Theoretical essaying in this compendium are written to illuminate the obscurities (and/or to obscure the hyper-clarity that narrative sometimes imputes to social action) that the ethnography encounters. These are my comments, assembled from the bricolage (there, I said it) of theories I’ve encountered in the past decades. The reader will normally encounter each essay as a link from the main ethnographic text, and then return (using their browser’s “BACK” button) to the ethnographic text encumbered (and perhaps empowered) with some new theoretical tools. There is a navigation bar on the bottom of the essays that allow the reader to wander directly from theoretical essay to theoretical essay without returning to the main text.
Here is Japan is a guidebook that was produced by the Asahi Broadcasting Company to “orient” foreign visitors to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Its editorial committee contained several of Japan’s most noted scholars and cultural analysts. The text is, of course, targeted not to the Japanese population, but rather with an aim of explaining this population to others. Again, within Japan, the most populous and durable “others” are the resident (zainichi) Koreans.
Here is JAPAN is a “native-ethnography” of Japan that was written from a desire to encapsulate the entire nation as a unique cultural place—a nation-state so unified by blood, history, and climate that its peoples live and think as one. It is filled with statistics and stories that seek to capture the essence of a Japanese mood of modernity. Thirty-two years later, these stories (in updated versions) still inform the Japanese school curriculum, and also governmental programs aimed at directing the self-projects of Japanese citizens.
One story speaks of the harmonious transformation of the nation from ancient farming to modern industry:
“We sow new seeds in ancient soil.
For the secret is hidden in nature's seasonal change of foliage.
Wooden temples yield to baseball grounds;
Castles bow to glass and concrete;
Rice-fields embrace busy factories;
And Noh masks peer into television sets.
Forest creepers envy electric wires carrying power across the land,
While huge trees are in awe at the soaring steel towers.
Aged Buddhist statues still smile benignly
At the age of movie stars.
All are Japan, the one no more an illusion than the other.
We grew with nature, we Japanese, as pliant as the cheerful trees.
Now we look upon what time has wrought—the fourth greatest industrial nation on earth.” (n.p.)
The natural “flowering” of industrial modernization, through the careful husbandry of the Japanese state is seen here as bridging the contradictions that would otherwise attend this process: the trees are in awe of the steel towers, and the Buddha smiles (perhaps through a
Noh mask) into the Trinitron TV tube.
Its prose and poetry offer up the Japanese islands as a nation-village-family-individual: a fractal Japan, uniform and unique at all levels, bound by a single spirit and philosophy:
“The Japanese philosophy is deeply embedded in our individual consciousness, and it is a way of life we preserve through all the revolutionary changes of time... In a big family—whether of the nation or the individual—one’s own share necessarily is small.... Virtue is expressed in mutual concessions.
The family feeling is continuous... Yet the concept is larger than the individual, and the family ultimately embraces the home, the place of work, society in general, the nation, and the geography of Japan itself.
Our houses are small. Yet even the humble family knows delicacy in food. Husbands work, celebrate a little with male friends, return to the love of the family circle. Wives bear and warmly rear the sweet children, chat with neighbors, study the arts or enjoy television. Small gifts express the appreciation of each other....” (n.p.)
This vision of an hermetically sealed island nation/family with a single national philosophy/heredity takes the imagined-nation concept described by Benedict Anderson (1983) to a level of detail rarely found in other nation/states. Those enabled to subscribe to this concept, through dint of birth, language, and education (Japanese public schools), are expected to inscribe its message on their bodies and practices.
Japan's Sister: the Girl:
“She astonishes us, the modern young girl who is our Sister. Breathing the air of democracy, she wants to be ‘more equal’ than anyone. Fiercely, she pursues university studies, or starts a career in offices, department stores, factories, and the professions. Her earning career usually begins earlier than those of young men, so her whims have great power over manufacturers. But the old virtues live in her; she is also tender, warm, accomplished in the graceful arts. Youth in its golden fling sometimes worries us. Yet we know our Sister is growing into the sensible wife and devoted mother who is the virtue of our Japan.”
(Here is Japan, 1964)
This nationalization of lifestyle contributes greatly to the lack of available individual lifestyle imagination. To fit into this national imagination—this second skin of nationality—not only requires assuming the epic history of the nation as that of one’s own past, but also, subscribing to a lifetime of practices, from cram schools and national exams, to drinks and sex out with office mates, or classes in
ikebana (flower arranging) with “the girls.”
Japan's Mr. Average:
the White-Collar Man:
We understand him, and love him, our representative White-Collar Man. The visitor might find him baffling: well-educated, even sophisticated, open to new ideas and new ways, yet suddenly curiously naive and sentimental. He aspires, through a company career, to the full life in the modern sense. For this, he will endure the wearying crush of the over-burdened commuter trains twice a day. Dutiful husband—he often defers to his wife—good father, hardworking, he still has extra vitality for active leisure.
(Here is Japan 1964, n.p.)
Daily practices thus acquire a (curiously) patriotic cachet, and so commuting for three hours a day with half a million others is not just a personal circumstance, but a collective—national—duty. To refuse, to complain, to allow the shadow of dissatisfaction
1 to cross one’s face, is to also step outside of the national circle.
Japan's Hope: the Student:
The Student is our future. He is complex and uncertain today. The moods and rebellions of young people all over the world are known to him through his studies and growing international contacts. The Student feels responsibility for his country. When moved to political protest, he may resort to mass demonstrations. But we have faith in him. He studies harder than most of the world's young people; great personal sacrifices are made to meet the challenge of severe examinations. The Student knows his life is still to come. He prepares for it thoroughly.”
(
Here is Japan, 1964, n.p.)
What is missing from this national family are the governmental and corporate institutions and executives who make the big and little decisions about its course and future. This vision of a homogeneous national community hides “Japan’s father: the bureaucrat.”
Japan's Mother: the Housewife:
The Housewife is the heart of our world. As bride, mother, and wise grandmother she is the warm link between many generations. Her ways changed with equality in modern Japan. The voice of the Housewife today is an economic force, influencing consumer prices. Desire for privacy with her own husband and children accelerates the trend toward living in apartments. As new appliances free her from pre-war drudgery, the Housewife, too, influences leisure patterns. Fashionable, intelligent, in formed, she is even more vital in the lives of husband, children, and grandchildren amid today's changing Japan.
Here is JAPAN 1964, n.p.
GOTO NEXT ROLE
And what is also missing are the other people, the strangers who cannot acquire the naturalized national lifestyle, because it, like the land itself, comes from HERE.
Japan's Brother: the Worker:
“When Japan began to industrialize, our Brother, the Worker, had two great inherited assets: the Farmer's diligence and a magnificent tradition of handicraft dexterity. Today, the Worker builds mammoth ships faster and cheaper than anyone else. The Worker stood in the ruins of defeated Japan, bent his back, and rebuilt the industrial structure to current heights astonishing the world. Today, too, he raises his voice through the trade union movement, and contributes his thoughts and opinions to free society.”
Here is JAPANGOTO FIRST ROLE
The model Japanese roles described in Here is JAPAN are now a generation old, and wearing thin, even among those who might have been the most eager to acquire them thirty years ago. “
Japan's Mother: the Housewife” as an image of the modal lifestyle goal is not simply removed from the daily realities of working women in Kyoto, but that the conditions of their employability further push them into circumstances where the imagination of a chaste, dutiful housewife becomes exotic to the life-style imagination.
“...they [the Japanese] were not earthlings, but native to this star [Japan]. Faces were kin to each other in a gentle absence of expression.”
Visit to a Green Star 1964
2.
Korean youth in Kyoto can only fail if they try to be “
Japan’s Hope: The Student,” or even “
Japan’s Brother: The Worker.” If we center these positions according to entrance into Japan’s universities or the workforces of its major production companies—these are goals that young Koreans learn not to desire. Only “
Japan’s Sister: The Girl” remains available to young Korean women, and then only because these positions are already reduced to the dominated gender
3 in Kyoto.
The gendered aspect of each of these roles is not superficial.
The Student is male; so too
The Worker. Women in Kyoto face a life where public life and public space is still coded by, of, and for men. But these spaces and lives are also coded as Japanese, and Korean’s need not apply.
But then it is not also easy for Japanese youth to acquire these same positions within the “national” family today. Jobs are scarce, and competition for university entrance has become a mind-numbing struggle with few winners. Many more students and their families cope with a life of expectations that has suddenly, and unalterably, become diminished
4 by a disappointing outcome in the competition for school admission. But enough Japanese youth do acquire the positions so revered in the national narratives of life-style success that this success—for all of its continuing difficulties (the life of a salaryman or his housewife is not an easy one)—gets reproduced as a general goal. And outside of these generalizable, but ultimately personal life-style paths, Japanese youth can also count on continual reminders of their responsibilities to community and the state.
Visit to a Green Star
Asahi Broadcasting Corporation, Osaka. n.p.
[
COMMENTs follow the text of the story.]
The shock of the landing had made him breathless. It had been a long journey from earth. Now, for the second time, he had landed safely on what he remembered as the “Green Star” isolated on the frontiers of solar civilization.
There will be, he thought, the quiet villages beside their crystal streams amid the neatly-cultivated fields. Only the birds twittering will disturb the music of the people enjoying their old dances and folk songs when the day’s work is done. The shrines to the ancient gods will be fresh with flowers, and the immemorial rhythms of an agricultural race will leave the mysteries of nature unviolated.
But it was not to be like that this time. As he stepped to the ground from his space vehicle, he saw the tall buildings challenging the blue skies. Traffic hummed beneath a network of monorail trains; automatic conveyer systems threaded in and out of factories. He was looking at a passing helicopter when the Old Man came up to him, and said:
“How nice to see you again, my friend from earth”.
The Man from Earth gestured helplessly. “What has happened”, he said. “What are all these changes?”
“New seeds were brought from earth”, the Old Man answered. “Thanks to them, we now have prosperity, as you see”.
“Seeds?” The Man from Earth was puzzled. “What seeds? Wheat? Or maybe sunflowers?”
The Old Man only smiled as he guided the Man from Earth into the fashionable lounge.
“Where is the lovely and peaceful green star I knew before?” the visitor asked angrily. “Where is the beauty of sunlight on the golden seas of ripening rice? Have you thrown away the exquisite fabrics of your festival robes? Does the festival drum no more call the people to their simple and happy pleasures?”
The Old Man was still smiling. “All these things we still have”, he answered gently. “At home, I take off the earthling's clothes and go back to the comfortable old ways”.
“Then I will find the tranquil atmosphere I appreciated so much on my last visit?”
“Where, in all this concrete, glass, and busy machines? How can the old customs not wither and decay under the smoke and grime?”
The Old Man gestured at the window. “Look outside, and you will see all the things you desire,” he said.
The Man from Earth sneered. “You are joking”, he said. “I see only the same sights of industrialized earth and our colonial stars. These are the things I fled”.
“You cannot see”, the Old Man mumbled sadly. “Because you are so new from earth, you cannot see there is no difference between the old and new. Stay a little longer than you did before. Then you will come to understand”.
The Man from Earth did not answer. But as the days went by, he began to see the details in the streets far below his room on the fourteenth floor of a new hotel. The people came into focus; they were not earthlings, but native to this star. Faces were kin to each other in a gentle absence of expression.
Change, too, was so much faster in the city about him. As a plant mushrooms in a hothouse, the city was growing faster than his eyes could record. Where there had been one factory, now there were two. His hotel had been 14 stories; now it had silently risen to 15, and atop the new height sprouted a roof-garden where there had been only a roof.
Perhaps the whole city was a growing entity, threatening to swell and expand until it floated, freely, skyward. Already the breezes played among the higher buildings.
When the Old Man came back to visit, he spoke with amusement “Soon Will come the season of wind and fire. You will understand everything soon”.
For the Man from Earth had not noticed the brief mention in his guide book of the season of violence. He knew it when the typhoon-like winds howled about the city, dumping their freight of rains until floods raged through the streets The ground began to shake as volcanoes spewed aloft their fiery rocks and white hot lava rained down on the Green Star city. In flood, fire and earthquake, the city shook like a tortured ship in merciless seas. The Man from Earth killed his fear with sleeping pills....
Twittering birds were the sound of the morning. He was no longer in a luxurious hotel room. His bed was the grass beside a humble hut. “What fantasy is this?” he wondered, as he stood up to look where the city had been. There was only fire seared earth between the beds of solidified lava and flood-borne mud.
“Now what do you think?” The voice was that of the Old Man, smiling at him from nearby.
“This is awful”, the Man from Earth said. “Can such things happen?”
“Awful?” asked the Old Man. “We shall see”.
The full warmth of the sun touched the earth. More birds sang, and tiny plants began to sprout from the ravaged land. People appeared, seemingly from the naked earth itself. They bent their backs, working the land. Their songs rose to mingle with the music of the birds. Between each blink of his eyes, the Man from Earth saw first the fields turning golden with ripening rice; then the simple villages building in the valleys; and after, the colourful costumes of the people at a gay festival to celebrate the success of their labour.
“This is what you saw five years ago, isn't it?” the Old Man asked. “It had not really disappeared, had it?”
The Man from Earth made no reply. He watched the rice harvested, and the land plowed anew, and fresh seeds sown. Villages grew into towns, and from some of the buildings came the sounds of simple machinery where only hands had worked before. The buildings grew taller, and just as the natural seeds yielded foods, the mechanical seeds gradually sent out new ribbons of roads; conveyer belts once more ran among the factories; and through the air flew machines to rival the traffic humming along the ground. Once more the great city lived, served by the people.
“Perhaps you understand now”, the Old Man said. “This sight is no different from the previous ones, either”.
The grass hut beside which the Man from Earth had awoken from the night of violence already was a cement and glass luxury hotel. He was back on the fourteenth floor.
“It must be fantasy”, he muttered. “Is this repeated every year?”
“We are not repeating”, the Old Man said. “The storms, the pastoral scene, and this urban community are all the same. Our civilization encompasses all the fundamental elements you have just experienced. Our world is an agricultural community, and our civilization is like that of flowers. I do not say which is better, your civilization of earth or ours. I only say that this is our way...”
When the Man from Earth prepared to leave, he looked back once more at the Green Star city that had seemed to be so much like the life he knew at home. But now he saw the different levels all at the same time—the modern factories inspired by earth, yes; but also the fields of golden rice and the diligent people, between the onslaughts of storm, affectionately caring for their land and its produce. And he knew they would be singing in their festivals as long as the towns bred new towns, just as the pollens renewed the cycles of the plants.
COMMENT
We are given a tour of the Green Star (Japan), a planet separate from, although at times and places resembling, the Earth. A traveler returns. He had visited this place in years past, and is, perhaps, also implicated in the bringing of the “new seeds” from Earth. With these seeds on such soil, the flowers that blossom are factories and high-rise hotels, which, as all flowers do, reproduce themselves as seeds, when the storms (typhoon) and the earthquakes rock the planet. And the peoples themselves, in touch with the same land, grow their rice as joyously as they labor in the factories.
“It is changing so swiftly, this mid-twentieth century Japan that you, the visitor will see. For the Japanese themselves, the pace of change is so swift that they sometimes wonder what they have lost, what they have gained, and what the final balance will be...”
Introduction to the
Visit to a Green Star in the book
Here is JAPAN, 1964, n.p.
Who are these people? “...they were not earthlings, but native to this star. Faces were kin to each other in a gentle absence of expression.” Their common immutable, and non-transferable status has left them with the same face, and a face characterized by a collective absence of expression.
And the visitor (perhaps something of an anthropologist) longs to see the village festivals; He asks the Old Man, “‘Where is the beauty of sunlight on the golden seas of ripening rice? Have you thrown away the exquisite fabrics of your festival robes? Does the festival drum no more call the people to their simple and happy pleasures?’"
The idea of discarding the past to accommodate the present is presented as a flawed strategy, where what is tossed out is more precious than anything that can be acquired. And so the epic history of the place does not and cannot give way to a novelistic time of modernity.
Here is a tale of an peculiar form of modernity that grows as naturally as flowers from the soil and from the soul of this place and its kin-connected people—a modernity that is at once ancient and new. The myth of a shared agricultural lifestyle of mutual suffering and the shared joy of a good harvest is presented as fully transferable to the construction of cities and the nation itself.
The Old Man puts it this way: “...Our civilization encompasses all the fundamental elements you have just experienced. Our world is an agricultural community, and our civilization is like that of flowers. I do not say which is better, your civilization of earth or ours. I only say that this is our way...”
“...I only say that this is our way.” The traveler must remember his place. He cannot know fully the unified but hidden philosophy that drives the locals to do what is bred in their nature to do. And so he, and they, cannot bring this philosophy and its consequent practices into a discursive arena of judgement and potential reform.
The myth of nation thus seals itself and its people into a silence that cannot easily be fractured. Note here that the buildings and the helicopters are from seeds brought from Earth, although on the Green Star they do not create the troubles and the discontinuities that modernity brings to Earth. Here they are liable to the ravages of nature, and to the seasons that all seeds obey.
‘"You cannot see”, the Old Man mumbled sadly. “Because you are so new from earth, you cannot see there is no difference between the old and new....’ The naturalizing influences of Japan’s racial/cultural heritage is presented as strong enough to change without changing. And so to alter change itself, from the discontinuities of modernization into a change that only reasserts the unchanging nature of the place and its people. Because of its (unique) soil, climate and people, Japan is the place that changes without changing.
Women in Kyoto from an early age can earn many times the minimum wage through work in the local sex industry. In Kyoto the sex industry is filled with part-time female workers who also may be students, office workers or housewives. Ms. Jones
5, one of the Madang organizers (a woman who teaches at a night school, and whose students, she offered, sometimes talk to her about their experiences in the sex industry) said to me,
“I hear that in the US there is a huge gap between women who do this and women who don’t. That is totally unrealistic. Everything is all mixed up when it comes to sex. So why not make some money, too?”
The growth of the sex industry within Japan and organized sex tourism to other countries is a feature of modernity in Japan that deserves much more careful attention. A brief history of the sex industry in modern and premodern Japan is available in
Positions 5:1. 1977; a special issue, “The comfort women: colonialism, war, and sex.”
Of course, the above type of response moves the problematic of sexual services into economic terms, where the definitions of opportunity and exploitation could be determined by the amount of profit that the sexual worker should share in, and the rights of the worker to determine the conditions of their labor (and to say” no” at times). It also points to the lack of such sexual services for (instead of by) women in Kyoto, and to the use of commodified sexuality as one of the markers of the public sphere as a male and masculinized space.
Entry into a Japanese home built on the pre-modern plan requires that the visitor open the door, announce their presence and wait inside in the entryway (
genkan). The Kyoto genkan entryway has great metaphorical utility, as it symbolizes both social and economic status. To be invited up into the house from the entryway is to assume a status equality (at least) with the house’s owner. I was told more than once that in Kyoto a new neighbor may not get past the
genkan of their more established neighbor for three or more generations. In a discussion over the plan devised by Kyoto University for the city of Kyoto, a plan to tear down the illegal structures in 40
banchi and replace these with an public housing apartment complex, the architect spent several minutes describing the aesthetic qualities of the new structure, stressing the fact that they all have balconies. “
Take away the balcony,” one 40
banchi resident responded, “
and give us a genkan!”
