". Urban cultural scholars have defined scenes as "the aesthetic meaning of a place," which is about "people's definition of how a place is lived." According to this, scene theory is an aesthetic of life. Examining the characteristics of multidimensional complex scenes, the main carrier is "amenities". The term, which has its roots in economics, "usually refers to something that brings pleasure when using or enjoying related goods and services, but is difficult to quantify." Parks, art galleries, and cafes are all artificial comforts, while clean air and warm weather are natural comforts. According to this, scene theory is also a consumer aesthetic. However, Western scholars mainly focus on the significance of scenes for economic development, social movements, and public policy. As for aesthetic mechanisms, most of them are rarely theoretically given to humanistic descriptions such as "homeland" and "habitat", while scene theory is mainly aimed at North American post-industrial societies and their "Bourgeois-Bohemia" lifestyles.
The collection and utilization of living objects is a hidden path for the construction of contemporary Chinese urban culture: a green, open aesthetics of life and consumption are emerging on the surface. Living things are not equal to comforts, and they show neither the bourgeois aesthetics of shielding Sontag from what Sontag called "the suffering of others", nor the bohemian aesthetics of pretending to be a libertine individual posture. In the Western civilization tradition, the aesthetic origins of comfort objects can be traced back to the spirit of Apollo, which centers on the beauty of the dream world and appearance, and the spirit of Dionysus, which feels the intoxication of tragic individuals from pain and destruction. As the ideal type of classical mirror image of the modern Western "Bourgeois-Bohemian", neither the Sun Nord nor dionysus can fit the material experience of contemporary Chinese urban culture:
Almost all the memories of our youth have been dismantled here and re-established. Clocks that always can't move, benches with one leg short, old fans that sweep away mosquitoes and flies on summer nights... All kinds of "broken copper and rotten iron" wrapped around the time of the 1980s is gradually drifting away.
Clocks, benches, and old fans only mean the nostalgia of the lost time, the old things of life are still the comforts of the beauty of dreams, and the reuse of "broken copper and rotten iron" actually looms a certain material historical potential. You may wish to suspend "comfort" and return to the "material" itself, in addition to the spiritual nostalgia of dreams and drunkenness, a material cognitive space needs to be opened urgently. According to Williams, "matter" originally meant "building materials", and later extended to "any tangible matter", which also refers to "the essence of anything". Since Plato's philosophy distinguishes between one and many, rational and phenomena, soul and body, "matter" has suffered a long forgotten compared to "spirit". After the rise of modernity, materialism (Materialism) was elaborated by Hobbes, Holbach and others, with physical, moral philosophy, metaphysical and other meanings. Marx criticized "mechanical materialism" and put forward "historical materialism", opposed the isolation of "things" as "objects", and attached importance to human activities and historical utility as "subjects". In the face of history and reality, Marx and Engels always understood people based on "materiality": "The production of ideas, concepts, and consciousness is initially directly intertwined with people's material activities, with people's material interactions, and with the language of real life. People's imagination, thinking, and spiritual interaction are still the direct products of people's material actions here. ”
Historical materialism influenced Benjamin, who loved to collect old objects, and in his review of collector Edward Fox, he discovered "the tradition of conducting the study of historical materialism in the history of spirit". Fox was a pioneer in the collection of European comics, but Benjamin realized that "what makes a collector is a clearer sense of historical conditions", calling him "a pioneer in the study of materialist art". Inspired by Engels, Benjamin's view of historical materialist art is based on reflection on two mainstream views: First, the "historicist view of history", always regarding new literary and artistic views, genres, and styles as "development", "opposition" and "overcoming" of previous views, genres and styles; The second is the "independence of the humanities", which always regards the history of science, religion, and art as independent fields, and avoids talking about their influence on the human spirit and the process of economic production. The problem with both is that the former's "continuous narrative" obliterates the unique value of different tomes, times, and lives, while the latter's "apparent detachment" reduces culture to a fetish object that avoids production. Taking Fox's collection of old objects as a reference, Benjamin proposed: on the one hand, replacing the "continuous narrative" with "definite construction", calling for "liberating the era from the material 'historical continuity'", aiming to affirm "every experience of history" and "for every present, history is initial"; On the other hand, the "apparent detachment" is broken with "dialectical destructiveness", emphasizing that "all this exists not only to the efforts of the great geniuses who created it, but also to varying degrees to the labor of their contemporaries". In other words, the former disintegrates the empty continuous consciousness of time and pays attention to the texture of life in every moment; the latter destroys the cultural consciousness of loneliness and self-discipline, presenting the production traces of overlapping dialectics. Respect for "things", "times" and "the public" is the true spiritual charm of Benjamin's material aesthetics.
The collection of old objects, as a material aesthetic rich in life emotions, growth experiences and local memories, consciously witnesses history rather than simply nostalgic history:
The West Long Street, Beizheng Street, and Pozi Street where we once lived were demolished in a large area. Over the course of the years, we have visited many neighborhoods, most of which are dilapidated, not new, not modern, and in the ruins we find many discarded objects, which we prefer to call "physical evidence of the past."
The material aesthetics that bear witness to history are dynamic and productive. In the face of "things" that are not new, not modern, and discarded, a feasible attitude is not the history of consumption but the history of production. The cultural tourism practice of Pozi Street not only collects old objects to restore living places, but also establishes an art museum to plan many cultural and artistic exhibitions around the life of the "old Changsha" city, such as the painting exhibition "Small Streets and Alleys little people", the old Changsha graphic and text video exhibition "Taiping Street Narrative", the poetry club "Dialect Poetry Recitation", etc. One of the exhibitions, "The Past Tense of the Future", is self-proclaimed:
We collected tens of thousands of bricks, thousands of old televisions, countless other objects. They are not antiques, nor do they have anything to do with the value of objects, their discarding is "physical evidence" of the past tense in the future, and we restore part of them to such a place to express our memory of the past and our examination of the future.
