Dancing Toward Democracy— exclusion and de-legitimacy

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Here is the most important outcome, in terms of the public sphere. A community that stops its own logic at a moment of exclusion announces its externality to the public sphere. It positions itself not as an alternative public sphere, but as an alternative to the existence of a public sphere. Such a group chooses not to participate in the critiques that are internal to the public sphere. Given the means, it would replace the public sphere with something else—with its own practices of exclusion. And so it can only provide an external critique: such as the critique that the Klu Klux Klan offers occasionally, when this group parades its vision of a “racially pure” community.

It is all to easy to conflate events in public places with public events... that is, with events that offer a public sphere arena of discussion and decision. However, once we start to ask questions about the controls placed on expression during an event, we can begin to see where a “public” place has been appropriated for the private interests of those with the means to exert these controls.
The ability to recognize practices that constrain expression in a “public” event needs to be informed by a sociology of such events and expressions. Most events in public are scripted to the extent that the constraints on expression are fairly easy to see.
Look at this particular video sequence as a private event, and imagine what role a stranger would find in it.

Even when this parade steps into the public street, it does not by this spacial move become a legitimate counter-critique; it still does not offer an alternative public sphere. This may seem to be a fine distinction, but it is one that is well worth remembering. Although we may see such communal spectacles in public places, they do not, by their spatial availability, thus acquire legitimacy¹ as counter-public events. But then how does a community achieve this legitimacy?

call me “Korean”

The mostly Korean neighborhood in Higashi-kujo Kyoto uses Korean cultural forms—notably, dress, music, and food— to mark what I call an “ENclusive” group identity. An enclusive identity has abandoned exclusion as a moment in its formation and reproduction: it practices the exclusion of exclusion. An enclusive community welcomes strangers into a common identity based upon mutually articulated desires. All a stranger needs for membership is to want in.

The Korean neighborhood festival, the Higashi-kujo Madang is most visibly “Korean.” It speaks most directly (although in Japanese) to the conditions of being Korean in Kyoto. But it is not at all exclusive to Koreans, and it does not make a claim that Koreans have a privileged counter-public argument to make.

Many of the “Koreans” coming out in traditional Korean costume are not, in fact, Korean². They may be Japanese, they may be people from other nation-states.

How many of these “Koreans” dressed up in stylized peasant clothing are actually “Korean” by their family history? Many of them are, but others are members of the neighborhood and of the city who have voluntarily “become” Korean to show their commitment to the neighborhood and its demonstration against economic and social injustice. Being “Korean” is a metonym for all people who feel excluded from Kyoto. Korean is the lowest of all local identities. Celebrating this celebrates the grotesque (dirty, dangerous, and most of all different) bodies that Koreans are supposed to have.

To be visibly, audibly, gustatorially “Korean” is to reject a claim of Japanese cultural superiority. These festival moments of Korean-ness in Higashi-kujo Kyoto are moments when the group unburdens itself of the everyday load of Japanese cultural representations. To be Korean and laugh, to be Korean and speak out, to be Korean and have a life: this denies their exclusion from social life in Kyoto, but it does not, by this, affirm any traditionalist position on being Korean.

Internally the event also learned to be its own public sphere, its own radical dialogic democracy. The event is entirely run by openly recruited volunteers. It receives no funds from the city. It operates in a manner that is consciously oblique to other social organizations in the neighborhood, organizations that would reflect various historically embedded status differences.

“The notion of a counterpublic, by contrast, refers to a specifically modern phenomenon, contemporaneous with, and responding to, bourgeois and industrial-capitalist publicity. It offers forms of solidarity and reciprocity that are grounded in a collective experience of marginalization and expropriation, but these forms are inevitably experienced as mediated, no longer rooted in face-to-face relations, and subject to discursive conflict and negotiation”
(Hansen 1993, xxxv-xxxvi).

Within the madang organization, women, men, Japanese, Koreans, physically-disadvantaged people, and any others who want to help are given positions of authority and responsibility. Each meeting is an open meeting. All comments were fully discussed. Precious hours are spent not on the details of the event, but to permit other voices their chance to speak. Marathon meetings are held where little was decided apart from the time and place of the next meeting. Still, there are times when decisions are made without full discussion, but these are later discussed for future procedural correction. The organization of the event is itself a three-month long event, a showcase of democratic, inclusive³ decision making.