5 Projects of the self/Projects of the state
Governmentality
“As already mentioned several times, it is very important to cultivate a sense of justice and fairness that is impressed by good acts and repelled by bad ones, an attitude of willingness to put this sense of justice into practice, a sense of consideration for others, a sense of respect for life and human rights, a spirit that is moved by beautiful things and a willingness to engage in volunteer activities. In addition, in the context of school education, there is a particular need to activate the qualities required for group living and to make still further efforts to cultivate an ethical perspective as embodied in basic social morality and social awareness expressed in, for example, the acquisition of rules for the formation of desirable human relationships or social living...”
(MONBUSHO 1997)
The connection between the cultural imaginations and the bodies of persons residing in a nation-state with the social programs of the modern state has become a key area of debate about the qualities of and changes within modernity itself. Foucault (1991) used the transformation of this connection via a change in what he called “governmentality” to mark the advent of modernity. The invention of modern “populations” and of a “pastoral” governmentality informs his description of modern nation-state creation.
In this perspective, the state is the shepherd that watches over his (gender marker intentional here) national population flock, with an eye to maximal productivity including the reduction of maverick individualities. The techniques required to perform this state function were provided by instrumental advances in statistics and surveillance, and the development of disciplinary regimes (in barracks, factories, schools, and prisons). These instruments work to the advantage
6 of the state and against the interests of a collective, public (democratic) control over the state.
It is not at all unusual in current nation-states for governments and corporations to offer advice about and models for the social behavior of their citizens/workers. In 1996 in the United States a new think-tank was created to ponder a decline in “civility” within the nation’s population. The Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community at the University of Pennsylvania focuses the talents of several dozen experts on issues of uncivil public behavior, the failure of leadership and the fragmentation of communities (See: http://www.upenn.edu/pnc). Its findings are meant to inform public policy at the national level.
The agencies of mass, popular education in virtually every modern state have been seen as venues within which to teach basic social values. In Japan, the Ministry of Education (
monbusho) takes the lead role in pursuing this use of the national public education system. As in many other nations, social values are also then described as proper to the citizens of that nation: the individual is taught how to behave within a national community of fellow citizens.
At the same time, as Walter Lippmann pointed out back in 1937 (262-263), education in a democracy must also take place outside of government-controlled schools and market-led journals in order for the citizenry to avoid the tautology of trying to govern the state and the market with only the knowledge that the state and the market provide to them. A “...democracy,” he noted, “must have a way of life which educates the people for the democratic way of life” (Lippmann 1937, 263).
“The concern with lifestyle, with the stylization of life, suggests that the practices of consumption, the planning, purchase and display of consumer goods and experiences in everyday life cannot be understood merely via conceptions of exchange value and instrumental rational calculation. The instrumental and expressive dimensions should not be regarded as exclusive either/or polarities, rather they can be conceived as a balance which consumer culture brings together. It is therefore possible to speak of a calculating hedonism, a calculus of the stylistic effect and an emotional economy on the one hand, and an aestheticization of the instrumental or functional rational dimension via the promotion of an aestheticizing distancing on the other. Rather than unreflexively adopting a lifestyle, through tradition or habit, the new heroes of consumer culture make lifestyle a life project and display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of the assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions they design together into a lifestyle”
(Featherstone 1991, 86).
What distinguishes the nation-formation programs in state-nation modern societies is an additional magnitude of imagined
national commonality; an intimate, normalized, national
lifestyle. Lifestyle patterns in nation-state societies tend to be distributed among and informed by non-governmental societal groups or by the (increasingly transnational) marketplace [see also:
State-nation modernity].
Under nation-state modernity, the state (central and/ or local) may inform popular instruction in “social values.” By this, the state provides
inputs to social behavior, or supplies social/legal
constraints that hedge in social behavior. Under conditions of state-nation modernity, instruction extends from lessons on social morality, to actual lifestyle behaviors—informing the behavioral outcome itself. Proper behavior becomes unmarked as correctly learned, nationally coded—and naturalized—and normal(ized) behavior. Individual variations in behavior become marked as both unnatural, and un-national. The potential level of behavioral uniformity is much greater than that possible under conditions of nation-state modernity, where competing group identities mark conflicting behaviors. The central state under state-nation modernity has available to it the instrumentalities of what Foucault called “biopolitics,” which first combined in the “endeavor...to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race...” (1997, 73). Here I would also add “social behavior” as this is linked to populations. Issues of the margins of population behavior, that is, of criminality and insanity, can be shunted to penal and medical expert systems, but the problem of informing the norms for behavior still remain, and the remaining question becomes that of territory: should the state monitor, control and inform a normative behavior for the nation’s population?
lifestyle and state-nation modernity
One of the features of
State-nation modernity, a feature that is only an extension of the state-nation governmentality in this area, is that the state takes upon itself the task of training the social behavior of its population. Mass public education is pursued not simply to provide social and cultural literacy, but also a moral education. And a central task of this training involves interactions within the economy: i.e., lifestyle.
“Schools should develop a form of education in which there is an appropriate balance between knowledge, morals and physical health and should aim to cultivate people who are imbued with a rich sense of humanity and a strong and vigorous physique”
(Monbusho report 1997).
The state under conditions of state-nation modernity will articulate its plans for national life-style goals (a notion that would not even occur to states under conditions of nation-state modernity) through state programs for the environment, sports, the arts, leisure, education, health and welfare, etc. National costumes and traditional forms of music and dance also receive state support.
Such fine-scale control over individual lives and life-styles have been reported in the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere, and have been accomplished in various degrees in all nations where state-nation modernity has developed. In fact there is no better example of biopower than in projects of the state where the spaces and times and practices of individuals at work, at home, and at play become interests of the state.
There are also places where such projects of the state are mostly absent. Spaces where state governmentalities do not penetrate into the intimate spheres of life. But if the state does not exert control in these areas of life, what and who will govern the self?
Projects of the self
In
Modernity and Self Identity, Anthony Giddens explores the connections between globalized (and -izing) processes of modernity and an emerging politics based upon lifestyle choices, rather than on broader social change. His writings about “life politics” describe the emergence of this under conditions of what he calls “late-modernity.” In fact, this emergence is one of the hallmarks of late- (he prefers this to post-) modernity. In the following, he lays out his notion of life politics, and links this to practices centered on “the reflexive project of the self.”
“Life politics presumes (a certain level of) emancipation, in both the main senses noted above emancipation from the fixities of tradition and from conditions of hierarchical domination. It would be too crude to say simply that life politics focuses on what happens once individuals have achieved a certain level of autonomy of action, because other factors are involved but this provides at least an initial orientation. Life politics does not primarily concern the conditions which liberate us in order to make choices: it is a politics of choice. While emancipatory politics is a politics of life chances, life politics is a politics of lifestyle. Life politics is the politics of a reflexively mobilised order—the system of late modernity—which, on an individual and collective level, has radically altered the existential parameters of social activity. It is a politics of self-actualisation in a reflexively ordered environment, where that reflexivity links self and body to systems of global scope. In this arena of activity, power is generative rather than hierarchical. Life politics is lifestyle politics in the serious and rich sense discussed in previous chapters. To give a formal definition: life politics concerns political issues which flow from processes of self-actualisation in post-traditional contexts, where globalising influences intrude deeply into the reflexive project of the self, and conversely where processes of self-realisation influence global strategies” (Giddens 1991, 214).
Giddens contends that the interface between the individual (person) and the global is now the primary locus for identity politics, a situation in which the nation-state is no longer a key player. In part this is so because individuals have been reflexively re-imagining their locales away from the nation (and so, living in and identifying with cities and neighborhoods instead of nations), and in part this is because the effects of modernization have eroded nation-state sovereignty and boundedness. Present-day concerns about the environment, human rights, disease, and gender equality do not admit to national boundaries, and global flows of ideas and cultural artifacts re-place national varieties in most locations.
However, while Giddens here refers to modernity in the singular, and seems to be comfortable with the idea that life politics has a currency and a positive valence at the global scale, I would argue that the emergence of a life-politics in any locale can be correlated to the presence of nation-state modernity at that locale. In those places under state-nation modernity conditions, the state remains the dominant cultural institution, and the nation its dominant idiom. And in those places, a “reflexive project of the self” as a group phenomenon would be liable to a critique that this is interfering with the state’s ability to plan for the lifestyle futures of the nation.
6 Insurance and festivals
Curiously, insurance is one area where both risk avoidance and participation in risk become possible. In Japan, and so in Kyoto, government and corporate responsibility (and thus economic liability) are far less well acknowledged in laws and in the courts. This means that individuals (citizens and consumers) generally assume a greater share of the economic/physical risk of their relationships with the government or corporations. There are festivals in Japan (none like this in Kyoto, however) where physical risk is extreme, and where serious bodily harm or death is not unusual. For example, there are a number of
kenka matsuri (“fighting festivals”) in Shikoku where massive portable wooden shrines (
omikoshi) are lifted by dozens of carriers and then smashed into one another in the street. Physical injury and even death is not uncommon. Voluntary participation in such events requires that the individual participant acknowledge and accept this risk.
7 Aesthetics, modernity and postmodernity
Actually the issue of the place of aesthetics is central to the entire modern/post-modernist debate. Let me lay out only a brief overview. There are two radically competing images of modernity at work in the theory. The first is tied to Weber’s description of the modern project as one which divides knowledge in to three spheres: scientific, juridical and artistic. These three are then the fields for three types of expert systems (science, courts, and cultural/artistic). One result of this is the monopoly of aesthetic “taste” in the hands of cultural-knowledge experts, and its removal from popular culture
(Habermas 1983, 8-9). In this way, modernity also creates types of knowledge expert (and forms of knowledge) that are artificially limited each to only one sector. It is this description/prescription of modernity that Habermas uses as a foil to revive modernity as a project that can unify all fields of knowledge. But if the future of modernity as a project requires a fundamental revision of its description, is this not a kind of post-modern modernity? Or did Weber get it wrong in the first place?
This brings up the second view of modernity, one in which the “forgotten masses” reemerge, both as consumer targets of the culture industry and as low-rent aesthetes on their own. For, while science and law have been relatively successful in managing their expert cultural production, when it comes to art, everyone is an expert (in their own minds). And aesthetics, the valuation of the
images of things, becomes a second life, not of people, but of objects.
The “peopling” of the lifeworld with aesthetically charged objects brings the “cultural dimension” to the fore, and the cultural capital invested into the “games” of distinction becomes a major stake in everyday lifestyle planning. Here the danger is from the institutions of cultural production that find themselves in an avant-garde position not only for their own internal game, but also vying to stay in the forefront of mass cultural commodity production; coupled with a global availability of cultural products. The stakes involved in the aesthetic “wing” of modernity threaten to override the rationality available from within science and law, creating a population obsessed with their relationship to aestheticized objects--including their own bodies. For identity with and through the body is itself colonized in this process (as it is also for the
expert aesthete, who at least makes a career of this).
Claiming that aesthetic reason trammels moral and instrumental reason in the individual, Daniel Bell [see
(Habermas 1983, 6-7)]--and also David Harvey
(Harvey 1989, 18-19)--conclude that modernity has gone beyond its own limits. It has become a type of postmodernity, which, depending upon who is doing the critiquing, is either a dangerous wrong turn or a runway to another mode of modernity. In either case the engine taking us down this tarmac is capitalism. And whether to
disengage moral and aesthetic reason
from capitalism (say, by reinventing religion or by reinventing marxism), or to
invest capitalism (and therefore the individual) with enough (also reinvented) rationality in order to recenter modernity as a project of enlightenment--this is the crux of the modern/postmodern debate.
In Santa Barbara, and in Kyoto, and in Cambridge, and Irvine, and elsewhere, we live in a “post-war” street, a street marked by the measures required to win the final battle (by armed police, health workers, sanitation crews, meter maids, ‘no loitering’ signs, ‘no sign’ signs, traffic signals, etc.)—a battle over disorder, disease, and discomfort.
In 1997, the City of Santa Barbara created a new law which prohibited sitting on the main city boulevard (State Street). Promoted by merchants on this street, the law is intended to push homeless persons away from the center of the downtown tourist destinations.
In this photo: during its first week of enforcement several protests were made to create a legal challenge to the law. Here a Santa Barbara police officer prepares to cite a protester.
Photo by author
Today, the goal of an orderly, disease-free, and comfortable boulevard is now at hand. But this street is also marked by a lack of people using it in diverse ways. Domination here appears not as a clockwork phalanx of uniformed soldiers with a marching band, but rather from out of the silences of what is not seen, and not heard at all. It is the loudness of the silence that makes the marching band unnecessary.
The task in front of us, as anthropologists and participants in the public sphere is to recognize the contours of the street in modern places, and to imagine moving beyond the restrictions that underpin the bourgeois coding of the street (i.e., the order and safety that is vouchsafed through the above agencies) into a space that may not appear or be as orderly or safe—for some—but which opens up to multiple forms of expression and representation. The role of festivity in articulating alternative uses for public streets cannot be understated (see:
A festival counters the dominant...).
The job required to create an inclusive, multicultural public street, is to make a place for difference. Not the pastiche of difference that Disney’s Epcot Center shows us, where everything is
similarly different, but a difference that arises, in part, from the vestiges of separate histories, and which is created, in ever greater numbers by processes of modern cultural production based on a late-modern logic of disparate desires.
When I first wrote the early draft of this work, HTML was a thin descriptor language where styles and formatting were mainly uncontrollable. For this reason, I output the text in structured PDF format. But I dreamed of a time (like now) when I could output the text in a better version of HTML:
“I am looking ahead to a time, perhaps months away, when works such as this will be published directly to the World Wide Web. This then makes them public resources. Each reader can add new observations to an ongoing dialog that begins with an encounter with such a text. At this point, the original “publication” achieves its etymological meaning: to make public. Publication, which has been mainly a point of closure for a work, can now, instead, announce its opening. For this reason, I am experimenting with a format of electronic publication that can be translated into an internet-readable form. [Bruce Caron 1996]”
The U.S. continues to provide a good share of the international popular cultural imagination in Kyoto. Films, fashions, television, music— sometimes the presence is comically ironic, as when a supermarket plays the latest “gangsta rap” as muzak, or when a pre-teen girl wanders down the street with a T-shirt that reads “The Devil sucked me off.” But more often the marketplace has made conscious efforts to manage and promote images and products licensed from the U.S. The marketplace increasingly works at odds to the governmental interest in domesticating these products, as it sells them as original and thus “raw.” This conflict of interests seems to be tilting in favor of the market. The government may even play into this when it fronts the dangerous differences between the US and Japan.
The dangers of the American lifestyle are a daily fare on NHK (the government-run TV/radio channel), particularly violent crimes and the lack of gun control. Japanese school groups that plan to travel abroad have been encouraged to go to Canada or Australia.
As a reverse example (i.e., making dangerous a foreign import), the government managed to enhance the dangerous and inferior qualities of foreign rice. When foreign rice imports were necessitated due to a terrible harvest in 1993, the Japanese government bought a cheaper quality of the long-grain Thai rice (which is, in any case, not suitable for making sushi) and then distributed
7 it with information on how to cook it in order to get rid of its bad odor. They also insisted on mixing this rice with the Japanese-style rice they imported from elsewhere, so that the consumer never had the opportunity to taste Japanese-style rice from only one source outside of Japan. Reports of the pebbles and other matter that people discovered in their rice made regular news features.
A last example. When Japanese companies predicted a need for additional labor in the late 1980s the Japanese government began a program of recruiting foreign workers who could prove their “pure” Japanese ancestry. Most of these were from communities of agriculturalists who had expatriated to Brazil or Peru earlier in the century. The idea was to re-socialize persons who were already biologically similar to the local population so that their continuing residence, and their resulting lack of “foreignness” would not be so disturbing.
The realities turned out to be much more what one could predict: the Brazilians were often less than enthusiastic over the lack of lifestyle amenities and the rigid constraints of the Japanese workplace. And the locals were even more frightened by the rumors that there were groups of people who looked Japanese but who might be more prone to acts of violence or crimes. At least with Europeans one could see them coming.
The Koreans and also
buraku Japanese face a similar prejudice, a generalized terror about their potential for being different (in anti-social ways) that their ability to pass as mainstream Japanese only increases. A Japanese friend of mine was certain that it was Koreans who bullied her in her primary school days. After the great Kanto earthquake in the Tokyo region seventy years ago, vigilante groups massacred thousands of Koreans when rumors circulated that they were setting fires and poisoning wells. Even after the 1995 Kobe quake, which destroyed much of the Korean/
buraku area of Nagataku in Kobe, there were rumors circulated as far as the National Diet, that the Koreans had set some of the fires.
Various polls in Japan periodically rank peoples of foreign nations in terms of their “trustworthiness,” polls in which the Koreans invariably rank last, close behind “Africans.” But even without attaching national groups to such a list, there is the more general idea that foreigners may not be trustworthy. It is such an attitude of mistrust that forms the ground for the racism that most affects “foreigners” residing in Kyoto.
“Privatization as an approach to social conflict would appear to be well suited to a political system and social order characterized by an emphasis on hierarchy and a tradition of benevolent paternalism.”
(Pharr 1990, 211)
At the center of Susan Pharr’s (1990) very valuable work on conflict management in Japan is a notion of “privatization.” Privatization is a strategy that removes discourses of dissent or counter-expressions from the public sphere, inserting them into a realm of private (lifeworld) concerns and interests. The discourse becomes a “conversation” between individuals who are in a hierarchical relationship: which means that the conversation is mostly one way—top down. And resolution of conflicts is made outside of any legitimizing discourse of dissent. As Pharr describes it:
“The Japanese approach thus is aimed fundamentally at privatizing social conflict. When faced with a social protest, authorities tend to respond by ignoring it; if avoidance fails, they work to contain the conflict, to keep it outside existing channels of resolution, and to discourage others from joining in. They strongly prefer to deal with conflicts case by case, and their favored methods are informal rather than formal. Whenever possible, they skirt solutions that might extend legitimacy to the protesters, which would have repercussions in the future on how problems of a similar nature should be resolved. Avoided also are solutions that generate principles having broad applicability across cases. As a result, outsiders remain outsiders and any gains achieved by protesters in a specific conflict episode have only a limited chance of becoming general.” (Pharr 1990, 208-209)
Only persons who have been elected (by vote or by selection to a position of authority, say within a governmental or corporate bureaucracy) can voice an expression that is legitimated as representing a group
8. Selection elevates the chosen to a position of note (they become
eraihito, “bigwigs”). Other individuals (such as “citizens” or “residents”) who are not in a position to speaking for an established institution (and the establishing of institutions is itself managed by government agencies) can only speak for themselves. Their ideas, complaints, or advice acquire whatever legitimacy they do through the personal circumstances of the individual’s life.
A paternalist relationship is a type of group determined by this hierarchical role structure. And as this sort of “one-to-several” relationship is maintained in many different settings in Japan: in the home, in the school, at work, in relationships to expert systems, etc., a person is simultaneously involved in many of these. And in each of these relationships, the “inferior” members are bound by an expectation of deference to the person and the decisions of the superior, while the superior member is, in turn, bound by a duty to protect the interests of the inferiors—as this is seen by the superior.
Pharr describes an ideal model of how conflict, such as conflict that might elsewhere become a public issue, is contained within such groups, and “resolved” through the actions of the superior:
“Implicit in these choices [of possible protest] is an ideal model of how conflict is to be avoided or resolved in a hierarchical society, with the following key tenets:
1. Superiors have the initiative in the relationship: ideally they anticipate an inferior's grievances and address them in the interest of preserving harmony.