These "physical evidences" have materiality, epochality and popularity that Benjamin values. Relying on materiality, they affirm the empirical value of each era in memory and engrave the imprint of the people's lives in history. The mechanism by which this material aesthetic is generated can be called a "contemporary atmosphere." "Contemporaneity" is the historical consciousness of material aesthetics, a relationship that "is both attached to the times and at the same time distanced from it", a unique position that enables those who gaze at their own times to "feel the darkness of the times rather than its light" and help to "return to the present moment in which we were never in it". According to this, contemporaneity is intended to discover the shadow of linear time, to pick up the fragments buried by developmentalism, and to open up the possibility of re-understanding the heterogeneity of the present moment. "Atmosphere" is the aesthetic connotation of material aesthetics, which is a "unique, intermediate state between the subject and the guest", "filling the space with a certain emotional tone, to some extent like a mist". Unlike the traditional concern of judging aesthetics, symbolic aesthetics, and artistic aesthetics, "atmosphere can be created through the various qualities of things." Therefore, the atmosphere is a kind of "fascination of things", which has both a material basis and is related to the subject's physical feelings in space. In short, "let the object come out of itself in a certain way and appear on the stage, and in this way make the presence of the object perceptible."
The "contemporary atmosphere" empowers urban culture and regains old things, both to sink historical values and to conceal physical feelings. This aesthetic mechanism has both green meaning and more open potential. The material aesthetics of living things are not nostalgic utopias or consumer ideals, but take the material as the method, look downward, and salvage the "future past tense" in the process of urbanization of development and progress. It is neither opposed to development nor illusionary regression, nor is it stubborn and rigid. With a sober and prudent attitude without losing warmth, it re-evaluates the value of the "past" and the "public", and maintains a sense of the unity of contemporary Chinese urban culture for the "efforts of geniuses" and "the labor of contemporaries".
The embodied aesthetics of the "common ethic"
As mentioned earlier, the atmosphere of matter calls for the induction of the body. Gastronomic experiences not only induce self-taste and individual identity, but also involve local culture and group significance. In the construction of a new type of cultural tourism consumption, the streets and living objects of the city are the flesh and bones of the scene experience, and the local taste and local language have converged into its blood and even soul. "Slow time" must not only be seen with the eyes, but also with the ears, and must be tasted with the tongue. There are two different paths of aesthetic interpretation: epistemological aesthetics based on visuality, and embodied aesthetics based on auditory and tastefulness. Compared with the formalization and distance of "watching", the latter can more effectively reveal the immersion mechanism and emotional folds of "slow time". Therefore, the collection of living things is not only a collection of those erratic street smells, but also the more perishable slang dialects:
With our aesthetic, we walk through every street and alley in search of food that has disappeared or is about to disappear. Just as you are protecting the dialect, we are trying to protect the delicious food that is born in this place!
Protecting delicious taste and dialect is not a textual task in the ivory tower, but is taken from life and created. For example, the cultural shirt printed with Changsha slang is full of dialect words such as "ironing" (comfortable), "withdrawing" (neat), "rhyme" (happy) and so on. It uses an "objectified" eye to look at familiar and unfamiliar local languages, providing another opportunity to understand the culture of the city. For another example, the series exhibition "Chai Rice Oil and Salt of Old Changsha" (2015-2017) in the visual record of dialect protection presents everything about old Changsha Chai Rice Oil and Salt in Changsha dialect. In the eyes of the curator, "this gives a context two feelings": on the one hand, looking for "how did your favorite tastes and eating habits come about"; On the other hand, recognize that "dialect is the language of a place, the basic way of contact between the feelings of the people of this place, and the most basic and important cultural element." Dialects and tastes may be related to the soul of the city's spirit.
Regarding the spirit of Chinese cities, in recent years, some scholars have proposed that Beijing is a "city of politics", Shanghai is a "city of convergence", Qufu is a "city of Confucian culture", Qingdao is a "city of ideals", and Chengdu is "a city of gardens with ease and tolerance". Although the names of discourses are colorful, many expressions are universally applicable. There is a considerable distance between the various generalizations and the empirical structure, ethical appeal and even aesthetic realm of the Chinese national community. So, how can we properly grasp the spirit of contemporary Chinese cities?
To shape the spirit of the city, we should pay special attention to the theoretical expression of personal experience. "Let things appear on stage" calls for opening up the cognitive space of embodiment. Embodied cognition poses an important challenge to standard cognitive science. Standard cognition involves perception, memory, attention, language, learning, etc., and advocates an algorithmic process of cognition based on symbolic representation. Embodied cognition mainly includes: (i) an organism cognition "the concept of the world around it", "depending on the type of body it has" ;(2) "the body of an organism that interacts with the environment" replaces the "algorithmic process of symbolic representation" ;(3) "the body or world plays a constitutive and not merely causal role". In short, the "body" becomes the cognitive basis for the production of meaning.
The traditional view is that the visual mechanism and cognition are the most closely related, and "watching" is always the most important way to learn in classical China or the imitation of classical Western drama. And "feeling through the world" or "Katasis", but there are other cognitive paths of "moving". According to this, crayfish and Changsha dialect go beyond symbolic representation cognition, including the immersive physical cognition of "eyes, ears, nose and tongue body" to "color, sound, fragrance and touch". Based on concrete cognition and the cultural empowerment of sound and taste, the Changsha dialect of "good charm" may be able to shape the spirit of Changsha city just right. It is not only the Changsha tone of Fa Shu happy, but also the Changsha taste of admiring food, and it is also the changsha human feeling that feels empathy. Looking further, this praise not only belongs to changsha, but also takes root in the Chinese homeland.
Returning to the Chinese civilization tradition, Mencius said: "The mouth is also in taste, there is the same age; the ear is also in the sound, there is the same hearing; the eye is also in the color, there is the same beauty." Taste, ear sounds, and eyes are embodied mechanisms, "old age, hearing, and beauty" are cognitive results, and "sameness" is saturated with ethical significance: human taste, hearing, and beauty can be connected. "Wenxin Carved Dragon" also says: "Different sounds are called sums, and the same sound corresponds to the rhyme." Charm is the embodiment of empathy for sound and taste. Combining historical semantics and embodied mechanisms, the essence of "good charm" is: delicious, fun, and happy. More importantly, its aesthetic ethical implication is that everyone should eat together, play together, and have fun together.