Here, then, is a community where the moments of ENclusion interrupt moments of inclusion/exclusion. These are events where the commonalities of the group with the wider public are marked, where the internal differences between members are accepted, and where an internal democracy is built from which a critique of internal exclusions becomes possible. The organization is acutely aware of criticisms about its own inclusivity. In part because its central message is a respect for heterogeneity in the public sphere, it has taken great efforts to apply this rule within its own organization. Again, The festival performs what it proposes.

One feature of festival organization and performance (and these are all one practice) that is different from that of other events, but similar to most “games” is that the festival is what it does, and it can only do what it is. To perform “heterogeneity” the festival encourages this internally. And to do this better next year, the festival finds new ways to foster this. The Higashi-kujo Madang creates, recognizes, and supports heterogeneity. Even though it consciously uses art forms that are labeled “traditional,” the Higashi-kujo Madang festival community does not consider itself to be a traditional⁴ community.

The Higashi-kujo Madang community is an example of what I call a “public community.” Communities such as this have learned a lesson from the public sphere, they have internalized an active “public” sphere for their own decision process. This civics lesson may not be welcomed by those who desire elite status within the group, because it gives space to other voices. But it is a lesson that, when applied sufficiently, effects the community's claim to legitimacy within a larger public sphere.

¹The current debate about multiculturalism generally overstresses the hostility between communities and the public sphere, because it lacks an understanding of the process through which plural ethnic communities can all add their own unique flavors to the “public pie” while preserving their own traditions. Stuck in the “politics of identity” this debate fails to see that communities can surrender exclusivity while maintaining traditional practices. Of course there are many groups, such as fundamentalist religious groups, that may prefer their exclusions to internal participation within the public sphere. The conflicts between the active public sphere and these groups are real conflicts where the outcome requires the elimination of either the public sphere or the communal group.

²The community has opened up the semantics of “Korean” to include anyone who feels the effects of exclusion in Kyoto. Anyone who sees the injustice of the continuing urban disgrace that the presence of a buraku makes of Kyoto can be “Korean”. Anyone who finds the exclusion of physically disabled from mainstream Japanese society to be offensive can be “Korean.” Anyone who sees the Japanese emperor as a figurehead for an essentializing Japanese national community that would exclude all others can be “Korean.” Even the odd ethnographer with a video camera can be “Korean.”

³Here is an example.

³In 1994, I had volunteered to manage a photographic exhibit of the results of a project I had just initiated to encourage a collective expression of place-attachment (positive an negative) within Higashi-kujo. “Higashi-kujo no ima” (Higashi-kujo Today) was one of those “Day in the Life” projects where several photographers take photos on the same day. Only this project was done not by professional photographers but by 20 volunteer residents of Higashi-kujo, using donated panoramic cameras. At one of the organizing meetings, I suggested that an exhibit of some of the photographs from this project could be shown at the Higashi-kujo madang. The idea was well received, but some of the members from the executive committee went along with me later to a local tavern to nail down the specifics before the next meeting.

³Most important for them was the issue of editorial control. There are many areas within Higashi-kujo where people just do not ever take photographs, and where people do not want to be photographed. The area's unmarked (but precisely known locally, and available nationally) stigmatized boundaries run like sulfurous streams through neighborhoods and even through buildings. Outsiders would not know these places, and might edit the show inappropriately. Also, in terms of the flavor of the event, it would not be appropriate to bring in outside editors, even if they had some sort of credentials in photography.

³“Who would select these photos?” They asked me. I shared their concern, and had been puzzling over this question for some time. “Why not have the photographers pick their best shots?” I suggested. I found it a little curious that they had not themselves thought of this idea. But as soon as I said it, it was clear that there could be no other choice. With that, the photo exhibition was approved. Several of the outside visitors to the festival replied to a questionnaire that the photographs added content to their understanding of the neighborhood.

⁴There are pronounced differences in the perception of “traditionality” as a feature of this event, differences that are most marked from the standpoint of generational position. Many of the original organizers are second-generation Koreans in Kyoto, and they were motivated by a desire to pass along a heritage of specifically Korean culture and history to their children. But the use of the event for outright cultural transmission is also open to critique internally, and several second-generation organizers admitted that the event’s goals were multiple and focused more on the local situation than on Korean culture per se.