2. Collective pressures, such as from the community or company, act as a check on unacceptable behavior by superiors toward inferiors.
3. Homogeneity (based on shared experience, attitudes, language, and so forth) operates to insure that superiors understand the vantage point of inferiors and take their position into account.
4. A long-term perspective in social relations means that it is in the superior's interest to make accommodations now in order to insure good relations in the future.
5. An inferior may let the superior know that the latter's behavior toward the inferior is unacceptable so long as the methods of relaying this information are consistent with the goal of maintaining social harmony.
6. When the various correctives on a superior's behavior fail to bring about a desired result, the inferior must adjust to the situation—and there are payoffs for doing so.”
(Pharr 1990, 30-31)
“By the nineteenth century, patterns of social hierarchy coexisted in England with a highly developed moral code based not on rule by status, as in contemporaneous Japan, but on individualism and rule by law. Thus, as groups on the lower rungs of society began to seek redress from the dislocations and inequities of industrialization, both features of the system were before them: on the one hand, they faced authorities who harbored a strong belief, which society widely shared, in their own natural superiority; on the other, they had at their disposal a well-entrenched value system, one fully accepted by those same elites, based on individualism, the rule of law, and the rights of man.”
(Pharr 1990, 212)
The final consequence of this form of “protest” is that the inferior has to live with whatever response the superior agrees to as being adequate to the situation. This consequence is the direct result of the inferior person accepting his inferior status. The more general problem is that, as public discourse becomes channeled into these privatized arenas, deference and duty preclude the articulation of conflict or of even the possibility of a plurality of interests within the group.
Throughout all of Pharr’s work, there is little to suggest that there is a conflict between the widespread “inferiorization” of the great majority of people nearly all of the time in matters of presumably public interest in Japan, and the “ideology of democracy.” She does note that in Britain and Germany—nations with a history of social inequality—at some point a ground of political equality undercut the notion of the population as being “inferior” to those that had acquired (by heredity, wealth, or means of access) positions of authority. But she does not see how Japan, by failing to gain this threshold, has failed to create the basis for public, democratic participation.
inferior is as inferior does
“Ideological shifts occurring over the last century, then, have laid the groundwork for major changes in protest behavior in Japan. Even if democracy and egalitarianism lack full acceptance as principles governing social relations, they have relatively strong support in the culture, and thus have become an important counterideology for status inferiors who wish to improve their position through protest.”
(Pharr 1990, 28)
The failure of democratic reform in modern Japan to create a public sphere where open public debate and the voicing of counter-opinions informs government policy is often linked to pre-existing cultural conditions: to a tradition of paternalist control, or to residual feudalism, or some other local circumstance. Japan lacks the cultural wherewithal for real democracy, this story goes. The lack of open democratic governance is also linked to the strength of bureaucratic agencies, and to the economic emergency of the post-war period, in which the bureaucracy acquired political and popular support for (presumably short-term) programs that put economic growth ahead of democratic practice. Elsewhere I present the notion that Japan shares a mode of modern governmentality with many other nation-states, several of these in the immediate region (see:
State-nation modernity).
When Pharr presents the presence of an “ideology of democracy” in modern Japan as making a major—if not yet fully realized—shift in the ability of protest groups to legitimate their counter-public expressions, she is suggesting that Japan may be at a point of abandoning its current governmentality. However, I see little evidence of this, even though the state in Japan faces many challenges in adjusting to changing global circumstances.
Pharr’s work adds to our understanding of how a central state under conditions of state-nation modernity can maintain its control over a population without the legitimation of a public sphere. Japan’s privatized public sphere—channelled through thousands of formal and informal paternalist relationships—multiply intersects the lives of each citizen. Again, the fractal image appears, as membership within the nation is duplicated at each level.
“With my friends, or in a class discussion, sometimes there were times when I said something about ‘Japanese people,’ you know? The thing is that I called myself Japanese (nihonjin), and although in fairness, I shouldn’t say so. I would say ‘We Japanese [warera nihonjin ha] such and such’...Of course my best friends knew [what was going on], but still I really felt the burden of deceiving everybody by not really being Japanese.”
Higashi-kujo resident and Madang organizer
The “official version” of why “We Japanese” are like they are is provided in capsule form in this video produced by the
Jinjahoncho.
Expousing an unbroken heritage from prehistoric society, informed by a “spontaneously” generated native religion (Shinto) and reflecting the unique (in the facile sense that all geographic locations are unique) influences of climate and agriculture—modern Japan is simply, and without an accommodation for modernity, the result of social, cultural, and racial evolution on the Japanese Archipelago from “time immemorial.”
For the last two decades it is Japan’s singular economic triumph on the world stage that has bolstered internal arguments about the benefits of belonging to “Japan, Inc.,” i.e., to “We Japanese.” But still, there is a need to secure the message of this triumph as a national achievement, to implicate (if not reward—most life-style markers in Japan are far lower than the per-capita GNP would predict) the national population as the source and the means to continual success.
“To ask that Japan be portrayed as a multiracial, multicultural society is only to ask that the artist, journalist, and scholar be objective and humanistic. For Japan has never been a country for which the description “homogeneous” or “mono-ethnic” would be appropriate except as a reductionist, holistic caricature. During the one-and-a-half millennia for which we have reasonably accurate historical accounts of Japanese society and its population, it is clear that Japan has never been without ethnic minorities and ethnic conflict.
(Wetherall 1981, 203).”
For decades various messages given by the state—from those during the pre-War days that linked the citizenry to its sovereign Emperor, a link that was legitimized by blood ties and informed by “nature” (the monsoon climate of Japan); to the more recent refrains about Japan’s total lack of minority groups (eliding entirely groups such as the Ainu, Okinawans, resident Koreans and Chinese, the distinctions used against those who live in
buraku areas, and the growing number of foreign workers in Japan)—have had one central theme: the Japanese population is one homogeneous group.
“...Similarly, the cultural homogeneity of Japan is an important asset to authorities in carrying out their mandate. In a society where elites are not expected to be directly responsive to the public and where the direct articulation of grievances by social subordinates is discouraged, this homogeneity enables elites to understand and anticipate the needs of those subject to their authority.
(Pharr 1990, 222).”
From the far north to the sub-tropical south, and from seacoast villages to mountain pass hamlets, from the great cities to the small towns: at all places and levels, what is presumed to hold in common is so much greater than what could be used to divide, that all persons (of Japanese descent) are equally (and unavoidably) members of the national “We Japanese” cohort. And so, when a politician starts his speech, “We Japanese...[
warera nihonjin ha...]” everyone knows precisely for—and to whom—he is talking.
“Consider ‘paternal constructions,’ the rather large class of deceits and fabrications that is performed in what is felt to be the dupe's best interests, but which he might reject, at least at the beginning, were he to discover what was really happening. The falsity is calculated to give him comfort and render him tractable and is constructed for those reasons
(Goffman 1974, 99).”
What is most suspicious about this discourse of underlying homogeneity, which has also been acquired by many social scientists looking at modern Japan
9, is that this seems so blatantly to be used in the service of inequality. What the Japanese public holds most in common, it seems, is that it is collectively obligated to all of those elevated (
erai) individuals (the new paternalist nobility, including one’s parents and teachers) who are said to be in a position to know, and have the facilities to understand, and [one can only hope] the integrity to act on behalf of the Japanese public.
“...Where organisational and decision-making structures remain centralised, the consequence of socialisation is only a shift from the private control of knowledge by the corporation to the monopolisation of knowledge by the state. The position of the majority of the population continues to be one of ‘subalternity’, a situation (similar to that criticised by Hidaka in contemporary Japan) in which individuals regard themselves as ‘little people’, lacking all power to influence the wider society, and therefore devoid of all responsibility for the outcome of social change
(Morris-Suzuki 1988, 206).”
In the same way that deference to one’s “betters,” i.e., to elders, to men (if you are a woman), and to anyone with a higher position in an organization, or with any job in an organization with higher status, is taught as “manners,” in Kyoto, an entrenched lack of equality
10 is passed off as “homogeneity.” What is shared here is a common, limited
ken, a mutual lack of perspective on a situation. This lack is both an outcome and input to the delegation of authority and the relinquishing of opinion that so marks the public sphere in Japan, and which is central to a governmentality often termed “paternalistic
11,” although this term does not adequately reveal the dynamics of the situation.
Because the idea that Japan is a singularly homogeneous nation is one of the central notions that Koreans in Kyoto wish to interrogate, I looked in various places to see where and in what fashion this notion can be found. One of the places where this idea has some currency is in universities in Kyoto.
Going off to a university marks the first time when many young adult Japanese find a period of relative independence and a lack of demands on their time. It is a time when personal, cultural and other pursuits are available and expected. College years are remembered by many as the best of times. The college lifestyle in Japan has been called “four years of heaven” for its lack of pressure and surplus of free time. It is a pivotal period in the skilling of the emerging adult in the adult skills of consumer capitalism: a time when preferences and attitudes congeal. And so I would often inquire of the students in the university classes I was teaching about the types of activities they were pursuing (this was mainly a ploy to encourage them to respond about topics of interest).
Two pronounced outcomes emerged from these discussions: a sharing of common interests throughout the class (a near unanimity of tastes), and a lack of interest in any of the forms of “traditional” Japanese cultural practice (such as tea ceremony, flower arrangement, Kabuki or Noh theater). Such practices did not fit into the age-group repertoire of shared interests—and just at what age and within what group they will, in the future, fit is another interesting question. Karaoke, on the other hand, was favored by virtually all students.
“In the case of Japan, its very homogeneity—the common language, shared history, and extraordinary sense of “we-ness” that Japanese people feel—creates a strong basis within inferior-superior relationships for status inferiors to believe superiors capable of understanding their situation, a basis that is often missing in societies with major language, religious, ethnic, or other differences.
(Pharr 1990, 30)”
Virtually none of my students (out of about 300) would admit to an attraction for Japanese traditional theatre, and none would admit
12 knowing the name of any Kabuki or Noh play or actor. Conversely, most were familiar with a wide range of internationally marketed music (several could name many Seattle grunge-rock bands) and films. Despite this devotion to international commodities, more than eighty-percent responded that Japan is a culturally homogeneous nation.
The reasons for this were simple, they argued, noting the circumstances of living on an island nation, with a language that is geographically specific to the national space, and a common heritage, both in history and as a people. But when I pressed for the content they would use to describe this homogeneous culture, I found that this was not informed by a narrative of ancient rice culture, nor a long history of elite cultural production, but rather the products of modern industrialization: televisions, VCRs, automobiles, cameras, video games, anime (cartoons), and karaoke.
“We Japanese” manufacture the best electronics in the world. “We Japanese” have the highest per-capita income in the world. The content has changed, but the message is as strong as ever.
“Because of the potential political consequences linked to survey results, faithfully confessing to some unknown pollster on the telephone may seem like a public duty.
Quite the contrary, the act of consciously misleading a pollster may actually do more public good in the long run. As an act of civil disobedience, this is a fully legitimate counter-population practice: it announces that the individual refuses to be interrogated for some institution's convenience. And it is not even illegal, not even in Japan.”
(Caron 1996, 124)
While Pharr’s (1990) arguments about “conflict management” in Japan contain some assumptions that are difficult to accept (such as the “fact” of homogeneity, which she does not sufficiently critique), her work, read with attention to constraints on expressions in public, reveal practices that defer (and so defeat) discursive access by the majority of the public to the public sphere in Japanese cities such as Kyoto.
By looking at the (mostly pre-War) history of protest by women and
buraku dwelling Japanese, she reveals a pattern of institutionalized delegitimation of protest. She describes how the steep requirements for legitimating public protest and the institutional practice of settling disputes without legitimating the right to dispute either the original situation or the settlement constrain public protest, and public discourse in general.
Japan: a lawless state
“...Acts of civil disobedience are examples of self-limiting radicalism par excellence. On the one hand, civil disobedients extend the range of legitimate, even if initially extralegal, citizen activity that is accepted by a given political culture. Few would be shocked today by a workers' strike, a sit-in, a boycott, or a mass demonstration. These forms of collective action have come to be considered normal, yet all of them were once illegal or extralegal and could again become illegal under some conditions. Thus, civil disobedience initiates a learning process that expands the range and forms of participation open to private citizens within a mature political culture. Moreover, it is well known that, historically, civil disobedience has been the motor to the creation and expansion of both rights and democratization. On the other hand, civil disobedience defines the outer limits of radical politics within the overall framework of civil societies”
(Cohen and Arato 1992, 567).
Because it is not used as a popular forum for counter discussions (which might lead to protests), the public sphere in Kyoto may be said to not exist as such, at least as this term is currently
13 being used to necessarily include counter-public protests. Of course, a similar argument has been leveled against the bourgeois public sphere in other nations: i.e., the lack of serious counter discourse brings into question the viability of the public sphere as an arena for social change.
However, in many states (mainly in nation-states, rather than in state-nations—Tienanmen is a counter example) there are signs of life within the public sphere: feminists challenging the masculine domination of this, and environmentalists challenging the market’s place in this. These challenges often appear in the form of mass protests. And so we can look for these events as a barometer for the viability of the public sphere.
Public protest is no more legal or illegal in Japan than it is in most parts of Europe and North America. And so why are there so conspicuously few protests on the streets in Japan? In part, we can suggest that this is due to a longer history of a lack of mass protest (combined with a lack of an acknowledged history of mass protest— state controlled history books do not reveal this history). Civil disobedience is a practice that requires, well, practice. And the space it opens on the margins of social action needs to be used regularly in order to be kept open.
The state in Japan used the threat of Communism in the 1950s to move against the industrial unions, and since 1960 it has tightened its control over universities and teacher unions to the point where student protest is virtually non existent. And so the memory of protest and civil disobedience has faded in Japan, allowing the state and industrial organizations to exert social, pre-legal forms of constraint against protest, in effect making these practically illegal without the use of the legal system.
Pharr describes another reason for the lack of protest: in Japan, a
Private public sphere takes the place of the (public) public sphere. The (public) public sphere is evacuated, a space of silence, while discussions of national policy and social grievances are instead pushed into the private enclaves (the boardrooms and back offices) of those who have acquired the auspices to speak and to act on behalf of the general population.
One of the chief outcomes of a public sphere is the opening of a space between acts of active dissent and those of simple articulation of alternatives to official policy. Dissent is still possible within the public sphere (although this may take a more symbolic form, such as flag burning, to self-define it as dissent and not just another argument) but so too are discussions about and against official policy. Under
State-nation modernity, where the public sphere is pre-occupied by the state, all public discussions of state policy acquire a potential interpretation as active dissent, and may result in sanctions by the state.
The lack of a public sphere is observable in all public discourses, from coffee-house conversations, to political speeches.
A public sphere opens up a space between simple expressions or discussions of alternative views and statements of active dissent from official policy. Verbal acts of protest are treated within this sphere as legitimate discursive practices. Within a public sphere, official policies (and those who manufacture these) are liable to a wide spectrum of comment, from serious critiques, to parodies and cynical dismissals. This broad discursive space allows for a variety of discussions to happen without these becoming illegal, or de-legitimate, and thus subject to social sanctions (silence) or state interventions.
The lack of a public sphere involves more than the lack of recognized public spaces and arenas for discussion, it actually precodes discourses in public as being anti-state, and by extension (as the state reserves for itself the voice of the public), anti-public.
the safety of silence
To speak out under these circumstances is to place oneself in a position of conflict with the state, even though this conflict may be perceived as minor. In the course of my research in Kyoto, Japan, I wanted to ask several of the people I was talking with about their opinions concerning how well the City represents their interests. In order to give them some time to reflect upon these issues, I made up a short list of topics that I handed out at the end of one of my conversations with them. I considered these topics to be fairly straightforward openings to the conversations I hoped to have about their circumstances of living in Kyoto. The following is the list of topics/questions that were translated and handed to interviewees to think about.
“ALL Interviewees: Questions for them to think about...
1Q-A. What differences do you see between Japanese and Korean cultures? How are these cultures similar?
2Q-A. What do you think of Japanese culture today? What kind of things are good examples of modern Japanese culture?
3Q-A. Japan and Kyoto have democratically elected governments. How well do these governments represent your interests? Are you satisfied with the condition of democractic government in Kyoto? IF NOT SATISFIED: how would you change Kyoto’s system of government to make this more democratic?
4Q-A. Kyoto society has many social divisions. Do people in all of the parts of Kyoto society participate equally in the city’s government and benefit equally from the city’s economy? [IF NO: describe the reason for these social and economic inequalities.]
5Q-A. Kyoto and Japan uses a family residence law that records where people live. Many other nations (for example, the United States) do not have such a law. Does Kyoto need this family residence law? What would happen if this law was not used?
6Q-A. The Higashi-kujo community is a large community with many groups. Describe in as much detail as you can the different groups in Higashi-Kujo (the name of the group, who is in the group, where do these people tend to live).
7Q-A. What are the most important changes that you have noticed in Kyoto in the last 10-20 years? How do you feel about these changes?
8Q-A. What will happen to Higashi-kujo in the next ten years? Do you think there will be any changes in the place or in the society? IF SO, what kind of changes do you predict?”
Before I began to distribute these questions, I gave them to an associate who responded, “
This is a mistake. These people are not in a position to speak on these issues. If you give them these questions it will only make things difficult.”
“In many areas of Japanese life, such as the private business sector, public bureaucracy, and rural community, a hierarchically grounded ideology of social relations operates as the “real” ideology, even if the “official” ideology, as set forth in public pronouncements, is based on democracy and egalitarianism.”
(Pharr 1990, 26)
And she was quite right. I did go ahead and distribute this list, but
none of the local residents would comment to me in any manner that would be linked to them (although some spoke “
offu reco” [off the record]) about topics three through six. “
It is not good to speak out about such matters,” I was told, and a few people refused to talk with me at all again.
This is not to suggest that there is no internal discussion about these issues that I, as an outsider simply did not have access to. I am certain that all such topics get talked about in private. In this instance I was more interested in the characteristics of what would be said
in public. So I also took this refusal to be an important finding about the lack of casual openness concerning many of the issues that are of some local interest, and that are also made available for discussion at and through the Higashi-kujo Madang.
15 Cybernetic governmentalities
“The persistence of status inequalities as a major characteristic of the Japanese social system has been recognized in virtually all studies of the society, from Ruth Benedict's early analysis of 1946, to popular accounts today directed at American managers hopeful of doing business in Japan, to works by contemporary social scientists. Generally, these analyses all discuss status in equality in terms of the importance that inferior-superior (or junior-senior) relationships and other rank and status considerations are accorded in the ordering of social relationships in Japan. ...”
(Pharr 1990, 8)
Giddens (1994, 58) develops a notion of a “cybernetic” governmental model, in which a central economic (mechanical) brain controls a dispersed organic body-politic. This model has some value describing the instrumentality that creates the otherwise oxymoronic situation we find in Japan: namely homogeneous inequality
14. The underlying inferior-superior relationship that holds between the general public—the body politic,—and those of the governing oligarchy that manage the affairs of commerce and the state at the center (in Tokyo) is be legitimated for the polity as an outcome of a natural process whereby the most talented individuals automatically rise to the top (and, in Japan, migrate toward Tokyo). This idealized “meritocracy” also hides a persistent, class-based system of privileges.
social hierarchy
The presence of social hierarchy within a “democratic society” is again not unique to Japan. This is, for example, one of the features of capitalism, i.e., the de-equalizing effect of unequal personal wealth
15 . And it applies as well to the formation of elite bureaucracies in other, e.g., socialist nations.