Or some people think that the "good charm" of spicy life does not represent the Chinese urban spirit with great differences in diet, such as Chengdu's pepper is crisp and crisp, Hangzhou's oil is salty and fresh, so it is not universal. While it may seem reasonable, this is only an empirical aesthetic of intuitive differences. The empathy of embodied aesthetics is not the uniformity of specific content, but the potential convergence of cognitive constructs. Kant's aesthetics, based on a priori comprehensive judgment, reflected on the cognitive limitations of empiric aesthetics, and invented the "Common Sense", that is, the belief that interesting judgment has universal validity, which is based on a subjective psychological function that assumes that everyone has. Although "sense of commonality" proposes a psychological interpretation of the universality of fun, it stops at subjective assumptions, which are cute and not credible. Li Zehou used historical materialism to critically explain, transforming the "sense of commonality" into a "cultural-psychological structure", so that individual psychological functions can more realistically rely on the historical accumulation of group social practice. In view of this, the universality of "good charm" does not refer to the universality of local spicy taste, but refers to the acquisition of life meaning and everyone's meaning from the physical sense of taste and hearing, such as Chengdu dialect "good bashi", Hangzhou dialect "good stomach", although there are differences in sweet and sour preferences, but they all convey the satisfaction brought by diet, but also express the sense of meaning obtained in life. Therefore, the "people take food as heaven" that Chinese is talked about, and this embodied cognition is not only aesthetic, but also ethical, and more universal.
The universality of Chinese consumption is not the consistency of objects, but the commonality of sharing, imaginatively reconstructing the "community" through joint participation, that is, "seeking something other than survival in the city".
We choose to recruit people in our streets and communities who, despite being retired, still need work and labor... In this way, each store becomes a sizable community family.
Regarding modernity, Tennis outlines the difference between "community" and "society". The former uses blood, geography, spirit, neighborhood, and friendship as social relations, while the latter uses the exchange of property, will, and value as the intermediary of social relations. In short, the "community" is composed of acquaintances with warm veins, and the "society" is the structure of strangers who exchange value. The concern for "friends" and "communities" looms into "community ethics", which contain reflection and transcendence of modernity; reflectiveness is embodied in the practice of preserving the community and giving back to the community in the process of urbanization; transcendence helps to avoid reflective degeneration into conservatism, reflecting on economic supremacy is not equivalent to giving up development and enterprising, but re-stimulating community life, transforming it into "starting a business together", "working together" and even "charm together".
As a model-oriented exploration of a new type of cultural tourism, the cherishing of the city's culture and living relics should ultimately be based on the promotion of the value of common sharing. "And" is both a mixture of harmony and difference, as well as a sense of empathy. Therefore, the commonality here is not publicity. Arendt used the table as a metaphor for "publicness": "Living together in the world fundamentally means that a world of things exists among the people who share them, as if a table were placed between people sitting around a table." The world, like every 'in between' thing, makes people both interconnected and separate from each other. Arendt is premised on "de-privatization" and rejects physical experience and everyday life. The "public" table is only the politics, economy, and science of the elite, and cannot place the body, material, and emotions of the masses. In fact, "commonality" is also a table, but it is not a negotiation table or an experimental table, but a eight immortals table or a mahjong table. The drama text said: "Set up the eight immortals table and entertain the sixteen parties." All the guests who came were by mouth. "At this table, Chinese can eat, play cards, fight wits, and nag. Feng Zhudi found that "compared with North America, the streets of East Asian metropolises tend to be more pedestrianized and lively for a longer time", "The reason why Beijingers go out of their homes is precisely to pursue liveliness: a pleasant and active atmosphere, bustling crowds, refreshed collective activities, enthusiasm and noise." The commonality of Chinese is not isolation but the connection between public and private, is "opening the door of the house and welcoming the spring breeze", and we live a "good life" together with taste and sound.
Li Zehou proposed "music culture", which means "seeking transcendence in the happiness of life", "is an aesthetic realm in which the body and use are inseparable, the spirit and flesh are one, that is, the aesthetic realm with rational content and maintaining the perceptual form". The transcendence of musical sense is not the spiritual vertical transcendence of the West, but the horizontal transcendence of Chinese embodiment, and it is also the "solo music" advocated by Mencius as "as good as "with people's music", "with shaole" as "with the crowd". The "good days" of a moderately prosperous society are by no means the "solo pleasures" of atomic individuals, but the "joys of all" that have reached the people, the common prosperity, and the achievements of the people. The "aesthetic-ethical" realm of "good charm" is the feeling of public happiness.
epilogue
Taking the cultural tourism practice of Changsha Pozi Street as a case, the composition of the "well-off aesthetics" of contemporary Chinese urban culture is gradually becoming clear: its temporal and spatial dimension leads to aesthetic innovation and coordination, its material dimension contains aesthetic greenness and openness, and its embodied dimension highlights the sharing of aesthetics. In the sense of life experience, lifestyle and its civilization value, the "well-off aesthetics" is consistent with the new development concept. Different from the one-sided tendency towards consumerism, fashionism and individualism of the "petty bourgeois aesthetics", "well-off aesthetics" is based on creative transformation and innovative development, with the overlapping mechanism of "aesthetic ethics" and "ethical aesthetics" advocating historical places, contemporary atmosphere and common ethics, and taking "good charm" and "good days" as important concepts for Chinese life. City culture, public life, and public happiness together constitute the spirit of the "flavor" of contemporary Chinese urban culture. "Flavor" is "local experience", although there are differences between the five lakes and the north and south of the great river, but they are all organic components of the diversity and integration of Chinese civilization. Therefore, the difference in "flavor" between the upper and lower reaches of the great river and inside and outside the Great Wall has an internal common spiritual structure, which is the living realm and civilization ideal of "the old age of the people", "the beauty and the commonality", and "the people's compatriots and things". Contemporary Chinese cities that have entered a moderately prosperous society, with respect for traditional civilization and optimism about the future, will surely embark on a path of innovative development and high-quality development of Chinese urban cultural modernity.
