Celebrations in Cities— place and ideology

Celebrations in Cities— place and ideology

The erasures of locales in service of the nation-state or the market becomes an evident problematic for anyone engaged in the study of situated cultural practices in East Asia, simply because it defines the “context of situation.” I am not suggesting that we valorize an unqualified nostalgia for the local in favor of the national. But we do need to pay attention to locality as a feature of the articulation of culture, and at the role of place in the creation of the nation and the market.

“Madang News 1997 no 31
4/13/97
HEADLINE: 5th Higashi-kujo Madang
COPY:
Having made the rounds of the four primary/junior high schools in the Higashi-kujo district, the Higashi-kujo madang had become a completely established event. After a heated discussion about making a new feeling for the fifth Higashi-kujo madang, the exchange committee had decided to make a change. At this time, for the first time four members of the Resident Korean Association of Hearing Brethren attended and two persons dispatched from the Kyoto City Hearing Language Center provided sign language translations, and a lively sharing of opinions and appeals was made....
More than a change of place and culture, the Higashi-kujo madang is a festival for everyone who shares the joy of living together.”

Throughout the Pacific Rim, various organs of the region's state governments have taken on the role of reinscribing local sites of culture as national sites of culture. The geographical rereading of local culture as national culture is probably the most pervasive source of change for locales throughout the region in the last several decades. (The same organs of the nation are today the most vocal in their alarm over international cultural influences: decrying everything from Levi jeans to ideas of feminism and democracy.) Nation-creation erases local traditions in favor of refashioned national histories, and makes cultural traditions the property of the state.

At the very same time, state programs encouraging industrial modernization remake the workplace to international specifications. And state intervention into the household and education, an intervention instrumental for what Foucault called a “pastoral” governmentality, redefines domestic spaces for national interests. And also at the very same time but from another source, the marketplace, within and without attempts at control by the state, refashions culture-scapes and media-scapes, and collectivizes life-style imaginations according to increasingly globalized inputs.

All of these processes act to homogenize and unitize local spaces of cultural production. The effect is a reduction through a process of erasure and uniform reinscription. The resulting sameness of places across the state creates an even plane upon which national identity is applied as though the sameness were the product of a long history of common national culture. (This is described in some detail by Benedict Anderson.) In the marketplace, a very similar process results in the uniformity of products and services, but the sameness is then overlaid by a simulated diversity, offering the consumer the image of choice.

“What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies? What would remain of a religious ideology—the Judaeo-Christian one, say—if it were not based on places and their names: church, confessional, altar, sanctuary, tabernacle? What would remain of the Church if there were no churches? The Christian ideology...has created the spaces which guarantee that it endures. More generally speaking, what we call ideology only achieves consistency by intervening in social space and in its production, and by thus taking on body therein. Ideology per se might well be said to consist primarily in a discourse upon social space.”
(Lefevbre 1991 [1974], 44)

Ideologies, we are reminded by Henri Lefevbre (1991), require their own spaces. We need to look at how these ideological spaces, not just ideological discourses—how streets and buildings, not simply texts—are created, maintained, and internally critiqued within a region. Place is nowhere innocent, nowhere external to the power relationship that maintains it, nowhere the product of unreflective tradition: particularly those places that are managed and advertised as traditional.

The state and the market, often in concert (see: market-state), but increasingly with oblique goals, offer up cultural desires that share a common power aspect: they are beyond the control of the residents of the city, who are all treated the same as tourists: welcome to watch and spend, but not to act on their own to invest other meanings to the space. A domesticated national cultural place cannot be appropriated by local residents, it has already been reduced to a single meaning, and is closed to dialogic intervention.

national spaces of domestication

So, it is not only the foreign, exotic space that is subject to domestication by the marketplace. Domestication also describes a process that produces places of the state from a former landscape of local spaces. The state domesticates local histories (which are dangerous to national “unity”) into a single national history. But why do we tend to allow the state this process as a feature of its own production? And what are the tactics (in de Certeau's sense) that can re-hybridize a nationally domesticated locale? In other words, how do we bring processes of domestication to a local, civil-democratic, practical level?

The center of this critique of the notion of domestication is largely a critique of the scale at which this is done: the nation-state is far too large a space to be domesticated as a single place. And the institutions required to perform this task at the national level can neither incorporate conflicting local demands for cultural distinctiveness, nor provide the intimate scale of assurances required for individuals to accept their fellows (the national citizenry) as co-domestics, although Japan, perhaps more than any other nation-state has approached this latter goal.

Domestication is best done close to home. If we look at a positive aspect of domestication—as this promotes a sense of closeness and familiarity: the mutual recognition between neighbors—we might see where this can be beneficial as a local practice.

The routinization of interaction between friends or daily acquaintances is a form of localized domestication for these relationships, which develops within a mutually negotiated frame. But here as well, daily routines may tend to reflect inequalities in status without allowing for any venue where this inequality can be resisted, as feminists have long noted. And so here is where the festival works also to lubricate the frozen junctures of those routines that might otherwise rigidly reinforce hierarchical social relationships. But to do this, the festival must create a de-routinizing moment, a place and a time for risk-taking—a private space on a public street.

The nationally domesticated space is an unimaginably large (apart from, say Singapore) space where the imagined “national family” lives and works. In state-nations this tends to become simultaneously a privatized public space, and a publicized private space, in the sense that it codes public interactions as private relationships (within the nation-as-family; see also Private public sphere) while it also intrudes into the private spaces (and the lifeworld) of its citizens. By this, it overcodes local public and private spaces. And so the spatial counter-action to this dominant space is to recode both local public spaces (e.g., create a local public sphere) and local private spaces, by rebuilding a shared intimacy that is kept hidden from the state. The ability to hide from the state is essential for any form of democracy. This “civil right” to privacy does not carry a reciprocal right for the state to hide from its citizenry. civic privacy is a right only for individuals.