One senses in Japan that the internal discourse of democracy (
minshushugi) is more centrally connected to notions of social equalization and equal rights (
byoudouken) within the society, than it is with human rights (
jinken). The Meiji period can be seen as a time of equalization, where the nobility and the samurai lost their hereditary advantages. And subsequent efforts to eliminate inequality at the other end of the old social scale by remedying the situation of those who dwell in buraku areas, is also seen in terms of social levelling (
douwa). What is perhaps problematic for democracy in Japan, articulated through the idea of an “equal society,” is the lack of counter-features to the underlying social hierarchy: the absence of a history of taking away the privilege of the elite
16, the lack of memorialized sites where the public once-and-for-all asserted its right to govern, the lack of celebrations of this right.
A history of centralized, national control over social and economic features of life in Japan intensifies the vertical hierarchy within government bureaucracies to the point where its apex again resembles a form of nobility, a family within the family, or a brain within the body. The institutional outcomes of a governmentality that nation-states—most commonly, but not exclusively, in state-socialist governments—devise in order to maintain conscious, centralized economic control at the national level are liable to acquire a self-electing authority in the process of guiding national interests.
“Given the awesome power of the System to deprive the Japanese citizen almost completely of the means to litigate, it should come as no surprise that action taken by the private individual against the government is virtually unthinkable. The Supreme Court refuses to use the powers of review given it by the post-war constitution as a means of safeguarding democracy. In combination with the far-reaching formal powers of government agencies in pursuing broad social policy, this has had the effect of almost totally insulating bureaucratic activity from judicial review. When activists persist in countering administrative decisions with lawsuits, the officials perceive this as a 'radical', almost violent action, hampering national policy-making.”
(van Wolferen 1990, 215)
In a more structural vein, what is also missing is a “court of appeal” where the government is itself held accountable for its power. That the “supreme” court in Japan early on abdicated its power to be a “constitutional court” means that every law passed in Japan is an abridgement on the constitution, and the right to challenge either law or practice is basically unavailable through the court system. The courts will only rule on how a particular practice might not reflect the intent or the wording of the law—not on the law itself. And it is precisely “the law” here, as
(Thompson 1993, 34-35) notes, that should provide the opening that the judiciary makes in favor of those who are ruled through its use.
The close hold that the state maintains on the courts in Japan is fairly typical of the role that courts play under circumstances of
State-nation modernity. Despite the physical existence of courtrooms in Japan, this state-nation has not yet undergone what Habermas called the “first wave of juridification,” in which the courts assume an emancipitory posture against the prior, sovereign order:
“ The first wave of juridification had a freedom-guaranteeing character to the extent that bourgeois civil law and a bureaucratic domination exercised by legal means at least meant emancipation from premodern relations of power and dependence. The three subsequent juridification waves guaranteed an increase in freedom insofar as they were able to restrain, in the interests of citizens and of private legal subjects, the political and economic dynamics that had been released by the legal institutionalization of the media of money and power. The step-by-step development toward the democratic welfare state is directed against those modern relations of power and dependence that arose with the capitalist enterprise, the bureaucratic apparatus of domination, and, more generally, the formally organized domains of action of the economy and the state. The inner dynamics of these action systems also unfold within the organizational forms of law, but in such a way that law here takes on the role of a steering medium rather than supplementing institutional components of the lifeworld” (Habermas 1989, 366).
Here, Habermas describes how the courts in the early development of nation-states, supply a “steering medium” that operates externally to both the state and the market. This operation has not occurred in Japan to date, and its lack is one of the hallmarks of Japan as a state-nation (see:
State-nation modernity).
In terms of new social movements, the lack of courts of appeal increases the risk of protest, as this is subject to claims of illegality that cannot be subsequently countered by some court’s ability to overrule the state in the interest of the public. The public has, in fact, no proven, legal interest outside of that which is granted by the state in Japan.
17 the politics and semantics of homogeneity
“No nation of comparable economic power seems so territorially constricted, so ethnically standardized, so culturally contained: Japanese themselves commonly insist that theirs is a small island country (
shimaguni), a homogeneous place. Its economic expansiveness is parried by a national inwardness and a disavowal of internal differences along class or ethnic lines, a disavowal most often laid at the feet of culture. The image of Japan as the great assimilator arises to explain away any epistemological snags or historical confusions: Japan assimilates, if not immigrants and American automobiles, then everything else, retaining the traditional, immutable core of culture while incorporating the shiny trappings of (post)modernity in a dizzying round of production, accumulation, and consumption”
(Ivy 1995, 1).
Whether it is entirely the outcome of long-range nation-state formation activities by the Japanese state, or in part an outcome of Japan’s physical/cultural/linguistic dis-connection from the Asian Continent, or, more likely the latter overlaid and transformed by the former, national identity in Japan now assumes a high degree of similarity, and the presence of a national habitus that is shared by nearly all of its citizens.
The politics of homogeneity—the various ways that this notion affects relationships between individuals in public—is a central concern for resident Koreans in Kyoto, who, by their official “national” identification, are excluded from becoming Japanese, even when they become naturalized citizens. “
Even if I become a Japanese citizen, I still have this Korean ancestry.” One resident Korean in Kyoto explained to me. While the official incorporation regime that prospective citizens must follow demands a public and sincere desire to acculturate to Japanese life, the unofficial exclusions of the national habitus do not admit newcomers into the “
We Japanese...” identity.
Koreans who grow up in Kyoto are virtually indistinguishable from their Japanese neighbors, and can easily pass as Kyoto Japanese in anonymous transactions. But when their Korean ancestry becomes known, they sense a shift in the manner in which others will interact with them. They feel the marking that removes them from assumptions that apply within the “We Japanese” group identity.
One alternative, which informs their festival Madang, and also their continuing discourse on international human rights as these apply locally to Kyoto, is to attack the very notion of homogeneity as the basis for a national population. They also take their dual identity, their Korean-Japanese heritage, not as a halving of both traditions: they are not half-Korean and half-Japanese; rather they talk about a doubling of identity: they are both Korean and Japanese. “
Isn’t a tree with two roots stronger than a tree with only one root?” a resident Korean asked me, illustrating this position.
What Koreans in Kyoto have not done (yet) in their arguments for heterogeneity is to critique the idea that Japan is naturally/historically a homogeneous society. They may, in fact accept this notion as being valid. But they would still argue that homogeneity cannot be used as the basis for citizenship today. But Koreans in Kyoto are not alone in their tacit acceptance of Japan as a homogeneous society, Even Pharr, who was writing about inequality in Japan, made the assumption that the formation of the nation-state was informed by its homogeneity, which gave the rulers a natural legitimacy to acquire political authority.
“Education has expanded and developed dramatically in Japan, due to factors that include the priority given to education, which is part of the national character, and rising income levels. Education has been a driving force behind Japan's economic, social, and cultural development.
(
Monbusho ibid 1994.)”
Pharr (1990, 214) also makes the argument that in Germany, where heterogeneity was (in her argument) more evident, the state could not assemble the requisite sense of commonality to achieve uncontested delegation of political authority (at least until Hitler did so). “The great heterogeneity of Germany, with its major religious, ethnic, and regional cleavages, foreclosed the possibility that any such delegation of authority could have occurred there, even if such a pattern had been more consistent with German traditions. Thus, authority figures at the national level had to evolve methods for mediating among the competing interests of society.”
“For Adorno, notably, any existing collectivity—under the homogenizing force of monopoly capitalism and fascism alike—could not be but false; truth was buried in nonidentity, to be grasped only in the paradoxical autonomy of modern(ist) art”
(Hansen 1993, xviii).
Pharr’s argument that public-sphere formation was possible in Germany because social heterogeneity required additional arenas for mediation also fails to predict the collapse of the public sphere in Germany in 1933, and it implicates a very general historical precondition as necessary for the creation of a public sphere: by this it denies the possibility of the creation of a public sphere as the result of political practice. This last point reveals the lack of critical attention to the
position of the notion of homogeneity in Pharr’s work.
Notions of a homogeneous culture
“...As Tokugawa economic life became more complex, self regulating occupational classes and functional groups developed. But even though the urban worker, merchant or artisan was occasionally made aware that power also emanated from sources other than his own superior or guild, he would still have had no sense of any impersonal political organisation, any possible precursor of the state, that might judge his conduct objectively.’Public’ affairs meant simply the sum of those things that occupied the attention of his superior.
(van Wolferen 1990, 164-165)
The word “
doushu” is described in
Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary (Fourth Edition) in its adjectival form as meaning “of the same kind [sort, description]; of the same family [species]; similar (in kind); same; identical; kindred; allied; congeneric; congerous; homogeneous; of the same race.”
Doushu is the Japanese term used for the notion of “homogeneity,” for example, when this is used in describing some national Japanese society. But note that the Japanese term’s semantic field differs from current English language
17 use of “homogeneous.”
“Similarity” and “uniformity” in the English meaning are descriptive of the current condition of the object described, and are in semantic counterposition to objects that show “heterogeneity.” In the Japanese borrowing of the term, current similarities are outcomes of a shared ancestry. Similarity of organic objects, including humans, is explained within this term by racial or familial connections.
This brings up a fundamental flaw in the debate surrounding
Nihonjinron. This discourse on “Japanese-ness” has essentialized its object to the point where “being Japanese” is an unmarked position that 1) can only be appropriated by certain individuals (i.e., citizens of Japan who have lived their life in Japan); and, 2) the right “being Japanese” can be lost through any of several ways of marking the individual as divergent from a group Japanese habitus.
“...I am attempting to write of the western nation as an obscure and ubiquitous form of living the
locality of culture. This locality is more
around temporality than
about historicity: a form of living that is more complex than 'community'; more symbolic than 'society'; more connotative than 'country'; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of state; more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centred than the citizen; more collective than ‘the subject’; more psychic than civility; more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications—gender, race or class—than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism.”
(Bhabha 1990, 292)
But for resident Koreans and others who grow up in Japan, the Japanese group habitus, the “harmonizing” homogeneity that sustains the “
We Japanese...” discourse, presents an ethnic barrier that no amount of assimilation (assuming there is a desire to assimilate) can overcome. And so, as I talk about the discourse surrounding “homogeneity” in Japan, I would remind the reader that this is not disconnected from discourses of race. So too, the demand by the Higashi-kujo Madang festival organizers that Japan recognize heterogeneity as a human right, is a demand that is not only made to assert cultural difference, but also ethnic and bodily diversity within the nation-state of Japan. This demand is also a local reflective appropriation of “multiculturalism” as a transnational practice with “obscure and ubiquitous” (See: Left) local implications.
One theory of optimal, or autotelic, experience has been developed following the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago. This theory reverses the dichotomy between play and work found in some theories of play such as those of Huizanga (1950) and Callois (1958). These latter theories held that play, i.e. any game, as opposed to work, was a completely bounded experience, the risks of which had no effect outside the boundary of the game.
What Csikszentmihalyi (1975) argues is that play is simply any activity that is internally motivated (hence autotelic). This means that work (labor) can also be play to the extent that it provides internal motivation. Certain structures of an activity increase the amount of its internal motivation and experience it creates. “Common to all these forms of autotelic envolvement is a matching of personal skills against a range of physical or symbolic opportunities for action that represent meaningful challenges to the individual” (
ibid. 181). This experience of play Csikszentmihalyi calls
flow, a name derived from a common element found in many descriptions of this experience.
Highly autotelic activities tend to reduce the participant’s awareness of time and of self. Yet these activities involve intense attention to a perceived set of well defined parameters. Flow activities are sequences of events that engender immediate challenges (risks), that demand a high level of mental and/or physical participation, and that reward this participation with a correspondingly high level of enjoyment. Thus the effort to meet the challenges provided within the context of the flow event is matched with an immediate sense of pleasure. Participation is its own reward.
The greater the perceived risk, the wider the symbolic arena of activity—up to the point where the individual feels preempted from entering the activity because her personal skills cannot possibly meet the challenges involved—the more profound the flow experience will be. Furthermore, flow is apparently not entirely a quantitatively measurable experience: one experience of an extremely “deep” flow nature is thus not equatable to several “shallow” flow experiences. Deep flow, once experienced, is apparently extremely psychologically addictive (
ibid, 138).
Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow has profound consequences for the study of festivals. To begin with, it provides a basic motivation for these events. Festivals are collective flow events, they provide a group of people with deep flow experiences. The ritual context of the festival creates the structured arena (the technology of experience) within which deep flow experiences can be obtained. The participants themselves create the need for the festival’s continuation. Again, people seem to have differential talents and needs vis à vis flow experiences. This means that the flow effects of the festival are differential.
Festivals vary in their success at engendering flow. The only aspect of the festival that is assured by its simple performance is its ritual
18. The rituals of the event provide what I call its “technology of experience,” they are the stage, the props, the elaborated context within which meaning will happen. Participation in a festival event varies from person to person, year to year. The actual meanings that do happen, that people experience, these are shared in that they respond to a shared immediate context, yet they are differentially experienced, they engage the participants in multiple ways, depending upon the role of the participant in the event, and on the participant’s immediate need and capacity to use the event as an optimal experience.
19 Imagine the festival as a building.
A multistory structure on a commons in a city. A building with a most peculiar history: it would be built so as to be torn down and reconstructed once a year. Every year the building site is cleared and the entire building is constructed from the ground up. Construction takes two weeks of concentrated co-laboration, and it requires the work, the skills, the enthusiasm, and the financial support of the entire neighborhood. All of these are brought together when the time for construction is nigh. A collection of tools and skills, plans and paints, everything needed for this task remains in the neighborhood all year around, and the construction itself proceeds as the work of several teams that compete with one another and with their own history, for speed and skill. The teams have practiced their coordination and strategy throughout the entire year.
The object is to make the building complete again as fast as possible. At the end of construction a grand party inaugurates the building for public use. People who visit the city only occasionally and walk through the neighborhood would see the building with its neighbors, standing there as if it were like the surrounding buildings, but always somehow looking newer than the others. These visitors may not realize that the building is simultaneously the same and different from the one they saw last year.
Each year, within its completeness, something new is added, and perhaps something else has been forgotten. Most of the people who use it (and who participate in its rebuilding) are not actively aware that it changes over time. They see it as their building, something whole.
Anyhow, the changes are appropriate to the space and its use. Two years ago the second floor was converted to a day-care center. Last year they added fiber-optic cables that connect each room to a computer network. And this year they took out the wall that separated the office of neighborhood’s committee chairperson from that of the secretary. There are plans for more skylights, and for a passive solarheating wall on the south. These changes keep the building alive.
And the ability to change is what allows new neighbors to add their newness to its completeness. Newcomers can either join one of existing building collectives or start their own. Last year, three families from Guatemala and another from Bosnia decided to add their own addition. And so an extra alcove that was never there before looks out over the street. It seems to fit just right, and its sudden presence is not at all obvious to most, but the newcomers point it out whenever they pass by—it is their piece of the local whole.
Two ways to destroy this “festival”
As a festival, this building is the most ephemeral of structures. There are only a few tactics that can keep it going, and so many ways for it to fail.
No matter how many years this building is built, it still takes a enormous amount of resources to complete it. Not everyone is happy with this situation. Hours and hours of rehearsal, planning, and coordination meetings are needed just so that the construction can begin. And during construction everything else, work, play, even sleep is forgotten. Employers get angry, the schools are not happy, and the local businesses complain about traffic tie-ups and lost revenue. Besides, the building is a perfectly good building. Why tear it down every year? Why not every three years? or five years? or ten? There are families who have not taken a real vacation in years. Why not give them a year off? And why is there this need to keep changing the building? It would be much simpler to have one plan and stick to it.
Meetings are held, votes are taken. But slowly, with some subtle arm-twisting, a majority is reached on a plan to construct the building every seven years using the plan that was constructed last year. There are to be no new cooperatives, and the existing cooperatives will each elect a single representative. These representatives will meet together as an executive committee and make all required decisions.
The first seven year period ended and the building was reconstructed. It took an extra twelve days, and some of the interior remained unfinished for three months, but the building was renewed. After the second seven year period, three of the cooperatives were unable to provide enough volunteers to construct the main structure. After a month, the roof was still not finished. By the time the winter came, the building was still not ready to be occupied. On a cold winter night some persons found an entry and lit a small fire that destroyed the building. The site remains vacant to this day.
Festivals are vulnerable to “slack” times. Because they maintain their own memory in their practice (unlike most sports which are codified in a manner that allows them to be relearned) they can be forgotten when enough people stop performing them. They are also relatively vulnerable/open to innovation, and so they change more rapidly than spectacle/rituals.
To preserve the memory of a festival it is important to maintain the continuity of its practice, under the festival logic. During slack times, the performance can be allowed to become smaller (the building can shrink in size), but it will not survive if the time between performances is too long. To counter arguments that the festival “takes too much time” the many diverse outcomes of the festival need to be understood.
In the case of this “building” festival, one might look at the improved condition of other buildings in the neighborhood (so many people know how to build), at the number of jobs that residents acquire in the building trade, and at the special qualities of the building itself, and how these might be better used. Document the interactions that take place in the planning and execution of the construction, and note the conversational opportunities within the event.
SCENARIO TWO: The museum effect
Let’s say that one year the city determines this building and its practice of rebuilding is of “historical interest.” They acquire this property, and they make a careful study of its rebuilding. Then they hire building experts to perform the rebuilding every year according to the precise calculations they have made. They advertise the rebuilding event to draw in tourists, and they set up television cameras to show this to the nation. The building is made a national monument. Books are written, tours arranged. And every year it is rebuilt in exactly the same way as the year before.
By this, the state hopes to preserve the building and its construction for centuries to come. The neighborhood no longer is burdened by having to perform this enormous task, and the tourists that come bring income to the local merchants.
However, by this the state has destroyed much more than it “preserved:” the building is now just another museum. There is no more festivity in its annual reconstruction. The stakes have changed: the goal is to do it “right” according to some preexisting determination. The art of incorporating change and invention in the festival/construction has been lost. The game is no longer a game but a duty, a ritual with only the most shallow resemblance to its prior logic.
The neighborhood needs to realize that it owns this event. It must tell the city and the state to not interfere. If the city/state is interested in this festival, then the festival participants can organize workshops to teach other neighborhoods how to do the same event in their location. The idea would be to spread the logic of the festival in its original form: local, democratic, always-changing.
20 Intimacy is first a connection to the body
“The world of
intimacy is as antithetical to the
real world as immoderation is to moderation, madness to reason, drunkenness to lucidity. There is moderation only in the object, reason only in the identity of the object with itself, lucidity only in the distinct knowledge of objects
(Bataille 1988 [1967], 58)”
Intimacy is a currency based on a subtle mettle mined in the body. Intimacy is at a different moment a transaction between individuals, as in an “intimate conversation” or an “intimate caress.” And, as we will see, this transaction must be mutual if intimacy is to be maintained (SEE:
Intimacy is always shared). In other words, what is transacted must flow in both directions. But what
moves in this transaction?
“Tenderness is a relationship with another person’s body, which we treat as sensitive with the aim of heightening its sensitivity and enabling it to enjoy being itself;
this relationship with another person’s body necessarily implies heightening our own sensitivity. Violence, by contrast, is a relationship of technological instrumentalization of the things of this world whose sensory qualities have been denied and it is, as a result, a form of repression which devalues our own sensitivity”
(Gorz 1989, 86).