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Organizer of Shanghai Federation of Social Sciences
There are academic ideas EXPLORATION AND FREE VIEWS
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The spirit of "flavor" - "well-off aesthetics" and the meaning of civilization
Luo Chengshu Associate Professor, Department of Chinese, Sun Yat-sen University
This article was originally published in Exploration and Controversy, No. 5, 2021
Unless noted, the pictures in the text are from the Internet
At the end of 2020, the urbanization rate of China's permanent population exceeded 60%. As a powerful engine of modernity projects, the steady advancement of urbanization has played a comprehensive role in bearing, driving and integrating industrialization, informatization and agricultural modernization. At present, the government further emphasizes: "Adhere to the new development concept, accelerate the implementation of a new type of urbanization strategy with the promotion of human urbanization as the core and the improvement of quality as the orientation." Compared with the previous incremental development of scale, people-oriented quality improvement development has become the main point of the new urbanization road. The new experience and new trends of contemporary Chinese urban culture should be considered in accordance with the complete new development concept of "innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing".
In the historical situation of the "post-epidemic era" and the "moderately prosperous society", to understand the reality and potential of contemporary Chinese urban culture, we must not be separated from the driving force and mechanism of modernity and globalization, but also should take root in the experience and dreams of the Chinese homeland, and carry out mutual learning among civilizations based on Chinese practice and Western theory. The essence of urban culture is the urban lifestyle and living experience. The key to the theoretical discourse construction of contemporary Chinese urban culture lies in how to give shape to the way of life and life experience of Chinese cities, to make a contemporary theoretical expression of the Chinese people's yearning for a better life, and to provide a road sign for the new urbanization map.
At the end of 2020, Changsha was included in the first batch of national cultural and tourism consumption demonstration cities announced by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In the past 20 years, with the rise of the "Tv Xiangjun", "Publishing Xiangjun" and "Literary Xiangjun", although Changsha has repeatedly won praise such as "Entertainment Capital", "Creative Capital" and "Media Art Capital", this selection has a unique idea. This paper attempts to focus on Changsha, a demonstration city of cultural tourism consumption, take the phenomenon-level cultural catering of Changsha Pozi Street as the object, strive to construct the cognitive space hidden behind the new cultural tourism consumption lifestyle and life experience, and through the analysis of the "aesthetic-ethical" mechanism, try to explore the theoretical characteristics and social implications of "well-off aesthetics" and reveal its possible civilization significance.
Pozi Street, Changsha
Ichijing culture: The temporal and spatial aesthetics of "historic places"
Different from traditional logos such as "Huxiang Culture", "Red Origin" and "Happy China", the charm of Changsha spread in the media space is mostly related to food. In 2020, after half a year of epidemic suspension, a "National Day people all over the country want to come to Changsha" entry appeared on Weibo hot search, on October 3, a cultural catering enterprise in Pozi Street announced that the number of more than 30,000, it is recommended that tourists take the number online and queue up 500 tables in advance. Some netizens think that eating and drinking is so hilarious? But the question is: Is cultural catering consumption limited to eating and drinking? In the face of consumer culture, can it only be read and interpreted by Applying Western Critical Theory? Is the consumption transformation and upgrading of contemporary Chinese society just a Footnote to Baudrillard's "Consumer Society"? Does the Chinese-style consumer society have a unique "aesthetic-ethical" structure, which provides a different kind of civilization enlightenment for the development of contemporary urban culture?
At the end of 2019, a cultural catering enterprise on Pozi Street issued a corporate manifesto entitled "If we don't create, we can die". In the slogan "Never Say Anything To The End", the core idea is to see "creation" as the lifeblood of the self. "Creation" is not only the invention of gastronomic skills, but also the discovery of urban life and cultural ecology. A few years ago, the documentary "China on the Tip of the Tongue" sparked renewed public concern about Chinese food culture. Although the works adopt the method of telling the story of the characters, the themes of the series still focus on the visual presentation of food skills, conveying the traditional meaning of nature and family for Chinese. Comparatively speaking, the construction of cultural catering in Pozi Street not only exceeds the visuality and craftsmanship of the food skills shown in the documentary video, but also differs from the "quasi-farmhouse" aesthetic and cultural model such as rural nostalgia commonly used in mainstream Hunan cuisine marketing, and mainly relies on the local memory of Chinese cities in the past 30 years to reconstruct and reproduce ecologically, and its experience characteristics have distinct urbanity, history and sociality. The innovative development of the new cultural tourism path stems from a self-inquiry of contemporary Chinese urban culture:
Nine years ago, we started a business with a stall on Pozi Street, and then opened a shop on Golden Line Street, Taiping Street, Renmin Road, and Riverside. In the past nine years, in the process of continuous development of Chinese cities, we have been continuously relocated and copied, and in the process we have been thinking.......
Changsha Cultural Tourism Catering, which has cultural consciousness, has always paid attention to the changes in the city and the adjustment of the meaning of life. In the fluid and replicable modernity of "relocated" and "copied", it declares that it does not succumb to the passive transformation of urbanization, but gazes at the strange changes in urban space, from "setting up stalls" to "opening shops", adhering to the reflective nature of urban culture in the migration of time and space:
As the city progressed, many of the horizontal streets disappeared into vertical buildings, and many of our creations disappeared with them. Because of this, we have gained new opportunities and challenges, and we must think about how to insist on ourselves in a building and restore the real street and street neighborhood relationship.
At the moment when "everything solid is gone", the disappearance of the street does not only stir up the melancholy chants of the nostalgic, but the historical subjects who face reality can always see "new opportunities and challenges". The new type of cultural tourism restaurant aims to restore neighborhood relations in a building, highlighting the initiative of contemporary Chinese urban culture with a conscious ethical responsibility and a clear social consciousness. The persistence of Ichijing culture is the hidden life concept and value behind local cuisines such as crayfish, stinky tofu, and shallot oil.
