Dancing toward a dialogic democracy

Dancing toward a dialogic democracy

performance is the goal

“Our wish is that Higashi-Kujo might become a town where there is active, person-to person contact between the various peoples who live here. Think of the madang as encompassing this wish, which is the desire of various people to work together and make this festival a success. We want to make this a madang that is filled with joy in the recognition of our mutual livelihood: a place on which Japanese people can build their own lives and find the meaning of living as a community by meeting with each other; and a place where resident Koreans can hold firmly to their ethnic pride in this madang”
MADANG STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

So now the festival is over for the year, the schoolyard is back in the hands of the Ministry of Education, the drums have been stored away, and the question lingers: what, if anything is different in the neighborhood, in Kyoto, in Japan? The goals announced by the organizers of the Higashi-kujo Madang (See: MADANG STATEMENT OF PURPOSE) include the transmission of cultural knowledge between generations of Koreans, the acknowledgment of the need for all neighbors in the area to recognize their common problems and provide mutual support, and the recognition by the city and nation of heterogeneity as the basis for the respect of human rights. The festival, through its organization and performance, demonstrates the first two goals, creates a public space that supports the third goal. The festival performs what it proposes is the operating concept here.

“With the politics of equal dignity, what is established is meant to be universally the same, an identical basket of rights and immunities; with the politics of difference, what we are asked to recognize is the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else”
(Taylor 1994, 37-38).

To an important extent, the performance is the goal. The cultural content of the festival offers younger community members an opportunity to learn and perform cultural arts that are different from those taught in Japanese public schools. The coordination between the various groups that bring the Japan Center for Independent Living in contact with South and North Korean social/political groups, and the Catholic Church in contact with the local Communist Party, and factions within the buraku together with each other: this cooperation is not only a goal of the madang, but also a precondition—without it the festival dissolves into acrimony. And so, on the morning after, the community knows that this symbiotic coexistence is not just a dream, but rather it is now a demonstrable fact, something real that will happen again next year.

Kyoto moderne

“Democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law, and knowledge, and as to the basis of relations between self and other, at every level of social life (at every level where division, and especially the division between those who held power and those who were subject to them, could once be articulated as a result of a belief in the nature of things or in a supernatural principal). It is this which leads me to take the view that, without the actors being aware of it, a process of questioning is implicit in social practice, that no one has the answer to the questions that arise, and that the work of ideology, which is always dedicated to the task of restoring certainty, cannot put an end to this practice (Lefort 1988, 19)”.

What is less certain is the impact that this one event can make on the conditions that hold sway for Kyoto’s public sphere. How can one event push hard enough to displace, even for a moment, the ocean of representations flooding the city every day? Given the firm grip that institutions such as Dentsu and Monbusho hold over time and space and media inputs, where does one counter-event make a difference?

Unfortunately, most of the writings about the public sphere are not helpful in evaluating or positioning the role of festivals. In large part this is because the history of the study of the public sphere has been dominated by reference to Western Europe, where festival production was waning during the formative period for the modern nation-states. And so, again, the necessity arises to create an expanded notion of modernity to include the place of festivals within the public sphere.

A critique of the notions of, and the evidence for, “public spheres” and “civil societies” is fundamental to a larger critique of modernity. My own work within this larger critique focuses upon performances in public, and most importantly, on the specific locales where modernities are assembled, recursively coded, paraded, challenged, and ridiculed: i.e., reproduced and deconstructed.

“...Confronted with an all-too-totalizing system of late capitalism with its global reach and administrative rationalizations, however, the indeterminacies and undecidabilities of our postmodern stance offer no virtuous solutions with which to confront contemporary crises, nor allow us to oppose and resist the increasingly uneven development of our cities and nations”
(Boyer 1994, 3).

Mostly this public panorama is dominated by the spectacles of the state and the market (usually in a friendly duet). The first task then is to critique the formations of this spectacular display and to locate openings and counter discourses within it and exterior to it. One immediate goal is to determine where and also how democratic action is (or needs to be made) possible within the public sphere under circumstances of late modernity.

First I want to reexamine some theoretical problematics within the study of civil society and public sphere, and look again as these as they are found in Kyoto, Japan.