[emphasis mine]
The easiest place to see intimacy as this becomes a part of the body is in music, art, and dance: in the body’s intimate skilling with instruments, objects, and movement. Here the connection to and through the body is applied to gesture, melody, rhythm, shape, or color to produce a result that can only be attributed to the body’s intimate skills. In recent decades, professional sport has become more like art or dance in this way, and the bodies of athletes filmed in slow motion reveal similar skills.
The appreciation of art and music usually combines the facility for making distinctions (as Bourdieu reminds us) with an attraction to the persons (and bodies) who can perform these feats. Musicians, artists, and sports figures inspire fanatical devotion in others who see, or believe they see, not only the virtuoso ability of their “star” but some intimate quality that is necessarily genuine. The idea that artists are somehow “more alive” or “more attuned to their environment” is a transference of the bodily intimacy that surrounds the artist’s skill to a more general capacity for intimacy. The attraction of visible intimacy in art, the seduction that the artistic spectacle of “sensitivity” creates, is linked to the later necessary moment of intimacy: to its potential sharing.
“ When the new connections between sexuality and intimacy were formed, however, sexuality became much more completely separated from procreation than before. Sexuality became doubly constituted as a medium of self-realisation and as a prime means, as well as an expression, of intimacy. Sexuality has here lost its extrinsic connections with wider traditions and ethics, as well as with the succession of the generations”
(Giddens 1991, 164).
The expectation that a talented painter should be talented in other applications of intimacy may more often than not prove over-optimistic, but the logic of this expectation is not entirely wrong. It simply neglects to account for the singularity of skilling in any art form. The same person who will not expect a painter to necessarily play the piano, may still assume that the painter’s intimate relation to her canvas is transportable to private conversations and personal intimacy. This kind of assumption is probably strongest with fiction writers who might have penned passionate conversations in their last novel, and who are thus (mis)taken as being skilled in personal intimacy. However, writing, like painting, is a solo performance.
mutual trust
Personal intimacy, now tied to a reflexivized sexuality, is keyed to mutual trust, and trust is a gamble where each person contributes their own stock of mettle and assumes that the other(s) have their own: “To trust the other is also to gamble upon the capability of the individual actually to be able to act with integrity” (Giddens 1992, 138). Getting involved with an artist is a tactic aimed at reducing the risk of this wager (of course the attraction of popularity is another feature of this: the hope that popularity will “rub-off”).
“In the pure relationship, trust has no external supports, and has to be developed on the basis of intimacy. Trust is a vesting of confidence in the other and also in the capability of the mutual bond to withstand future traumas”
(Giddens 1992, 138).
The point here is that individuals enter into intimate relationships, the continuation of which is determined by their capability in intimacy. In much the same way that each member of a music ensemble must
trust the capabilities of the others, so too, each partner in an intimate relationship needs to trust that the other partner(s) have been adequately skilled in the ways of personal intimacy. These skills, like the talent of a top ballet star, are kept in the body, in a repository of the results of prior rehearsals, performances, failures, and lessons.
Intimacy is first a connection to the body. It is the body that sends the signals that the ongoing conversation (the discursive requirement of intimacy) is sincere.
21 Intimacy is always shared
“To say that Madame Merle improved on acquaintance states meagrely the impression she made on her friend, who had found her from the first so ample and so easy.
At the end of an intimacy of three months Isabel felt she knew her better; her character had revealed itself, and the admirable woman had also at last redeemed her promise of relating her history from her own point of view-a consummation the more desirable as Isabel had already heard it related from the point of view of others”
(Henry James,
The Portrait of a Lady).
The shared aspect of intimacy means simply that this must be reciprocal, otherwise it becomes a simple confession. The priest listening to the confessions of the sinner does so through a screen and makes no confessions himself. The paid sex worker goes through the motions of emotion and physical intimacy without giving sharing in what is really a sexual confession, and not intimate at all.
The moment of sharing is the performance of intimacy. Where the skilling in the body is its rehearsal, intimacy is performed only as a shared action. This means too that artists, musicians, etc., do share the intimacy of their art with those who appreciate this (but it does not mean that they share a personal intimacy with their audience).
It is this sharing that brings to the front the notion of trust.
The pure relationship is focused on intimacy, which is a major condition of any long-term stability the partners might achieve. Intimacy has to be distinguished from the more negative phenomenon of lack of privacy, characteristic of most circumstances of life in pre-modern Europe and in many non-modern cultures generally (Giddens 1991, 94).
22 A festival counters the dominant...
bourgeois lifestyle logic
“Objective distance from necessity and from those trapped within it combines with a conscious distance which doubles freedom by exhibiting it. As the objective distance from necessity grows, life-style increasingly becomes the product of what Weber calls a 'stylization of life', a systematic commitment which orients and organizes the most diverse practices—the choice of a vintage or a cheese or the decoration of a holiday home in the country. This affirmation of power over a dominated necessity always implies a claim to a legitimate superiority over those who, because they cannot assert the same contempt for contingencies in gratuitous luxury and conspicuous consumption, remain dominated by ordinary interests and urgencies....”
(Bourdieu 1984, 55-56).
This is not simply a wishful bit of nominalism, but one of those aspects of festivals that need further examination. Implied herein is an assumption that should there be a dominant lifestyle logic available at the place of the festival, and should this be describable in relation to some description of a local “bourgeoisie,” then a festival in this locale will operate counter to this. Such a statement is constructed as much on the description of (globally available) bourgeois lifestyle practices as it on notions of festival practices. The bourgeois life-style is at its core a spectacular display of the “affirmation of power over a dominated necessity,” as Bourdieu call this.
To live in a world that seems comfortable, where economic and physical threats are remote from the quotidian flow of time: this is a life project goal at the center of the bourgeois lifestyle. A history of the pursuit of this goal would include global institutions for policing and intelligence, agencies for insurance and transportation safety, for health care and, most recently, for environmental management.
All of these institutions provide several rationales for their cost, but they are each a party to the maintenance of a threshold of care-free comfort that lies at the core of the bourgeois life project. This becomes most noticeable in the travel industry, where the transportation, feeding, lodging and entertainment of millions of tourists must be accomplished without any gaps in the “comfort bubble” that is meant to envelope the traveler from doorstep to doorstep.
Of course, the irony here is that this “bubble” also separates the tourist from the places they have travelled to. Their journey is an expense of time and money, much of which is spent avoiding their destinations. And when they stay at home, these tourists still expect that the level of comfort and safety that they have acquired in their neighborhoods
19will do nothing if not improve over time. The bubble is created for/by them on
The Street. The festival breaks this bubble.
A festival displays the domination
of necessity, the hunger for desire, a need for laughter. And so a “bourgeois festival” is oxymoronic (elsewhere, as in Disneyland’s new “Festival of Fools,” the “oxy-” is optional). The most obvious elements in this claim are the direct connections of the festival to the body and to a type of sexuality (or sensuality) that is not determined by institutionalized “tastes.” Also, in festival there is the ad hoc quality of physical resources: which may be gathered from refuse or modified from everyday objects. The inclusion of women and of (other) marginal groups also works against the exclusivity of the bourgeois public sphere. The nature of festival performance, and the skilling it requires and promotes, is also a factor in this theory.
While this concept entails that events that do not counter the bourgeois logic of the dominant lifestyle are not festivals, it does not entail that all events that counter the bourgeois logic of the dominant lifestyle are festivals. Internal military actions against citizens, for example, also run against the liberal, democratic governmentality.
23 A festival is a space of social therapy
Therapy, in its broadest sense, attempts to bring unconsciously (non-discursively) acquired problems into the conscious, discursive awareness. Therapy works when it extends the reflexive ken of the person under therapy. The festival, practiced in public places, extends the reflexive apparatus of the community, bringing into its discourse those practices (and histories) of domination that normally—and necessarily—exist outside of the ken of its members. The festival is a model site for collective therapy.
A festival opens up a space of voluntary discourse and a democratic recoding of knowledges that are previously unavailable for comment. This space is an arena for public meta-commentaries about the social circumstances of the community. In short the festival is a discursive space where the availability of shared intimacy creates the potential for bringing into discourse circumstances that would otherwise remain misunderstood and thus oppressive.
Festivals are many things at the same time, so I do not want to imply that their therapeutic potential—which will be explored below—confers their only, or in some places, their main use. One can certainly imagine a festival where its space of therapy is rarely used, even as one can imagine a city neighborhood where social therapy is sorely needed.
24 Domination produces silences
“...the basis of criticism is not in theory but in the taste a lived experience of the world has for the person experiencing it. The task of theory (or rather philosophy) and literature, each in its own way and at its own level, will be to unravel the web of the dominant discourse which reduces lived experience to silence”
(Gorz 1989, 87).
Against the general notion of ideology as the articulation and enforcement of particular ideals (ideas with teeth), we have to also note the great silences between these ideals. If you add up the discursive space of a dominant discourse and that of the implied silences, the space of silence far exceeds that of articulation. Everything that “goes-without-saying” also belongs to the discourse that speaks through those who are authorized to do so.
Foucault put this well in his
History of Sexuality:
“Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (1990, 27).
This notion, following Foucault, points to silences within the public sphere. To look at silence as an expected outcome of the practices that dominate discursive fields shows this “black matter” that is as much a part of the field as what is said.
One type of counter-discourse is to get up in public and speak what goes-without-saying. Political satire can reveal the arbitrariness of government authority (a feature of governmentalities that governments will not speak about). But most of all, realizing that silence is a product of domination opens up the process of self reflection to explore the unexpressed, forbidden gray reaches of the imagination.
25 Practice creates its place
One of the great frustrations of planners and architects is that the users of their plans and buildings often find ways to make these into something different than was originally intended. These later appropriations of spaces disregard what the planner assumed would be the appropriate uses of them. Such later, ad hoc uses may be only temporary or they may be more permanent. Goffman provides us with a useful example:
“The great modern case is President Grayson Kirk's office during the 1968 unpleasantness at Columbia:
‘One and a half hours after the President's suite had been cleared of student demonstrators, Grayson Kirk stood in the center of his private office looking at the blankets, cigarette butts and orange peels that covered his rug. Turning to A. M. Rosenthal of The New York Times and several other reporters who had come into the office with him he murmured, "My God, how could human beings do a thing like this?" It was the only time, Truman recalled later, that he had ever seen the President break down. Kirk's windows were crisscrossed with tape and on one hung a large sign reading, "Join Us." His lampshades were torn, his carpet was spotted, his furniture was displaced and scratched. But the most evident and disturbing aspect of the scene was not the minor damage inflicted by the students. The everything-in-its-place decor to which Kirk had grown accustomed was now in disarray—disarray that was the result of the transformation of an office into the living quarters of l50 students during the past six days’ (quoted from: Avorn, et al., 1969. p. 200).
The great sociological question, of course, is not how could it be that human beings would do a thing like this, but rather how is it that human beings do this sort of thing so rarely. How come persons in authority have been so overwhelmingly successful in conning those beneath them into keeping the hell out of their offices?” (Goffman 1971, 288).
For the larger majority of people who are neither architects nor university presidents, the occupation of space is a continual problem and opportunity. Living in spaces designed by others, often for uses that are no longer useful, coping with advances in technology, and aging infrastructure: people more or less make do.
Counter-domination
“But should a stranger or employer or a janitor or policeman approach the two players, it will usually be quite sufficient to know that the men are playing a board game. The gearing of the game into the immediately surrounding workaday world is largely in terms of this relatively abstract categorization, for what are involved are such matters as the electric light, the room space, the time needed, the right of others to openly watch and under certain circumstances to interrupt the men and ask them to postpone the game or shift its physical location, the right of the players to phone their wives to say they will be delayed because of a game to finish. These and a host of other detailed ways in which what is going on must find a place in the rest of the ongoing world are relatively independent of which game is being played. By and large it is the mode of transformation, not what is thus transformed, that is geared into the world. And yet, of course, this independence is not complete”
(Goffman 1974, 248).
This slipperiness of place, its vulnerability to practices, set the limit to the production of space as an act of domination. Practices of domination attempt to produce spaces of domination, which will allow domination to occur as the sole practice in the place. Prisons use panoptic availability to prevent prisoners from performing counter-practices. Cities use codes to prevent the homeless from using the streets as either work space (panhandling) or housing (sleeping or defecating).
Counter-dominant practices create counter-spaces by disattending to the spatial logic of the dominant order. Alternative rules and unofficial attitudes (such as cynicism) tactically retrieve a space for use by a local practice. More profound transformations of space by practice require pre-planning and an alternative logic. Jokes are a clear example of this, as are festivals.
Counter-domination opens up spaces within the dominant order. But the opposite is also true. The market/state has tremendous resources, and authority, as well as longevity. It can quickly reseal the openings that counter-events have made. The longer term answer is to reveal and remove the practices of domination within the market/state, to democratize democracy and capitalism. Only then will the practices of government and the market create places that are open and available to all.
26 The festival performs what it proposes
A festival performs its goals, these are internal to the event. This little concept fronts the
performativity of festival practices. It also hints at the need to repeat the festival event: as much as the performance is the goal, its effect is established through a practice of iteration. Iteration provides the memory of the festival.
“...Liminal propositions, or what Turner also called ‘frames,’ are ‘privileged spaces where people are allowed to think about how they think, about the terms in which they conduct their thinking, or to feel about how they feel about daily life.’ These frames place the spectator outside the system of instrumental propositions and objective measures used to conduct daily life. They recognize that other scrutinizing and evaluating procedures, really meta-languages, are required to talk about the system itself. At times the space of the city takes on this sense of liminality, it becomes a text to be read or a space to enter in order to retreat from and subsequently reflect on the social order and cultural significance of its architectural passages and transformations....”
(Boyer 1994, 211).
One idea here is to make a clear distinction between festivals and spectacles, the latter which display features external to the event: status markers of powerful, famous, or historically noted individuals, or reminders of military and police strength.
Think of spectacle parade as holding up a wall of specially constructed mirrors that reflect into the eyes of onlookers the surrounding buildings and their occupants in a light complimentary to the parade’s organizers.
And then think of a festival parade as surrounding itself with mirrors that shut out the gaze of onlookers, and distort and reassemble the identities of those within the parade, rendering external distinctions indistinct, and opening up to laughter, reflection, and sudden insight. This moment is the goal of the festival.
There is a tendency in the social sciences (in part because of an economistic bent) to only ask what effect the festival has on quotidian life, to view the festival as an “episode” and everyday life and work as primary and external to such cultural episodes. In response to this tendency, there are a couple of features of festivals that need to be looked at. The first is the need for rehearsal, and the second is the availability of “doubleness.”
A festival does not simply erupt from the street (there are a few exceptions to this), it is organized and rehearsed throughout the year. And so it is active in the lives and relationships of its participants all year around. It is its own “lifestyle.” This means it adds another “lifestyle” onto that provided by the market/state. This “doubling” of lifestyle helps to decenter consumerist lifestyle production in the life projects of individuals (one aspect of the festival countering the bourgeois lifestyle [see:
A festival counters the dominant...]). A festival becomes a double identity, which attaches to its performers and to its sites. Space is also doubled, and the street is made liable to short-term ad hoc appropriations by those who already know it as a festival space.
27 State-nation modernity
“Modernity produces certain distinct social forms, of which the most prominent is the nation-state. A banal observation, of course, until one remembers the established tendency of sociology to concentrate on 'society' as its designated subject-matter. The sociologist's 'society', applied to the period of modernity at any rate, is a nation-state, but this is usually a covert equation rather than an explicitly theorised one. As a socio-political entity the nation-state contrasts in a fundamental way with most types of traditional order. It develops only as part of a wider nation-state system (which today has become global in character), has very specific forms of territoriality and surveillance capabilities, and monopolises effective control over the means of violence”
(Giddens 1991, 15).
“Modernity” is too often a term used as unproblematic
in the singular. And the processes that lead to and through this period are too often considered as uniform and ubiquitous. Scholars working in and on Asian locales have led a counter-argument which notes that a plurality of modernities are to be found, each responding to local historical circumstances. At the same time, there is no escaping the
globalizing aspect of modernity, which includes the development of nation-states in geographical and organizational counter-position to one another. So too, the disembedding features of modern nation formation have unlinked internal locales from local histories, recoding these as sites of the nation. And competition among nations steers their internal formations, resulting in homologous institutional arenas where the global holds sway over the local.
Industrialization, militarization, capital formation: there are several arenas within modernity where states compete. And this competition brings them into a dialogic relationship that reduces inter-national differences. Institutions learn from each other, and copy one another in the process. As with the bodies competitive athletes competing in the modern Olympiad, modern states begin to resemble each other as they individually strive to master similar practices.
However, internal “governmentalities” in each nation also reflects a local history of rules (and rulers), and of powers and places. But here, too, in a general—however, I would venture, in a productive—manner, we can speak of
dominant frames of governmentality as well as localized practices. These frames for modern governmentalities are plural, but not as numerous as nations, and not as diverse as states might profess.
I want to focus on the location of the state within the nation (the latter as a geographical location and as an imagined community of “citizens”).
In particular, I want to focus on the location of the state within the nation (the latter as a geographical location and as an imagined community of “citizens”). And within this, I would look at the position of the state vis-à-vis civil society and the public sphere. Again, as with “modernity,” these terms have also arisen mainly from debates and descriptions of states in Europe. However, recent reconsiderations of them, as exemplified by Keane (1988) have illuminated their histories and the contours of their application in a manner that makes these both more difficult to use as general terms but easier to apply as historically-grounded examples for global comparisons.
In “Despotism and Democracy,” his own contribution to the work he edited, Keane (1988) notes that the term “civil society” was originally used in several nations as a “type of political association which places its members under the influence of its laws and thereby ensures peaceful order and good government” (35). Until the early eighteenth century throughout Europe, this form of (and forum for) political association was protected by the state, and so developed
as an interest internal to the state. In fact, Keane claims, “[c]ivil society [
koinonia politiké, societas civilis, société civile, bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Civill Society, societá civile] and the state [
polis, civitas, état, Staat, state, stato] were interchangeable terms” (35-36). It is only after that that civil society emerges (where it did) as a counter-state forum and form of political association.
When I speak then of a “frame” for governmentality, I am looking, for example, at precisely the institutional and philosophical connections or dis-connections between elements of modernity, such as civil society and the state. The eighteenth-century transformation of civil society in parts of Europe from a state-based arena of action and discourse, to a counter-state arena marked a shift in the framework of democracy in these nations. This shift moved some aspects of governmentality outside of the state, but perhaps more importantly, it also called into question the existence of the state.
Here I am using Foucault’s term, “government” in a meaning field that Foucault supplied:
“The things with which in this sense government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in their relation to that other kind of things, customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relation to that other kind of things, accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc.” (1991, 93).
Government, and its underlying “governmentality” is the dominant discourse of relationships among people, and between people and cultural objects. Government is not restricted to the relations between the state and the individual, although this relationship in modernity has a marked quality because of the state’s monopoly over the means of violence—both carceral and military. And there are also nations where the state’s hegemonic interests spread far wider than a control over the means of violence. In fact, here is where the frameworks for locally-present modernities diverge in important ways.