Built in 2014, the "Huayuan Hua Center" is located at the intersection of Pozi Street and Xiangjiang Middle Road in the old town of Changsha, standing on the bank of the Xiangjiang River, overlooking Orange Island, overlooking Yuelu Mountain, the highest ground height of the four main buildings is 278 meters, and the seven-storey podium is Hisense Square. The exterior of the building is an ultra-white glass curtain wall, the interior is modeled on the old city of Changsha in the 1980s and 1990s to create a seven-story "old building", the entrance is jokingly called "time and space wormhole", in fact, more similar to Tao Yuanming's Wuling people found the entrance of Tao Yuanyuan, "the beginning is extremely narrow, only through people, repeat dozens of steps, suddenly cheerful". At the end of the passage, which is carefully made of old bricks, there is a huge patio enclosed by the façade of the old dormitory building. It opens up not only a "time-space" in the "technical-physical" sense, but also a "historical place" in a "humanistic-psychological" sense.
The climbing indoor patio has hidden elevators that go up to the restaurants on all floors, as well as reinforced concrete steps that walk up the old building. On the third floor leading to the fourth floor, a "forever street" was created: "The vertical tower extends to more than 300 meters into the air, and we need to restore a 300-meter-long street to 'confront' it." Originally an old street in changsha's old town that connects Pozi Street and Xiahe Street, it has long disappeared with the large-scale renovation of the old city in the past 20 years, and has been rebuilt indoors in order to preserve the "place of stories and human feelings". On Yongyong Street, Changsha snacks such as "Qiao Bo Cold Noodles", "Li Ta Tofu Brain", "Aunt Mao Chicken Feet", "Kong Family Sweet Wine", "Laid-off Brand Stinky Tofu", "Liu Ji Sugar Oil Dumplings", "Wen's Scraping Cold Powder", "Nanmen Alley Pig's Feet" and so on are lined up one after another, and there is even a well-known local "Shugu Ancient Literature Bookstore". The traditional stalls and shops in the corners of the city continue their own small business here, and the principals strive to create a temporal and spatial aesthetic of neighborhood affection and neighborhood business inside the skyscrapers; buildings and streets, food and culture, memory and reality, the old and the new and complement each other.
As an aesthetic presentation of urban cultural ecology, "Forever Street" is a kind of "historic place". It is not a purely virtual utopia in the imaginary world, but a heterotopia that once existed in the historical world. Utopia and heterotopia, although both products of modernity, appear to be at odds with each other. Utopia originally referred to as "Utopia", which is a kind of spatial imagination. Carinesecu notes that its temporal connotations today far outweigh the spatial meaning of etymology, and that utopianism since the 18th century is "yet another piece of evidence of the growing importance of the modern era in belittling the past and the future," rooted in a specific Western sense of time, namely "the importance of reason on irreversible time." In view of this, modernity is based on a fluid, linear, irreversible sense of time, with the characteristics of "de-spatialization". Utopia both characterizes dissatisfaction with modernity and is more deeply attached to the temporal logic of modernity. Sawyer calls this temporal hegemony of modernity "historical determinism," arguing that "attaching space to time" thus "obscures the geographical interpretations of the variability of the social world." Heterotopia, as another spatial understanding, aims to escape from the trap of homogeneous, hollow temporality. Foucault reminds people to get rid of the fascination with time and should pay attention to the epistemological value of space, because people do not live in the void, and living space is always heterogeneous. In Foucault's view, utopias are "unreal spaces", and heterotopias are "real places". Heterotopias not only did exist, but were formed in the historical construction of society. Foucault used the example of the "mirror", the mirror is a utopia, I see in the mirror is not the real existence of the self, it is a virtual space; The mirror is also a heterotopia, and the real mirror reacts to me, allowing my eyes to pass through it and discover the absolute reality of the place I am in.
Foucault's discourse also hides the difference between "space" and "place". According to Chryswell, "space" is often "seen as a meaningless realm" that ", like time, constitutes the basic coordinates of human life"; "Place" is "a meaningful space created by human beings", and it needs to have three elements: geographical positioning, material visual form, human manufacturing and consumption meaning. It can be inferred that heterotopias have two characteristics: one is historical, distinguished from the imaginary space of literature or art, and has a basis for existence; the other is locality, which is different from the abstract space of maps or coordinates, and has social significance. Therefore, heterotopia is a kind of "historical place", which does not simply subvert temporality with spatiality, but re-incorporates historical and social in the double breakthrough of homogeneous time and abstract space. As a space-time aesthetic, it is neither the "physical space-time" of objective science nor the "virtual space-time" of subjective imagination, but the "historical space-time" and "social space-time" derived from practice and summoned practice:
We remodeled the façade and interior spaces of the shopping mall, boldly creating an old city where everything from the shantytowns of the old city around Changsha was rationally placed. In the process, we try to re-engage the new buildings with the old relocated communities so that they coexist in harmony.
The exploration of a new cultural tourism model is not only an innovative development, but also a coordinated development. The juxtaposition of the old and the new, the horizontal and vertical confrontation, is not a life-and-death struggle of a zero-sum game, but the re-recognition of the original intention of a life path. The "historic place" represented by "Forever Street" is not a simple opposition to the "time-space" utopia, but a soul-calling to the urban experience and life ethics of the past with the fading neighborhood streets and the "rematerialization" of their food culture as the main means. Different from the stereotypical nostalgia of Romanticism, the dialogue between the old and the new and the harmonious coexistence are the core concerns of the "historic place". As a time-space installation of urban culture, "Forever Street" is like Foucault's mirror, turning back the eyes of tourists and leading people to re-understand those fundamental questions: "Who are we?" Where do we come from? Where are we going?"
Living Things: The Material Aesthetics of "Contemporary Sexual Atmosphere"
In addition to the need to eat and drink, diet is related to the experiential reconstruction of self-identity and lifestyle. As a new type of cultural tourism consumption, "Super Wenheyou" has a double creativity: "what to eat" is a food culture, which is of course important; "Where to eat" is a cultural ecology, not to mention charming. Time and space and old things together constitute the flesh and bone of the ecology of food culture: on the one hand, old buildings, patios and streets provide time and space devices for urban culture; On the other hand, signs, neon signs, old furniture, old posters, and small advertisements for dredging pipes, repairing appliances, renting out houses, and even the enamel flat plates that diners used to eat and drink spicy food and drink under white porcelain kettles in the 80s, everything is full of old things that frame the atmosphere of city life:
For many years, from the very beginning of the relocation and demolition of the home, we have been collecting discarded objects in the process and sorting them out and numbering them. Using the hundreds of thousands of architectural relics and daily objects collected, we can restore a complete past living place and a disappeared living place.