State-nations and nation-states
In some places today, one finds that the nation’s state has acquired a governmental purview which has few limits, while in other places, the state operates within imposed limits, while other cultural and economic institutions exist more-or-less external to the state. The latter places are “nation-states” that display a form of modern state where issues of civil society and the public sphere are central to critiques of modernity. These are the states where, for example, Keane’s “classical” notion of civil society has been transformed into an entity different from the state.
The former places (in order to distinguish them from the latter, I call these “
state-nations”—as they tend to put the interests of the state at the front of the nation) are found, for example, in most places in Asia and Africa. In these countries, descriptions of the state, in its many interventions into the lives of its citizens, form the main critique of local modernities.
State-nations and nation-states are not fixed in some formal oppposition. As we noted, the above nation-states were themselves state-nations before the middle of the eighteenth century. And current debates over the position of the state can be seen as potentially repositioning the state, moving the frame of governmentality either toward or away from state-nation modernity. For the state, to date, is the one feature that appears in all locales.
“For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is neither inherently good nor bad, only dynamic and productive; desiring-machines can travel along the path of becoming revolutionary as well as becoming-fascist; lines of escape can turn into lines of liberation or destruction”
(Best and Kellner 1991, 105).
It is important to see both frames of modernity as a) informing the other, and b) capable of transforming into the other. State organizations in nation-states may envy those of state-nations, where the purview of state institutions is much broader. So too, civil organizations in state-nations may envy those in nation-states for the latter’s greater liberty of independent action and influence. Capitalist organizations recognize the benefits of direct government support for research under state-nation conditions, but also complain about state controls on the marketplace.
“Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they
wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 29).
Both frames for modern governmentalities are, to some extent, keyed to the desires of their citizenry (although this connection generally includes paternalist attempts at control over these desires). And, to the extent that these desires, however articulated, are met, then the frame may be considered to have succeeded. Today, both frames are increasingly linked to a “capitalist-production machine,” (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term) a mechanism increasingly global in scope. Of late, this machine has become more central to the articulation of lifestyle desires, desires that may run counter to existing or proposed state-nation or nation-state programs.
Both modes are not ever fully realized, but reflect plateaus where the tensions between the state and its population are resolvable. A universal command over the lives of its citizens is generally beyond the reach of even the strongest state, and so state-nations are only relatively state-centered. And, conversely, full independence from the state is not generally possible for civil-society organizations, and so nation-states are only relatively public-centered.
Several attempts at achieving a dual state-nation/nation-state: where the state behaves like a state-nation in terms of supplying social resources, but also acts like a nation-state in terms of economic and public-sphere issues have mostly failed, a failure seen as the result of the fluidity of capital in the global marketplace. “Liberal welfare states” use tax monies to provide state support for social services
20, but corporations and wealthy individuals can simply move away, or take their profit centers off-shore, and so pay few taxes, creating situation of chronic under-funding that eventually undermines the state.
“The fact that the welfare state becomes a focus of conflict as much as reducing it puts limits on the fiscal resources that can be generated to fund its services. ... The 'taxpayer's revolt' places limits on the resources governments can muster to pay for the welfare state in circumstances where they have to compete for marginal votes in the electoral system. This squeeze tends to get tighter rather than to relax. As levels of voter dealignment grow, the parties can rely less and less on their established supporters alone and have to capture those in the middle; a resistance develops to paying marginal rates of tax once broadly acceptable to those who carried the burden”
(Giddens 1994, 75-76).
In some countries, such as in Hungary, a history of state-nation modernity is being challenged by social movements in favor of a public-centered nation-state. Other countries hold a history of movement in the opposite direction—from a nation-state to a state-nation—as Germany did in the 1930s.
Most countries are still working within the founding situations of their own modernity, and it is important, when critiquing their current situation, not to direct an argument to this which lacks a purchase on the mode of modernity which holds sway locally. Now, the distinction between nation-states and state-nations does not correspond directly to any of the “classical” modern political discourses: left-right, liberal-conservative, socialist-capitalist, etc. Instead it points to the role of the state
21 and that of the public sphere within a nation as an outcome of a local, modern governmentality.
State-nation modernity
“Although he resigned in 1989 following charges of corruption, Takeshita’s brainchild, the
Furusato kon no kai (Spirit of Furusato Association) was adopted by the present (1989) prime minister, Kaifu Toshiki, as his personal advisory committee. Political factionalism aside, the LDP as a whole regards
furusato-zukuri as the means by which to forge a new ‘cultural state’ (
bunka kokka) in tandem with a ‘new Japanese-style welfare state’ (‘
Nihonsei no atarashii fukushi kokka’)”
(Robertson 1991, 26).
Japan, for example, is a place where a certain contour of modernity has been accomplished, a matrix of modernizations and reflexive institutionalities that in their combination assemble what might be called a “
state-nation modernity:” a modernity where agencies the state figure centrally in modernization and modern institutionalities. State-nation modernity occurs in nations in several parts of the world. It is one of the stable forms of modernity that have emerged in this century. Its basis is a strong, centralized government and a determined program of control over economic and social forms of life. For decades it has been the main form of the modern state for more than half of the population of the world. State-nation modernity is the outcome of decades of a nation’s state operating within the state-nation governmental frame.
I want to suggest that state-nation modernity has some primary contours, although these are more or less evident in any locale:
1. Strong central state control over or active management of the means of production within the nation;
2. Centralized governmental control over or management of health, education, cultural, and social programs;
3. Centralized control over local governmental agencies;
4. Centralized state control over or active management of mass media, particularly over broadcast media and newspapers;
5. A weak and ineffective public sphere either within or external to the state;
6. A court system dominated by the interests of the central state, and a strong national police.
“Conscious control means economic planning, which to be effective even in principle has to be largely centralized. In socialist theory, this forms a ‘cybernetic model’ of economic organization. The socialist economy (not the state, which disappears') is regulated through a 'higher order intelligence', the economic brain, which controls 'lower order' economic inputs and outputs. As one prominent author of the earlier part of the century put it, production and distribution will be regulated by 'the local, regional, or national commissars', who 'shape, with conscious foresight, the whole economic life of the communities of which they are the appointed representatives and leaders, in accordance with the needs of their members'
(Giddens 1994, 58).”
Most generally, we find a
strong centralized state that pursues a national state interest in the economy (through nationalized industries or through bureaucratic intervention
22), and an interest in providing for health care, education, and a variety of social resources, together with an interest in managing mass media and in using the justice and penal systems in the service of the state.
The weak public sphere may be seen as an outcome of the strong state, but is, I believe, more a primary feature of the relationship between the state and its population within the circumstances of state-nation modernity. As the state is the primary conduit for all decisions of public interest, other arenas become peripheralized.
The state that emerges within conditions of state-nation modernity uses its institutions to exert conscious control over the economic, cultural, and social lives of its population. This control has been characterized by Anthony Giddens (1994) on the model of a “cybernetic” organism, where the state is the mechanical brain, and the population its organic body. The notion of
Cybernetic governmentalities articulates the distance between the state and its polity, a distance that magnifies the power of the state to act upon its population, as the latter is fully objectified as a field of operation for the state.
“This politics of
The Prince, fictitious or otherwise, from which people sought to distance themselves, was characterized by one principle: for Machiavelli, it was alleged, the prince stood in a relation of singularity and externality, and thus of transcendence, to his principality. The prince acquires his principality by inheritance or conquest, but in any case he does not form part of it, he remains external to it”
(Foucault 1991, 89-90).
State-nations are countries where the state has not rejected the externality of the
sovereign state in favor of the internality of the democratic state. The state becomes positioned outside of the population. It announces its interests as those
of the population, and it proceeds on their behalf, but it is not subject to interrogation by or oversight from the population via the public sphere. This produces a weakened public sphere both within (e.g., in the instrumentalities of parliamentary discussions and decisions) and outside of the state.
All the democracy that fits
Given the widespread persistence of sovereign governmentalities (including colonial ones) up to this century, and the ready-made access to economic means that this form of governmentality provides to a ruling elite, it is really not surprising that subsequent, modern states have, on the whole, not embraced the internalization of power that would erode and replace this governmentality with that of an actually democratic state. The practical advantages of ruling under sovereign conditions are not obscure.
Varieties of “democracy” have thus emerged in many countries that are not actually supported from a democratic logic, but which offer a modicum of democracy
23 as a legitimizing feature both internally and externally. State-nations use the discourses of democracy to code their own practices, but in the form of an alibi, rather than a logic of practice.
“Japan’s experience demonstrates the insufficiency of equating democracy with the formal or nominal presence of certain institutions. The country is not a democracy in the Western sense”
(Herzog 1993, 18).
This opens up the states of state-nations to critiques of democracy as this is practiced by the state. However, an expectation of democracy in state-nations is not well-founded
as a critique of the state’s role in the state-nation. The same holds for expectations on an independent public sphere within state-nation modernity. What public discourse does take place in these circumstances is produced by or with the consent of the state, and so an independent public sphere is not an available option.
Critiques of local democracy acquire usefulness in the larger critique of modernity, that is, of the choice of the mode of modernity itself. Those who, like Herzog (1993), would argue that Japan is not a democracy, hold a misplaced expectation, given the state-nation modernity of which Japan is a well-formed example. But those who would critique Japan’s choice of state-nation modernity as the locally practiced mode can use notions of democracy to articulate alternative—nation-state style—modes of modernity.
democratizing Japan
The nation-state-style democratization of Japan would not only necessitate that the existing institutions (the constitution, the diet, etc.) operate as they now claim to do, but a more fundamental break from the state itself as the instrument of governmentality, and also a break from the paternalist governmentality that informs not only the state’s position vis-à-vis its population, but also relationships within corporations, factories, schools, and families.
In short, democratization, as this process is pursued and critiqued within and about nation-states, is an ongoing recoding of relationships at all levels of society, and, most importantly under capitalist economic systems, a recoding of the relationship between people and cultural objects.
A critique of democracy within a state-nation is thus an external critique of the persistence of the state-nation system of governmentality, and necessarily includes a counter-public critique of the lack of a public sphere as the forum where such discussions can take place. But here we have to also mention that critiques of democracy within nation-states have also led to the formation of state-nations, even where there already exists a public sphere and a civil society.
Where there is an pre-existing strong public sphere (such as in Germany before 1933), the movement toward state-nation modernity is characterized by a state rhetoric of “national interests” and an erosion of public sphere discourse as a means for decision making or oversight of the state. This erosion is coupled to state efforts in acquiring control over the media, which may be accomplished under the rationale of “protecting” national interests. Finally, the centralization of institutional powers provides the central state with the means to direct the economic and social lives of its citizens.
Where there not a pre-existing strong public sphere, such as in cases of direct transfer of power from a princely state (as in the Soviet Union, Iran, or Japan) or from a colonial state (as in Indonesia), or both (as in China), the emerging modern state might suddenly acquire an ability to speak on behalf of “the national interest” and a centralized state apparatus may already be in place. Under these circumstances, the notion of a strong public sphere or of active non-governmental organizations would only threaten the ability of the state to govern
24 in the manner in which it now operates.
With the collapse of communist regimes in Europe it may be tempting to typify the state-nation form of modernity by reference to these, and so to announce that this is no longer a viable alternative for local modernities anywhere in on the globe. However, state-nation modernity is still the most prevalent form of modernity on the globe, and it is nowhere more evident than in Asia. And in Asia, it is today not linked to the Titanic adventures of state socialism, but rather rides the tigers of Asian capitalism.
Japan is a reasonable example of a state within a state-nation modernity, and it demonstrates how this type of modernity can foster rapid industrial growth at a national level. By harnessing its control over the “national interests” of the population and corporations, central government planners in Japan created one of the world’s largest economies within a space of forty years. And much of this economic growth can be described as the outcome of this nation’s fostering its own state-nation modernity
25.
The consequences of state-nation modernity include a strong state with an enhanced capacity to direct the lives of individuals, and with the means to plan for and invest in economic and social programs of national scope, on the long term. Under these circumstances the public sphere is also “privatized” by the state (see also:
Private public sphere). And so we now see the growth of “state sponsored non-governmental organizations” in nations such as Malaysia. The state penetrates the lives of individuals and encompasses the arenas for social and cultural participation.
Such a state looks to legitimate its actions through the seamless appearance of its capability to plan for the future, and its own servitude to the national interests it articulates and promotes. Its legitimacy does not rest on the claims it might make as a democratic state. Although citizens in any state may not be aware of circumstances of democracy in other states, they can discern the contours of democracy in their nation and government, whatever the latter’s own claims. However, as the state becomes implicated in the goals it announces for national “progress,” a lack of democratic legitimacy reduces its ability to avoid the consequences of failures in its goals. But as long as these are attractive (or reasonable) and it subsequently meets them, it is not liable to critiques over its lack of democratic decision-making. Here, the state’s “sovereign” legitimacy hinges on a combination of evident benevolence, ultimate justice, and visible power.
The question of liberalism
State-nations and nation-states represent modal frames for local governmentalities, conditions that reflect the local relationship between the state and its polity. In nation-state modernity, the state has been internalized by the polity and reemerges as a government subject to what Foucault (1997) called “the question of liberalism:”
“...
liberalism resonates with the principle: ‘One always governs too much’—or, at any rate, one always must suspect that one governs too much. Governmentality should not be exercised without a ‘critique’ far more radical than a test of optimization. It should inquire not just as to the best (or least costly) means of achieving its effects but also concerning the possibility and even the lawfulness of its scheme for achieving effects. The suspicion that one always risks governing too much is inhabited by the question: Why, in fact, must one govern?”... Liberal thought starts not from the existence of the state, seeing in the government the means for attaining that end it would be for itself, but rather from society, which is in a complex relation of exteriority and interiority with respect to the state. Society, as both a precondition and a final end, is what enables one to no longer ask the question: How can one govern as much as possible and at the least possible cost? Instead, the question becomes: Why must one govern? In other words, what makes it necessary for there to be a government, and what ends should it pursue with regard to society in order to justify its existence? (74-75 emphasis added).
By viewing government as an unhappy compromise predicated upon the current failings of society, liberalism
26 imagines a society where the least amount of government is necessary, and looks to the practices that will realize this utopian vision.
liberalism and the nation-state
Looking at the history of liberalism in England, Germany, and the United States, Foucault notes that each case presents its own forms of liberalism, and local distinctions between the state and civil society. But in each case, the circumstances of the nation-state are evident. The presence of public-sphere institutions that are external to the state actually mark the state’s position as internal to the public.
The public sphere is what surrounds and subtends the state. Under these conditions, the state is not granted a controlling interest in the economy, nor in mass media, cultural production, or legal proceedings
27, etc.. These social practices might share the same techniques of government that the state uses (and this creates the problem of “governmentality” as a logic that is hegemonic among even counter-state organizations), but they are managed independently from the state.
In state-nations the state maintains an (earlier developed) external position to the polity. This is its founding condition, and remains the operational logic. Under these circumstances, the liberal question makes no sense. Society has already been equated with the nation, and the state has already acquired control of the “national interest.”
“The era of big government is over”
US President Bill Clinton in a State of the Union Address;
“The era of big, centralized government is over”
British Prime Minister Tony Blair
on the day of Scotland’s plebiscite authorizing a Scottish parliament.
It must be noted that state institutions within nation-states are not “weakened” because of the state’s lack of interest in controlling the economic, social, or cultural lives of its citizens. These states may seem “thin” compared to the “thicker” layer of state presence one finds everywhere in state-nations, and there may be whole areas of life where the state plays no role at all (a circumstance that persons accustomed to life in a state-nation may find difficult to imagine). But even the “thinnest” state today still maintains its monopoly over the means of violence, and it supports the nation’s legal infrastructure, collects its taxes, and usually shows some interest in economic matters, for example, monitoring the market’s ability to monopolize economic resources against the interests of the consumer public. (The state works to make rational and fair constraints on corporations, which, in turn, views these as onerous.)
It may be said that today several countries in Europe and North America are well within the description of nation-states, and that there is, in some other places, including Eastern Europe and Latin America, a movement toward this form of governmentality. This movement can be seen today in the collapse
28 of the welfare-state governmentalities that were the liberal-social varieties of state-nation modernity (e.g., “Thatcherism” in the United Kingdom), and in the growth of civil-society institutions and public-sphere arenas in former communist states.
But it can also be said that state-nation modernity is, in many places, a central feature of the circumstances of modernity, and that this seems to be at least as durable in these places as “nation-state modernity” (See: below) is in other states. In the People’s Republic of China, for example, despite changes in economic institutions, there has been little change of late in the desire of the central state to control the media, and to penetrate the lives of its population. Notions of a strong public sphere there are about as local as Coca-Cola.
nation-state modernity
Under the circumstances of nation-states, i.e., of a state where one finds a public sphere that is involved not only in discussion, but in actual decision making, one of the possible outcomes over the course of decades is a form of
nation-state modernity: a modernity where a strong public sphere, a state apparatus, and an independent marketplace confront each other in an open-ended contest where overall control is not possible or even desirable.
Where state-nation modernity may be described as conservative, as it maintains a prior “sovereign” governmentality, nation-state modernity—at its limit—is an experiment in working democracy. The latter places are marked in their formation by events (and today, by memorialized sites) of democratic resistance to absolute sovereign rule, although, as state socialism reminds us, this history is not sufficient to warrant an ensuing discourse of democracy. Nation-state modernity has the following general contours:
7. Weakened state control over or active management of the means of production within the nation;
8. Weakened central governmental control over or management of health, education, cultural, and social programs and active non-governmental organizations in these areas;
9. Decentralized decision making: local governmental agencies have more control over resources and programs;
10. Weakened state control over or active management of mass media—and so strong legal protections and social sentiments protecting the media from government control;
11. A relatively strong public sphere both within and external to the state;
12. A court system able to counter the interests of the state, and localized law-enforcement.
During the past hundred years several states have approached this mode of modernity, and others have abandoned it. National Socialism in Germany rejected this form of modernity in the 1930s in favor of state-nation modernity. The return of the king in Spain marked another move away from nation-state modernity. And welfare-state programs in nations of Europe and North America have tended to allow the state to penetrate the lives of citizens in much the same fashion as states under state-nation modernity. These modes are not fixed in any one locale and continue to inform and compete
29 with each other. Today, several countries are moving toward one or the other of the modal modernities. And so there is an international discourse that critiques both modes, however this has often failed to recognize them both as “modern.” Too often, state-nations have been seen as “pre-modern.”
The following illustrates the main tensions between state-nation and nation-state modernities:
State-nations, and debates over democracy
Like “the state”, “democracy” seems to be a universal feature of all nations today—either in its presence of absence, or both. Each nation on the global pursues, or refuses to pursue, democratic governmentalities in ways that are imbricated within histories of local practices. And so, definitions of “democracy” are debated locally in discourses that may not translate readily from nation to nation. For example, state-nations may promote forms of “democracy” that are fundamentally different from those of nation-states. This means that local demands for “democracy” within state-nations may have quite different goals than demands for “democracy” in nation-states.
Generally, calls for democratic reform in state-nations (coming from citizens or from politicians) are calls for reform
within the state, which range from a discourse of anti-corruption, to that of fairness in the state’s dealings with groups of citizens who feel unfairly excluded due to social or geographical circumstances. Farmers, for example, may feel that the state spends too many resources on the cities. These calls for reform are very similar in structure and tone to the kinds of petitions that groups under a monarchy might raise to the king. Rarely do calls for reform question the
position of the state within the nation.
Democratic reform movements in nation-states may also center on reforms within the state (corruption happens everywhere), but also include discourses concerning the very need for state intervention in certain arenas (e.g., regulating the internet). Again and again, the “liberal question” is raised. And here too, the final result may not be a petition to elected leaders, but a referendum that imposes the result of a debate from within the public sphere upon the state.
When analyzing democratic movements within state-nations, again, it is important to note first the position of the state within the goals of the movement. Social movements in nation-states may find their goals hampered by a lack of state controls, for example, controls over environmental conditions. These movements may then call for more state controls. Whereas social movements in state-nations may find that the state’s control over the condition in question is simple refractory to external pressures. But what are the available counter-strategies in these circumstances? Instead of calling for a decreased control by the state, a position that would suggest that the state is not legitimate, protest groups look to increase their visibility as supplicants to the state. This strategy only strengthens the state’s claims to legitimate control.
state-nation self-defined democracy
While the states of some state-nations, such as that of the People’s Republic of China, distance themselves from the very use of the term and the practice of “democracy;” others, such as that of Malaysia, critique the model of democracy derived from nation-states in the West as inappropriate for their (state-) nation; and then others, such as Japan, maintain a façade of Western-style democratic institutions without considering that these lose their democratic force when they are controlled entirely from within the state.
“... there is a very funny, peculiar feeling that if it is democracy, then you must be fighting each other. Otherwise, it is not democracy. But we happen to agree. That is also a choice. We have a choice to consciously agree or disagree. But the fact that we agree or the fact that in this country if we don't change government and parties at every election, is in itself, an expression of free choice. The choice not to change”
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
October 4, 1996
(Far Eastern Economic Review web site)
To reiterate, debates over democracy—and, oftentimes, over issues of human and civil “rights” and “freedoms,” issues that are historically linked to nation-state democracies in the West—need first to account for the
position of the state within state-nations. Only then can the debate move on to discursive strategies that would discursively “re-place” the state within the nation. While the states of state-nations may attempt to claim that they are the source of such rights and liberties, in practice, these rights and liberties must warranted as much by an external control over the state as they are by democratic institutions within the state. This condition on rights and liberties is an historical feature of the discourse’s founding within (Western) nation-states.
Here is where the liberal question becomes a fulcrum that might just re-place the state in state-nations. For this reason, most state-nations—including Japan, where the state runs several “human rights institutes”— tend to overcode (see also:
Overcoding, Coding, and Recoding) the state’s commitment to “preserving” human rights, although some state-nations, such as that of the People’s Republic of China, have simply dismissed the idea of civil rights as inappropriate for their locale.
Within a state-nation, counter-state discourses acquire the means to focus on issues of rights and freedoms (which are also linked to a public sphere operating outside of the state) by first asking the “liberal question” that Foucault noted was the origin of the modern (Western) break with the Princely governmentality—the question is: why do we need a state at all?
practice against the position of the state
Above, I noted that, to date, democratic nation-states all have sites that commemorate where counter-sovereign actions and discourses made a break with autocratic rule. This brings us to suspect that such actions and such places may be necessary for a public to appropriate the position of the state within a state-nation and lay the groundwork for a public sphere. Even where the break was not, initially, successful (as in Tienanmen Square, and in Kwangju, Korea), such actions may be integral to the success of counter-state discourse/practice. So too, the ongoing commemoration of prior democratic actions may be in part responsible for maintaining a strong public sphere. For all of its nods to rationality, modern democracy is also a bodily practice that begs for exercise and rehearsals, and, most of all, for performance.
Nation-state modernity may be also characterized by the regular attention paid to the act of achieving the ground of a strong public sphere, and, correspondingly, we can expect state-nation modernity to celebrate the
formation of the state as the basis for the nation. We can see here that modernities also reveal their primary modes in collective practices in the “theatres-of-the public:” in the streets of the cities, and in schools, as well as what happens in government chambers and corporate offices.
late modernity and the state
It may be useful to look at possible consequences which attend to either state-nation modernity or nation-state modernity under the conditions of what Giddens calls “late modernity”.
“In conditions of late modernity, we live 'in the world' in a different sense from previous eras of history. Everyone still continues to live a local life, and the constraints of the body ensure that all individuals, at every moment, are contextually situated in time and space. Yet the transformations of place, and the intrusion of distance into local activities, combined with the centrality of mediated experience, radically change what 'the world' actually is. This is so both on the level of the 'phenomenal world' of the individual and the general universe of social activity within which collective social life is enacted. Although everyone lives a local life, phenomenal worlds for the most part are truly global”
(Giddens 1991, 187).
One feature of this notion of late modernity is
the disappearance of the nation-state as the site of the construction of individual and group identities, lifestyles (see also
lifestyle and state-nation modernity), and social movements. As transnational flows of technologies, workers, tourists, ideas, and cultural artifacts increase, the arbitrary, political boundaries of nation-states lose cultural relevance. The state’s ability to restrict access to these flows becomes problematic, both because the transnational marketplace relentlessly seeks out local market outlets, and because isolation may have negative consequences for the local economy.
Under state-nation modernity, states rely on state-sponsored lifestyle programs coded as
national/natural to promote social
orthoposture and normalized social behaviors. But these now must compete with market-driven trans-national (and so “de-natured”) lifestyle inputs. Additionally, the emerging “free-market” global economy has been coded with the same “liberal question” that critiques the role of state governments to control national economies. The state’s control over prices and production is now recoded as “protectionist” and the lack of transparent decision-making by the state becomes liable to claims of “corruption.”
At the same time the global job market in cultural production draws talent from smaller, national markets to international cosmopolitan centers, creating a center-periphery circumstance that marginalizes nations where cultural production is managed (usually by the state) as being by and for a
national audience. National programs in media and the arts may fare poorly in competition against those produced by the new cosmopolitan centers. And global media are now in a position (e.g., through satellite broadcasting) to ensure that this competition occurs despite state controls on local media.
What I am suggesting is that the circumstances of late modernity hold greater consequences for states under state-nation modernity than they do for states under nation-state modernity, and that this differential is now being felt acutely in places like Japan and China.
In Japan, the state’s response has been to reassert a national character as one-among-many. In order to resist a future where individuals will look outside of Japan for cultural identity, the Japanese Government seeks to strengthen identity with Japanese culture—only this time, and ironically, in the name of “internationalization” (
kokusaika).
“In addition, what can also be thought of as something to be prized and transcending different periods of time, is the need, in the education systems of different countries, to get children to learn their own country's language, its history, traditions and culture, and to foster in them a spirit and state of mind that will treasure these things. In the case of Japan, we have an important duty to see that our children, the rising generation who are to bear the destiny of our country on their shoulders, become fully familiar with the beautiful Japanese language, study the history that has fashioned Japan as well as its leading artistic and cultural accomplishments, its literature, its folktales and its traditions, and as well as developing a state of mind that treasures these things, become able to relate them and see them as relevant to the present age in which we live...
In order to encourage zest for living in children in the context of steadily increasing internationalization and a further deepening of international interdependence, it can be seen as even more important than hitherto to educate ‘Japanese who can live in international society,’ trusted by the world, and to foster an attitude of respect for the culture and traditions of Japan as handed down from a continuous line of past generations” (MONBUSHO 1997).
This call for a renewed respect for the “culture and traditions of Japan” is made from a strategic position that assumes other nations are promoting the same national cultural goal, and so it fails to realize that transnational cultural notions—culture unbounded from states— are the real emerging “competition” for an increasingly globalized cultural imagination.
Nation-state modernities also face challenges under circumstances of late modernity. In particular, the ability of corporations to escape national legal systems (for example, the hiring of slave laborers in foreign countries) hampers the efforts of nation-based public-sphere organizations to use the agencies of state governments to monitor and constrain the market. Until the public sphere is seen as a global discourse, and civil-society organizations acquire international legal standings, international corporations will be able to escape local efforts to oversee their operations.
Neighborhood events
After years of reading about Japanese neighborhood festivals, and witnessing these in my travels throughout Japan in the 1980s, in mid-1992 I had moved into a Kyoto neighborhood that held one of these events, and, by that autumn, it's weekend was finally upon us
30.
Shinto festivals in Japan have played a prominent role in some recent urban ethnographies, from Ted Bestor's pathbreaking
Neighborhood Tokyo (1989) to Jennifer Robertson's landmark
Native and Newcomer (1991). Still, by far the greater literature on festivals exists in Japanese. Beginning with a period of burgeoning interest in local folklore at the turn of the century—an interest guided by the work of Japan's foremost scholar on this topic, Yanagita Kunio—many of the country's several thousand festivals (
matsuri) have received some sort of scholarly attention.
Although it is a momentary punctuation in the year’s activities, the festival illustrates many of the themes that suffuse Miyamoto-choo’s mundane social life throughout the year: the hierarchical structure of neighborhood groups and the egalitarian ethos that permeates many residents’ conceptions of the neighborhood; tensions between internal and external definitions of the community; Miyamoto-choo’s assertion of its identity and autonomy through local events and activities that are self-consciously seen as parts of the neighborhood’s evolving body of “tradition.” These themes manifest themselves in one form or another in all aspects of neighborhood life. But they are perhaps nowhere more clearly and coherently evident than in the annual festival for the Shinto tutelary deity.
(Bestor 1989, 225)
From local histories, to more analytic works,
matsuri literature in Japanese is truly volumnous, although, like works on
matsuri in English (and like works on ritual in any language) these invariably focus on the event's ceremonial activities and scripts, at the expense of any serious notice of the less-scripted actions that are also expected to occur. This means that we often have an extensive record of the ritual “scaffold” erected for and by an event, but a far less complete record of the event in its potential
performative complexity. It was my original task to explore these other, less recorded, aspects of festival production in Japan, by looking at one or more festivals in Kyoto.
I was originally encouraged by the great number of
matsuri events that happen every year, and by their self-professed position occupying the center of cultural production in Kyoto city (albeit in the absence of other modes—such as television and music— of cultural production).
our invitation
On the second Friday of October, the
chounikaichou (the head of the neighborhood association) poked his head into our house's
genkan (entry hall) and asked if my son would like to participate in the carrying of the
kodomo-omikoshi (children's portable shrine). I unhesitatingly volunteered my son's services, and took the child's costume that the fellow handed me, which included a headband, a happi-coat and belt, and a light brass bell that was to be attached to this belt. It would soon be time for the Awata Matsuri.
Awata Jinja
By that time, I had visited the nearby Awata Jinja (Awata shrine) on many occasions. Like other Shinto shrines in the area, it provides an open-space, park-like ambiance that is not easy to find in Kyoto. And, from its hill-side vantage point, I had watched the summer Obon fires
31 on the hills surrounding the city.
The view north-north-west from the Awata Jinja shows the Kitayama (northern mountains) that lie between Kyoto and the Eastern Sea (The Sea of Japan).
Awata Jinja's position at the Eastern entrance to Kyoto on a hill overlooking the old Tokaido road between Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo) lent it some prominence
32 in former times. But today it has a moribund feel about it. In part, this might be due to its location: wedged between the expansive, and still vibrant Yasaka Jinja, and the even larger (as a national marker) Hein Jingu (Heian Grand Shrine), where the spirits of the first and the last of Kyoto's resident emperors have been enshrined.
Awata Jinja
The Awata Jinja is nearly always quiet, and it lacks even a marriage facility. On any given day it might appear abandoned, and often when I strolled its grounds I met not a single other person. It is not until the week of the annual festival that one can sense its presence in the neighborhood.
The Awata Matsuri is an annual festival put on by the Awata Jinja, a Shinto shrine located about four-hundred yards from my house. All of the neighborhoods in its precincts gather contributions from their member (
ujiko) households for its operation, and some of these households also hold the right to set up temporary shrines where the main procession will pass by. In many ways, this small festival is a miniature of the city's one great festival: Gion
matsuri. Like Gion, the Awata Matsuri's traditional practice relies upon the availability of historic-period architecture. This is where my house (although not my household) became the focus of the neighborhood festival the second year of my stay in Kyoto.
The entire process of setting up the neighborhood display is guided not by some sense of religious or other meaning, but by the goal of reproducing the display according to a standard appearance, through the use of photographs. The duties were mostly divided between the adult men (who did the large construction and electrical work) and the women (who created the displays of fruit and nuts and did the fine work on the final display). Young adult men and young unmarried women did not involve themselves in this process.
The two-day festival includes some ceremonial and also entertainment events at the Awata Jinja, and it centers around a double procession: in the afternoon, a ceremonial halberd (
hoko) is processed, along with the shrine's
omikoshi, which was formerly carried by young men, but now sits on the back of a pick-up truck.
Here we see the shrine’s main
o-mikoshi (portable shrine) paraded through the shrine precincts on the back of a pick-up truck.
Later in the evening, another procession takes burning torches along the same route, as the main “ritual cleansing” aspect of the event.
Today, the main “cleansing” aspect of the event occurs when it is used as an alibi for neighborhoods to contribute volunteers to police some of the areas that are common to more than one chou (such as the riverbank of the creek (the Shirakawa) that runs through the district.
Our neighborhood kept a storehouse for the ceremonial fixtures in an overhead room between two houses. The expensive articles (the brocade and the halberd) were kept at the home of the chounaikaicho. (Image from the
Awata video I, available by request)
Each neighborhood hosts a children's portable shrine which is carried by children
33 to the main shrine
Posters are displayed to announce the main festival events at the Awata Shrine. This year, the classical festival music concert has been abandoned in favor of a karaoke event. (Image from the
Awata video I, available by request).
after being carried throughout the neighborhood.
This festival,
the annual district
undokai (sporting meet) and the summer's
Jizo-obon festival are events that include participation not only of children, but also of retired people (mostly women).
Old families and foreign visitors
In my neighborhood there are today only a couple of families who trace their residence back to pre-Meiji times, when the area was a precinct of a local branch of a Buddhist temple
34 with Imperial family connections. I will call these the two “old families” in the area. They still own many of the houses in this small neighborhood, and are the local landlords. There are a few more families that have many decades (and several generations) of residence, most of these have retail or service businesses in the area and own their houses. I will call these the “main” families of the neighborhood, as they are the most active in neighborhood affairs.
The large lantern stands are assembled by neighborhood men.(Image from the
Awata video I, available by request)
The rest of the neighborhood are relative “newcomers,” including a disproportionately large number (seven) of households of foreign residents, all of them from the United States or Europe.
Most of these, like myself, were living in Kyoto while they pursue academic
35 interests. There were no other (non-European) foreign residents in the neighborhood, or, if there were, they were passing as Japanese.
Only one of the foreigner-occupied households has been stable enough (this one also contains a Japanese spouse) to be admitted into the
chonaikai. The remainder of the foreign “contingent” are not included in either the deliberations nor the circular information that gets passed through the neighborhood.
At the same time that the neighborhoods were “dressing-up” for the festival, the Awata Shrine became a stage where the offerings of the precincts families were on conspicuous display. (Image from the
Awata Festival video II available by request).
One of the newcomers, whose family had lived in the neighborhood for more than thirty years, but whose ancestors originated not only from outside of the neighborhood, but from outside of Kyoto, once complained to me that “it takes five generations to get past the
genkan.” Admission to
genkan, the front hall where visitors and service people enter the house, does not signal status equality, while an invitation to come up into the house does.
Neighborhood women assemble the interior display stands in my livingroom, after the front wall has been removed. (From the
Awata Festival Video I, available by request).
This complaint fit into a mode of complaint that I often heard from Japanese who were not born in Kyoto—that old Kyoto families were emotionally “stingy” (
kechi) or arrogant
36. Some explained this to me as a consequence of the city's thousand-year role as the home of the emperor. “Position” in the old imperial city, the relative proximity of one's house to the imperial center, formed a loose socio-geographical hierarchy centered on the imperial palace. But then I could imagine that similar complaints about “old-timers” might occur anywhere that local tenure means as much as it does in Kyoto. To the many who are considered newcomers to Kyoto (basically anyone who moved in after WWII), this lingering aftertaste of aristocratic sentiment leaves them mis-placed and sometimes out of sorts.
A festival of forms
The people I spoke with from my neighborhood had very little information to offer on meaning of the content of the Awata Matsuri processions, except to point out that our neighborhood shrine contained a brocade that was noted for its beauty and antiquity. The inclusion of this brocade in a book about Kyoto brocades was celebrated by including a copy of the book in the display, along with the brocade.
The entire display is created to resemble master photographs of each detail. The form of the display is thus reconstructed every year. But the contents hold little meaning, and have become empty signifiers. And I sometimes wondered what would happen if they ever lost the book of photographs. (From the
Awata Festival Video I, available by request).
Where Bestor’s neighborhood used the event to demarcate its normally invisible boundaries within
shitamachi Tokyo, the boundaries of the Awata Jinja’s precincts are normally well-defined—to the west is one of Kyoto’s largest buraku areas behind sanjo-eki, the third-street train station. To the south are the temple grounds of Sanen’in and the enormous Chion’in, Maruyama koen, Kyoto’s largest public park (and a famous cherry blossom viewing spot in the spring), and the Yasaka shrine. To the east are the Higashiyama hills, and to the north is the civic plaza created when the 1894 eleven-hundred year City anniversary was held, and which now boasts the main art museum, modern art museum, zoo, library, concert hall, and the Heian Jingu.
This festival does provide the one time in the year when the boundaries of my own immediate neighborhood (
chou) are marked. The children’s
mikoshi parade goes down every street and alleyway to the edge of the
chou. And as the neighboring shrines—the Yasaka Shrine to the north and the Heian Shrine to the north—have festivals (Gion Matsuri and Jidai Matsuri) that are today appropriated as national civic spectacles, the Awata matsuri is the only local event that remains attached to a longer-term geographical place.
A syntax of obligation
The head of the
chounaikai had a copy of the program that the shrine prints every year which he read from to give me some idea of the event. But even this document failed to narrativize the event as having either a definite purpose (although the use of flaming torches in one of the processions is generally explained as a technique of purification) or an identifiable myth. The program provided a simple calendar of events, and space to acknowledge local donors.
What I am suggesting here is that the
meanings (a shared semantic load) provided by the event do not inform the main experience of it, rather, it is the events regular appearance, its syntax, that is most important. For example, I could not elicit a narrative story from any participant in my neighborhood. One volunteer at the shrine boasted that this festival is “
older than Gion matsuri,” and that it is always covered by the local television station (KTB). (The first claim was not supported by others at the site, and there was never any evidence of television crews at the shrine. ) This twin claim of antiquity and current media interest fronts the main dynamic for referents to this event: it is produced as a visible display of history. It is nostalgia packaged as tradition and sold to others.
Following photographs from previous years, the women complete the offerings for the display alter. Japanese persimmons (
kaki) and chestnuts are the primary displays. The work is tackled with general good spirits. There is no noticeable division among the crews. Older participants take on leadership roles without discussion. (From the
Awata Festival Video I, available by request).
The performance of the festival in my neighborhood, indeed, in my house as the locus of this event one year, seemed to be mainly focused outward, to fulfill an external expectation. To not do it, would be to abandon the neighborhood’s position in the larger shrine precinct. And abandoning one’s established position in Kyoto, where position is acquired through multiple generations of dutiful behavior, is not an acceptable option—even when this duty requires that the neighborhood rely upon the cooperation of a foreign resident.