The key to the restoration of living places lies in the reconstruction of "things". Urban cultural scholars have defined scenes as "the aesthetic meaning of a place," which is about "people's definition of how a place is lived." According to this, scene theory is an aesthetic of life. Examining the characteristics of multidimensional complex scenes, the main carrier is "amenities". The term, which has its roots in economics, "usually refers to something that brings pleasure when using or enjoying related goods and services, but is difficult to quantify." Parks, art galleries, and cafes are all artificial comforts, while clean air and warm weather are natural comforts. According to this, scene theory is also a consumer aesthetic. However, Western scholars mainly focus on the significance of scenes for economic development, social movements, and public policy. As for aesthetic mechanisms, most of them are rarely theoretically given to humanistic descriptions such as "homeland" and "habitat", while scene theory is mainly aimed at North American post-industrial societies and their "Bourgeois-Bohemia" lifestyles.
The collection and utilization of living objects is a hidden path for the construction of contemporary Chinese urban culture: a green, open aesthetics of life and consumption are emerging on the surface. Living things are not equal to comforts, and they show neither the bourgeois aesthetics of shielding Sontag from what Sontag called "the suffering of others", nor the bohemian aesthetics of pretending to be a libertine individual posture. In the Western civilization tradition, the aesthetic origins of comfort objects can be traced back to the spirit of Apollo, which centers on the beauty of the dream world and appearance, and the spirit of Dionysus, which feels the intoxication of tragic individuals from pain and destruction. As the ideal type of classical mirror image of the modern Western "Bourgeois-Bohemian", neither the Sun Nord nor dionysus can fit the material experience of contemporary Chinese urban culture:
Almost all the memories of our youth have been dismantled here and re-established. Clocks that always can't move, benches with one leg short, old fans that sweep away mosquitoes and flies on summer nights... All kinds of "broken copper and rotten iron" wrapped around the time of the 1980s is gradually drifting away.
Clocks, benches, and old fans only mean the nostalgia of the lost time, the old things of life are still the comforts of the beauty of dreams, and the reuse of "broken copper and rotten iron" actually looms a certain material historical potential. You may wish to suspend "comfort" and return to the "material" itself, in addition to the spiritual nostalgia of dreams and drunkenness, a material cognitive space needs to be opened urgently. According to Williams, "matter" originally meant "building materials", and later extended to "any tangible matter", which also refers to "the essence of anything". Since Plato's philosophy distinguishes between one and many, rational and phenomena, soul and body, "matter" has suffered a long forgotten compared to "spirit". After the rise of modernity, materialism (Materialism) was elaborated by Hobbes, Holbach and others, with physical, moral philosophy, metaphysical and other meanings. Marx criticized "mechanical materialism" and put forward "historical materialism", opposed the isolation of "things" as "objects", and attached importance to human activities and historical utility as "subjects". In the face of history and reality, Marx and Engels always understood people based on "materiality": "The production of ideas, concepts, and consciousness is initially directly intertwined with people's material activities, with people's material interactions, and with the language of real life. People's imagination, thinking, and spiritual interaction are still the direct products of people's material actions here. ”
Historical materialism influenced Benjamin, who loved to collect old objects, and in his review of collector Edward Fox, he discovered "the tradition of conducting the study of historical materialism in the history of spirit". Fox was a pioneer in the collection of European comics, but Benjamin realized that "what makes a collector is a clearer sense of historical conditions", calling him "a pioneer in the study of materialist art". Inspired by Engels, Benjamin's view of historical materialist art is based on reflection on two mainstream views: First, the "historicist view of history", always regarding new literary and artistic views, genres, and styles as "development", "opposition" and "overcoming" of previous views, genres and styles; The second is the "independence of the humanities", which always regards the history of science, religion, and art as independent fields, and avoids talking about their influence on the human spirit and the process of economic production. The problem with both is that the former's "continuous narrative" obliterates the unique value of different tomes, times, and lives, while the latter's "apparent detachment" reduces culture to a fetish object that avoids production. Taking Fox's collection of old objects as a reference, Benjamin proposed: on the one hand, replacing the "continuous narrative" with "definite construction", calling for "liberating the era from the material 'historical continuity'", aiming to affirm "every experience of history" and "for every present, history is initial"; On the other hand, the "apparent detachment" is broken with "dialectical destructiveness", emphasizing that "all this exists not only to the efforts of the great geniuses who created it, but also to varying degrees to the labor of their contemporaries". In other words, the former disintegrates the empty continuous consciousness of time and pays attention to the texture of life in every moment; the latter destroys the cultural consciousness of loneliness and self-discipline, presenting the production traces of overlapping dialectics. Respect for "things", "times" and "the public" is the true spiritual charm of Benjamin's material aesthetics.
The collection of old objects, as a material aesthetic rich in life emotions, growth experiences and local memories, consciously witnesses history rather than simply nostalgic history:
The West Long Street, Beizheng Street, and Pozi Street where we once lived were demolished in a large area. Over the course of the years, we have visited many neighborhoods, most of which are dilapidated, not new, not modern, and in the ruins we find many discarded objects, which we prefer to call "physical evidence of the past."
The material aesthetics that bear witness to history are dynamic and productive. In the face of "things" that are not new, not modern, and discarded, a feasible attitude is not the history of consumption but the history of production. The cultural tourism practice of Pozi Street not only collects old objects to restore living places, but also establishes an art museum to plan many cultural and artistic exhibitions around the life of the "old Changsha" city, such as the painting exhibition "Small Streets and Alleys little people", the old Changsha graphic and text video exhibition "Taiping Street Narrative", the poetry club "Dialect Poetry Recitation", etc. One of the exhibitions, "The Past Tense of the Future", is self-proclaimed:
We collected tens of thousands of bricks, thousands of old televisions, countless other objects. They are not antiques, nor do they have anything to do with the value of objects, their discarding is "physical evidence" of the past tense in the future, and we restore part of them to such a place to express our memory of the past and our examination of the future.
These "physical evidences" have materiality, epochality and popularity that Benjamin values. Relying on materiality, they affirm the empirical value of each era in memory and engrave the imprint of the people's lives in history. The mechanism by which this material aesthetic is generated can be called a "contemporary atmosphere." "Contemporaneity" is the historical consciousness of material aesthetics, a relationship that "is both attached to the times and at the same time distanced from it", a unique position that enables those who gaze at their own times to "feel the darkness of the times rather than its light" and help to "return to the present moment in which we were never in it". According to this, contemporaneity is intended to discover the shadow of linear time, to pick up the fragments buried by developmentalism, and to open up the possibility of re-understanding the heterogeneity of the present moment. "Atmosphere" is the aesthetic connotation of material aesthetics, which is a "unique, intermediate state between the subject and the guest", "filling the space with a certain emotional tone, to some extent like a mist". Unlike the traditional concern of judging aesthetics, symbolic aesthetics, and artistic aesthetics, "atmosphere can be created through the various qualities of things." Therefore, the atmosphere is a kind of "fascination of things", which has both a material basis and is related to the subject's physical feelings in space. In short, "let the object come out of itself in a certain way and appear on the stage, and in this way make the presence of the object perceptible."
The "contemporary atmosphere" empowers urban culture and regains old things, both to sink historical values and to conceal physical feelings. This aesthetic mechanism has both green meaning and more open potential. The material aesthetics of living things are not nostalgic utopias or consumer ideals, but take the material as the method, look downward, and salvage the "future past tense" in the process of urbanization of development and progress. It is neither opposed to development nor illusionary regression, nor is it stubborn and rigid. With a sober and prudent attitude without losing warmth, it re-evaluates the value of the "past" and the "public", and maintains a sense of the unity of contemporary Chinese urban culture for the "efforts of geniuses" and "the labor of contemporaries".
The embodied aesthetics of the "common ethic"
As mentioned earlier, the atmosphere of matter calls for the induction of the body. Gastronomic experiences not only induce self-taste and individual identity, but also involve local culture and group significance. In the construction of a new type of cultural tourism consumption, the streets and living objects of the city are the flesh and bones of the scene experience, and the local taste and local language have converged into its blood and even soul. "Slow time" must not only be seen with the eyes, but also with the ears, and must be tasted with the tongue. There are two different paths of aesthetic interpretation: epistemological aesthetics based on visuality, and embodied aesthetics based on auditory and tastefulness. Compared with the formalization and distance of "watching", the latter can more effectively reveal the immersion mechanism and emotional folds of "slow time". Therefore, the collection of living things is not only a collection of those erratic street smells, but also the more perishable slang dialects:
With our aesthetic, we walk through every street and alley in search of food that has disappeared or is about to disappear. Just as you are protecting the dialect, we are trying to protect the delicious food that is born in this place!
Protecting delicious taste and dialect is not a textual task in the ivory tower, but is taken from life and created. For example, the cultural shirt printed with Changsha slang is full of dialect words such as "ironing" (comfortable), "withdrawing" (neat), "rhyme" (happy) and so on. It uses an "objectified" eye to look at familiar and unfamiliar local languages, providing another opportunity to understand the culture of the city. For another example, the series exhibition "Chai Rice Oil and Salt of Old Changsha" (2015-2017) in the visual record of dialect protection presents everything about old Changsha Chai Rice Oil and Salt in Changsha dialect. In the eyes of the curator, "this gives a context two feelings": on the one hand, looking for "how did your favorite tastes and eating habits come about"; On the other hand, recognize that "dialect is the language of a place, the basic way of contact between the feelings of the people of this place, and the most basic and important cultural element." Dialects and tastes may be related to the soul of the city's spirit.
Regarding the spirit of Chinese cities, in recent years, some scholars have proposed that Beijing is a "city of politics", Shanghai is a "city of convergence", Qufu is a "city of Confucian culture", Qingdao is a "city of ideals", and Chengdu is "a city of gardens with ease and tolerance". Although the names of discourses are colorful, many expressions are universally applicable. There is a considerable distance between the various generalizations and the empirical structure, ethical appeal and even aesthetic realm of the Chinese national community. So, how can we properly grasp the spirit of contemporary Chinese cities?
To shape the spirit of the city, we should pay special attention to the theoretical expression of personal experience. "Let things appear on stage" calls for opening up the cognitive space of embodiment. Embodied cognition poses an important challenge to standard cognitive science. Standard cognition involves perception, memory, attention, language, learning, etc., and advocates an algorithmic process of cognition based on symbolic representation. Embodied cognition mainly includes: (i) an organism cognition "the concept of the world around it", "depending on the type of body it has" ;(2) "the body of an organism that interacts with the environment" replaces the "algorithmic process of symbolic representation" ;(3) "the body or world plays a constitutive and not merely causal role". In short, the "body" becomes the cognitive basis for the production of meaning.
The traditional view is that the visual mechanism and cognition are the most closely related, and "watching" is always the most important way to learn in classical China or the imitation of classical Western drama. And "feeling through the world" or "Katasis", but there are other cognitive paths of "moving". According to this, crayfish and Changsha dialect go beyond symbolic representation cognition, including the immersive physical cognition of "eyes, ears, nose and tongue body" to "color, sound, fragrance and touch". Based on concrete cognition and the cultural empowerment of sound and taste, the Changsha dialect of "good charm" may be able to shape the spirit of Changsha city just right. It is not only the Changsha tone of Fa Shu happy, but also the Changsha taste of admiring food, and it is also the changsha human feeling that feels empathy. Looking further, this praise not only belongs to changsha, but also takes root in the Chinese homeland.
Returning to the Chinese civilization tradition, Mencius said: "The mouth is also in taste, there is the same age; the ear is also in the sound, there is the same hearing; the eye is also in the color, there is the same beauty." Taste, ear sounds, and eyes are embodied mechanisms, "old age, hearing, and beauty" are cognitive results, and "sameness" is saturated with ethical significance: human taste, hearing, and beauty can be connected. "Wenxin Carved Dragon" also says: "Different sounds are called sums, and the same sound corresponds to the rhyme." Charm is the embodiment of empathy for sound and taste. Combining historical semantics and embodied mechanisms, the essence of "good charm" is: delicious, fun, and happy. More importantly, its aesthetic ethical implication is that everyone should eat together, play together, and have fun together.
Or some people think that the "good charm" of spicy life does not represent the Chinese urban spirit with great differences in diet, such as Chengdu's pepper is crisp and crisp, Hangzhou's oil is salty and fresh, so it is not universal. While it may seem reasonable, this is only an empirical aesthetic of intuitive differences. The empathy of embodied aesthetics is not the uniformity of specific content, but the potential convergence of cognitive constructs. Kant's aesthetics, based on a priori comprehensive judgment, reflected on the cognitive limitations of empiric aesthetics, and invented the "Common Sense", that is, the belief that interesting judgment has universal validity, which is based on a subjective psychological function that assumes that everyone has. Although "sense of commonality" proposes a psychological interpretation of the universality of fun, it stops at subjective assumptions, which are cute and not credible. Li Zehou used historical materialism to critically explain, transforming the "sense of commonality" into a "cultural-psychological structure", so that individual psychological functions can more realistically rely on the historical accumulation of group social practice. In view of this, the universality of "good charm" does not refer to the universality of local spicy taste, but refers to the acquisition of life meaning and everyone's meaning from the physical sense of taste and hearing, such as Chengdu dialect "good bashi", Hangzhou dialect "good stomach", although there are differences in sweet and sour preferences, but they all convey the satisfaction brought by diet, but also express the sense of meaning obtained in life. Therefore, the "people take food as heaven" that Chinese is talked about, and this embodied cognition is not only aesthetic, but also ethical, and more universal.
The universality of Chinese consumption is not the consistency of objects, but the commonality of sharing, imaginatively reconstructing the "community" through joint participation, that is, "seeking something other than survival in the city".
We choose to recruit people in our streets and communities who, despite being retired, still need work and labor... In this way, each store becomes a sizable community family.
Regarding modernity, Tennis outlines the difference between "community" and "society". The former uses blood, geography, spirit, neighborhood, and friendship as social relations, while the latter uses the exchange of property, will, and value as the intermediary of social relations. In short, the "community" is composed of acquaintances with warm veins, and the "society" is the structure of strangers who exchange value. The concern for "friends" and "communities" looms into "community ethics", which contain reflection and transcendence of modernity; reflectiveness is embodied in the practice of preserving the community and giving back to the community in the process of urbanization; transcendence helps to avoid reflective degeneration into conservatism, reflecting on economic supremacy is not equivalent to giving up development and enterprising, but re-stimulating community life, transforming it into "starting a business together", "working together" and even "charm together".
As a model-oriented exploration of a new type of cultural tourism, the cherishing of the city's culture and living relics should ultimately be based on the promotion of the value of common sharing. "And" is both a mixture of harmony and difference, as well as a sense of empathy. Therefore, the commonality here is not publicity. Arendt used the table as a metaphor for "publicness": "Living together in the world fundamentally means that a world of things exists among the people who share them, as if a table were placed between people sitting around a table." The world, like every 'in between' thing, makes people both interconnected and separate from each other. Arendt is premised on "de-privatization" and rejects physical experience and everyday life. The "public" table is only the politics, economy, and science of the elite, and cannot place the body, material, and emotions of the masses. In fact, "commonality" is also a table, but it is not a negotiation table or an experimental table, but a eight immortals table or a mahjong table. The drama text said: "Set up the eight immortals table and entertain the sixteen parties." All the guests who came were by mouth. "At this table, Chinese can eat, play cards, fight wits, and nag. Feng Zhudi found that "compared with North America, the streets of East Asian metropolises tend to be more pedestrianized and lively for a longer time", "The reason why Beijingers go out of their homes is precisely to pursue liveliness: a pleasant and active atmosphere, bustling crowds, refreshed collective activities, enthusiasm and noise." The commonality of Chinese is not isolation but the connection between public and private, is "opening the door of the house and welcoming the spring breeze", and we live a "good life" together with taste and sound.
Li Zehou proposed "music culture", which means "seeking transcendence in the happiness of life", "is an aesthetic realm in which the body and use are inseparable, the spirit and flesh are one, that is, the aesthetic realm with rational content and maintaining the perceptual form". The transcendence of musical sense is not the spiritual vertical transcendence of the West, but the horizontal transcendence of Chinese embodiment, and it is also the "solo music" advocated by Mencius as "as good as "with people's music", "with shaole" as "with the crowd". The "good days" of a moderately prosperous society are by no means the "solo pleasures" of atomic individuals, but the "joys of all" that have reached the people, the common prosperity, and the achievements of the people. The "aesthetic-ethical" realm of "good charm" is the feeling of public happiness.
epilogue
Taking the cultural tourism practice of Changsha Pozi Street as a case, the composition of the "well-off aesthetics" of contemporary Chinese urban culture is gradually becoming clear: its temporal and spatial dimension leads to aesthetic innovation and coordination, its material dimension contains aesthetic greenness and openness, and its embodied dimension highlights the sharing of aesthetics. In the sense of life experience, lifestyle and its civilization value, the "well-off aesthetics" is consistent with the new development concept. Different from the one-sided tendency towards consumerism, fashionism and individualism of the "petty bourgeois aesthetics", "well-off aesthetics" is based on creative transformation and innovative development, with the overlapping mechanism of "aesthetic ethics" and "ethical aesthetics" advocating historical places, contemporary atmosphere and common ethics, and taking "good charm" and "good days" as important concepts for Chinese life. City culture, public life, and public happiness together constitute the spirit of the "flavor" of contemporary Chinese urban culture. "Flavor" is "local experience", although there are differences between the five lakes and the north and south of the great river, but they are all organic components of the diversity and integration of Chinese civilization. Therefore, the difference in "flavor" between the upper and lower reaches of the great river and inside and outside the Great Wall has an internal common spiritual structure, which is the living realm and civilization ideal of "the old age of the people", "the beauty and the commonality", and "the people's compatriots and things". Contemporary Chinese cities that have entered a moderately prosperous society, with respect for traditional civilization and optimism about the future, will surely embark on a path of innovative development and high-quality development of Chinese urban cultural modernity.
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