Machiya as festival place
It was the second year of my residence in Kyoto when another person announced their presence in our genkan. This time is was a member of one of the two old families in the neighborhood, a relative of our landlord. She was there to request that we allow the neighborhood festival to use our front room for the ritual display that marks the neighborhood’s place in the shrine precinct.
Our living room has been transformed into an abode of the
kami (the god himself has been installed in the form of a folded paper object). For the next two days we will share our house with this display. At the end of the festival, there was some discussion about what to do with the kami. “
We probably shouldn’t toss it in the trash,” one woman observed, to the laughter of the others. “
I’ll take it back to the shrine,” another offered, solving the problem. (Video taken from the street) . (From the
Awata Festival Video I, available by request).
Again, as I had come to Kyoto to explore festivity, this request was entirely welcome, although it was also puzzling. For all of the literature I had read about
shinto festivals stressed the strict rules of ritual purity that any household serving as a locus of ritual activity would have to undergo.
The display at the Awata Shrine was not dissimilar to the displays set up at the main neighborhoods. In fact, uniformity of display and of practices, a feature that was not prominent among Shinto-Buddhist festivals in prior centuries, became the central feature of Shinto festival practice through the efforts of national reorganizations of Shinto shrines in the last 130 years. (From the
Awata Festival Video II, available by request).
To begin with, according to the literature on
matsuri,this should have been an honor extended with great care only to those families who had tendered long-term service to the shrine. And then the family, for the year before the festival, but with more attention in the weeks preceding it, would be required to avoid certain impure circumstances, such as the death of a family member. During the event, the family must be careful not to have women who are in childbirth or menses in the house. These various ritual obligations were described as central to the festival’s task of ritually purifying the shrine’s precincts.
The chounaikaichou was in charge of the construction of the festival display. But when I asked him for particulars about the history and meaning of the event, he could only suck air through his teeth and reply “
Saa...” (A local performative response when one does not know a reply). Later, he offered me a program.
“
Here is a map of the event,” he said.
None of these obligations were applied to my household. For it was not my household that the neighborhood was interested in, it was our house. “What is the meaning of this festival? What is its history?” Such questions raised only the intake of breath that signals a lack of an answer (or annoyance with the question). The head of the
chounaikai was summoned as he passed by, and he had the same response.
“We do it every year,” he said.
“We always do it without fail.” Later he came by to give me a copy of the program that is printed by the shrine (mostly to advertise those local companies and people who had donated the larger amounts).
“Here is a map of the event,” he said, “and here we are.”
With their own cries of “washoi, washoi” the children in our neighborhood (with some adult assistance) carried the children’s
mikoshi (portable shrine) to the boundaries of the neighborhood (
chou), and also to the shrine.
Notice that the older children, those above grade school age, do not participate, as they are busy with school work, and so parents also help to carry the
kodomomikoshi.
©1993 Anjali
It was for this reason that the relative of my landlord was standing in my
genkan making a polite request that we allow the neighborhood to use our house for this purpose.On that year, the other old houses in the neighborhood were all, for some reason, unavailable. And so, by default, the neighborhood turned to us. It was a request that I had already been coached to accept with equal or greater politeness. But I added my own enthusiasm to this acceptance. Indeed my only regret was that, on that year the neighborhood’s festival and the very first Higashi-kujo Madang were both taking place on the same day. After a year of misgivings, it seemed that my festival cup was finally running over.
When all the work was done, there was little left to do but sit back on benches in the street and sip sake and chat.
©1993 Anjali
Going by the book
I present scenes from my neighborhood’s participation in the Awata Matsuri to illustrate various qualities of event as these can be said to represent the social space of the neighborhood, and the expressive limits of cultural participation in that space.
When meeting in public, practices of polite deference are still maintained by older people. The continuation of these practices is one of the unintentional outcomes of events such as the Awata Matsuri, where formal occasions and formal dress provide interpersonal situations where such behaviors are required. The continuation of these formal circumstances on an annual basis increases the overall “formalization” of the street as a site place where micro-bodily control is expected.
©1993 Bruce Caron
The space that is described in the neighborhood by participation in the Awata Matsuri bears a useful resemblance to the social perceptions/positions of the families in the neighborhood. Distinctions based on length of residence, gender, age, and attachment to the volunteer lay organization of the Shrine are all displayed in this event, along with the positioning of the neighborhood as an integral part of the larger Shrine precincts.
The economics of the Awata Shrine also center on the festival and on the donations that the festival produces. But donations are also accepted as these are appropriate to the position of the household within the shrine’s long-time hierarchy, which maintains as a visible vestige the prestige of those households who were in upper class positions before modernization. To donate more than one should would be as ill-taken as to shirk one’s responsibility to donate as much as one has always done.
The currency for status improvement is not cash, but rather time. As decades pass, the fortunes of houses may decline and force them to neglect their position within this donation scheme. This creates an opening for other households to step up in the ranks. This situation also makes it difficult for the shrine to take advantage of newcomers who might have the economic means to make significant donations.
And so the situation at the Awata Shrine can best be described by a long duration (now a century or more) within which the ritual requirements and the economy of the shrine are slowly weakening, but are not subject to major reform. As an institution, the shrine resembles (as it annually reassembles) a social order that was fixed well before its current members were born. Newcomers to the shrine neighborhoods are kept outside of positions of ceremonial importance, and, as migration is increasing, the participant base for shrine events decreases. The annual festival of the shrine maintains as much of the display of prior events as possible, but it has lost nearly all of the performance and the meaning of this display.
The fragile performative conditions—the amount and the organization of public performance—of this neighborhood may not be very different from other Kyoto neighborhoods, although I would not care to generalize either to the region or to Japan. The many events in Kyoto that today claim to link the present to the area’s vaunted past share in this problematic: by preserving the formal aspects of events
at the expense of creative and performative openings, they find themselves in control of events that no longer serve as expressive openings for cultural practice.
Ours was one of the houses in the neighborhood that had been built in the nineteenth century, in the prevailing architectural style of the time. And so its front room had a front wall that could be removed, exposing the entire room to the street. It is a
machiya, a townhouse fronting the street, with three tatami-floored rooms in a row from front to back, an inner garden behind that, and a
benjo (toilet) at the very rear. Constructed of wood and paper (now glass in front and back), with reed mats for floors, hand-stuccoed walls, and a ceramic tile roof, it was always drafty (a small blessing in the hot summer), generally dark. Its front wall was acoustically transparent to the street, which ran directly in front with no sidewalk.
Preservation of
machiya housing is the key for historical management in Kyoto, according to the International Society to Save Kyoto. [http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/bigkarma/issk/issk-e.html]
In this scene from the ISSK website we see a machiya being torn down, opening up a tear in the local urban fabric.
Sitting in the middle room, one could hear quite plainly the hushed conversation of people walking in the street. And as I often practiced my Japanese aloud, I sometimes wondered what passersby would make of the sound of a voice repeating the same sentences over and over again.
The house was elegant in its design and construction, with a
tokonoma alcove framed in polished logs, a
horikotasu sunken seating place, where we spent most of the snowy winter around a low table, with our legs dangling in a pit where a heater warmed our toes under a quilted blanket. Best of all the house had a deep
ofuro bath, with its own noisy gas heater that took the frigid tap water to near boiling in less than half an hour. Here is where the aches of hours of filming festivals were soothed away.
With the lanterns out, and the place decorated, our house could have been back in the Edo period.
Having an
ofuro meant that our trips to the local public bath
37 were not as regular as they might have otherwise been, but every other week or so, my son and I would visit the bath to enjoy its various pools.
For most of its first century, our house had been occupied by families of craftspersons making cloisonné ware for export. By WWII, the house’s owners had abandoned artisan occupations for professional ones. But the original design of the house retained its multipurpose flexibility. Our house had been constructed so that its front room could be opened to display wares for sale. This meant that the house could also display the ritual items for the festival procession.
30 kone and kane: connections and money
Regular gift-giving is one of the practices that articulates this informal network of “personal relationships” (
jinmyaku). But gift giving in Kyoto exists within existing networks of institutional and familial connections, it is a medium that signals an active relationship of obligations, of which the gifts are merely tokens (although they may be rather expensive tokens, and at times—such as the New Year and mid-summer— the volume of gift exchanges may be considerable
38.) This means that those persons and families who are excluded from institutional connections (such as university or large corporate affiliations) cannot use gifting to enter into relationships of obligation. Although gift giving is seen as a practice that outsiders cannot perform correctly (as there are no correct reasons for outsiders to give gifts), this practice is not available as an official mode of national discourse. It is, however, integral to the local mode of state-nation governmentality that places top government officials—who are top-feeders on the gifting circuit—into a realm of economic security that has no relationship to their official salaries and perquisites. An entire gift economy elongates the vertical structure of the society, erecting pillars of social capital (with easy translations into cash) that attach to key positions in government/corporate hierarchy.
Where much of the gift giving in China (See: Yang 1994) seems to promote a
reciprocal relationship of personal obligation, in Japan this usually promotes client/patron relationships that, in official spheres, resembles bribery and corruption—particularly when these “personal” relationships are allowed between corporations and government offices. Indeed, in both nations the practices of gift-giving
39 may run counter to official, professional and bureaucratic standards and codes of ethics, but this hardly diminishes the scope of the practice. And there are also at times official acknowledgments of the practice as “customary.” Recent disclosures of these practices in South Korea have prompted the government there to decry the practice as the “Korean disease,” a social affliction that threatens economic growth.
In Japan, despite the token public prosecutions that always keep one or two politicians in the tabloids, the creation and care of personal connections to officaldom remains the chief social goal of most families. Here too is where the “outsider” status of Koreans is most keenly felt. Even those few who have the economic means to engage in active giving, lack the social capital to do so. And for the rest, when the favors are determined, they are confident these will not come their way. One of the third-generation Korean Madang organizers once compared his life to series of Sumo wrestling matches. “
I go out and do my best, but even when I throw the other guy, the judgement always goes against me.”
counting connections
“Isolation follows from the way in which the emergence of a bourgeoisie has been halted; from the way in which the middle class has been incorporated into the hierarchy of business firms; from the way in which the school system, rather than educating citizens for Japan, produces administrators and salarymen for predetermined levels of the System's hierarchies. All this is most clearly demonstrated by the phenomenon of the so-called 'returning youngsters' (
kikoku shijo) —Japanese children who have received an important part of their education abroad while their fathers were serving in overseas offices of their companies.”
(van Wolferen 1990, 431-432)
The realities of the reproduction of a privileged class in Japan through intermarriage and personal connections (
jinmyaku) with the “gate-keepers” in institutions, such as the elite national universities, are suspected by many, and perhaps most. Public outcries about scandals over entrance-exam fraud occur with some regularity in the newspapers. And the differential access of wealthy, well-placed
40 families to elite preparatory schools, often with automatic admission into elite “public” universities (until 1945 these were imperial universities) is not at all hidden. And the cultural economy of connections is nowhere as fully understood as it is at the bottom of the scheme—among Koreans and Japanese living in
buraku neighborhoods— and at the top, where, as van Wolferen notes, connections (
kone) mean everything:
“Connections are crucial to life in Japan at all levels of society. Success depends almost entirely on who one knows. Kone (a Japanised abbreviation of the English word 'connections') often provide the key to admission to desirable schools, and to finding good jobs. If one wants the best medical treatment, a special introduction to busy doctors is almost indispensable. Most Japanese are thoroughly indebted in this sense to numerous other Japanese, and others in turn are indebted to them; one of the main characteristics of Japanese life is an unremitting trade in favours.
In the upper levels of society, the kone multiply to form whole networks of special relationships. These may derive from one-time favours, school ties or shared experiences, or may involve intricate mutual back-scratching deals. They are referred to as jinmyaku -Jin meaning 'personal' and myaku a 'vein' such as is found in mineral deposits, so that jinmyaku means a vein, or web, of personal connections running through the fabric of society. Jinmyaku are much more widespread, and of incomparably greater importance, than old-boy networks in the West.
Among top bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen, marriage facilitates the building up of informal contacts with the élite. LDP politicians reinforce their positions by marrying the daughters of older, influential politicians, then match their own sons and daughters with the children of prosperous and influential businessmen. The resulting networks are known as keibatsu (family groupings through marriage). ...” (1990 109-110).
Kone (connections) and
kane (money) form the grease of social movement (up or down) that is, in many small and a few larger (through university admissions) ways open to most Japanese families, although this opening eludes Koreans and Japanese living in
buraku neighborhoods. Kyoto adds an additional feature—residential tenure—to the game of connections. As we will see in the organization of religious festivals, Kyoto maintains the privileges of its “old families” to the exclusion of newcomers, even newcomers with cash or fame.
Here I am introducing the notion of “heritage management” for two reasons: the first is that this process informs the city sponsored spectacles that claim to represent local cultural practices; and the second is that it also describes the field where cultural production, anthropology, and urban planning intersect—here is where local cultural practices, and theories of urban planning are reflexively commodified (usually by city/civic (chamber of commerce) for sale to tourists and residents.
“The generalizing tendency is inscribed in the very principle of the disposition to recognize legitimate works, a propensity and capacity to recognize their legitimacy and perceive them as worthy of admiration in themselves, which is inseparable from the capacity to recognize in them something already known, i.e., the stylistic traits appropriate to characterize them in their singularity (‘It’s a Rembrandt’ or even
‘It’s the Helmeted Man’) or as members of a class of works (‘It’s Impressionist’).”
(Bourdieu 1984, 25-26)
All of the issues surrounding the management of urban cultural authority, legitimacy, and taste are born in this process, and in the longer term, people’s life-styles and their bodies (
habitus) are also managed. The appropriation of the work of artists and artisans leads to the formation of schools of art, and the exclusion of the works of those not admitted into such schools. And in Kyoto there are various city, county, and civic art associations for every genre of artistic production, and each has its own exhibits and its own gate that can open up to the “right” person, and can shut out the rest. The creation of positions within the field of artistic production informs dispositions that are never fully discursified. But the institutional stakes within the market for authenticated tastes (and here, for “real-Kyoto” arts and artifacts) are visible and quantifiable—for example, one can easily look at what is put into cultural museums.
I want to argue that there are alternatives to this style of cultural management, alternatives that are advantageous to the continuing production of cultural works in a city, and that also create openings for novel and counter-productions. When heritage (
patrimoine) includes the ongoing “work” of art in the city; and when management engages the need to protect and enliven the plurality of urban cultural forms—then the city itself becomes a cultural work, a factory of local production that requires little management, and that creates and critiques its own tastes,
I will focus here on Kyoto, as the processes of heritage management were quite openly on display there during the time of my fieldwork
41 (1992-1994).
playing to the tourists
It is impossible to discuss Kyoto’s history and present circumstances without first addressing the realities of Kyoto’s tourist industry, and the effect that this has upon the city, its administration, and, most of all, its general economic future. In some ways, Kyoto has always been selling itself. For centuries the capital city, Kyoto was the locus of social and religious pilgrimages, and it sold its wares and pleasures to secular and sacerdotal aristocrats. Their patronage made Kyoto the center of a long and often remarkable cultural efflorescence.
In what follows, I do not want to even appear to belittle the artistic heritage of this city. But, the fortunes of Kyoto, which were not entirely good during the occupancy of the various emperors (the city was burned to the ground more than once) became much more problematic after the emperor Meiji moved to Tokyo.
In actual and symbolic terms, the creation of “Tokyo”—arguably the world’s most dynamic metropolitan center—has come at Kyoto’s direct expense. It was in adjusting to its reduced circumstances that Kyoto has made its share of planning mistakes. I do not intend to dwell on these mistakes, but will attempt, instead, bring certain social-scientific and urban-planning notions to the problems faced by Kyoto today.
Kyoto is a tourist town. By the city’s own count, about forty million tourists visit Kyoto every year, although this figure includes the annual tsunami (deluge) of school groups that peaks in the spring. To attract such hordes, Kyoto trades quite lucratively, if somewhat brazenly, on the longevity of its habitation.
Much of Kyoto’s early history has been rather recently reinvented (along with histories to be forgotten) to support the city’s contention that nothing essential here has changed. It takes, however, only a brief stay and a bit of looking around for even the most devout tourist—who, after all, has paid good money to revel in Kyoto’s antiquity—to arrive at just the opposite conclusion: here is a town where almost nothing is like it was before.
Valorizing the old capital
Kyoto sells itself as a kind of Rome on the Kamo river: a place where ancient dynasties flourished and fought (and fornicated), and, in the process, forged that rare “alloy” known as “elite culture.” Ever dwindling stocks of this stuff make up the mother-lode of Kyoto’s tourist drawing power. Kyoto spins less and less new “alloy” every year, and meanwhile, consumes itself in the process of pandering its historical image
42.
Out on the streets, the cultural vending machines (the tourist traps outside all of the historic sites) are all in place, but today “authentic” Kyoto-esque merchandise, old or new, are far too dear for the tourist trade. Only those arts that, in former eras, were refined to meet aristocratic appetites for glamour and style, are today touted as uniquely Kyoto-esque.
Kyoto’s famous goods: Kiyomizu pottery, Nishijin silk weaving, and hand-painted (
yuzen) kimono—are all now fantastically expensive. Upholding the standards, and the prices (and control over production and style) of these “aristocratic” artistic traditions also locks out novel and creative inputs. The local artistic community is trapped by the effects of ten centuries of this cultural “gentrification.” Meanwhile, the sightseer is offered mass-produced trinkets—the same James Dean towel and “Hello Kitty” coffee cups they could buy anywhere in Japan—as remembrances of their visit to “historic” Kyoto.
This sort of reverse bait-and-switch marketing (show them the good stuff and then sell them kitsch) actually proves the deepest anxiety of the Kyoto tourist industry: the fear that authenticity—real places, real history, real pottery—might now longer matter to the tourist. When tradition becomes only a come-on for the hotel trade, then Kyoto is forced to compete with every other tourist destination in Japan on something like equal terms. The irony here is that Kyoto is also guilty of sacrificing “tradition” for image. As David Harvey noted, the substitution of a city’s image for actual historical continuity places cities, like Kyoto, in the same business as theme parks.
“...The irony is that tradition is now often preserved by being commodified and marketed as such. The search for roots ends up at worst being produced and marketed as an image, as a simulacrum or pastiche (imitation communities constructed to evoke images of some folksy past, the fabric of traditional working-class communities being taken over by an urban gentry)....At best, historical tradition is reorganized as a museum culture, not necessarily of high modernist art, but of local history, of local production, of how things once upon a time were made, sold, consumed, and integrated into a long-lost and often romanticized daily life (one from which all trace of oppressive social relations may be expunged). Through the presentation of a partially illusory past it becomes possible to signify something of local identity and perhaps to do it profitably.”
In this decade, in Wakayama and Toba city (both within a few hours by fast train from Kyoto) new “historical” theme parks have opened their gates to the public.
Porto Europa and Shima Spain Village both offer a complete, “historical” experience, from the cobblestones underfoot, to the banners on the turrets overhead; a simulacrum of places long ago and far away, and with convenient hotels and thrill rides for the young. The latter expects to draw three million visitors a year. The “eighteenth century” Porto Europa is being built on a new island, which means that not even the land was there in the eighteenth century.
Managing the new/old Kyoto
As the home of the secretariat of the Conference of World Historical Cities, Kyoto has sponsored a network of cities with a similar problematic in front of them all: how does an “historical city” recreate its past as a project for its future? And how does it develop its own history to open up new avenues of cultural production for its city-zenry?
The most interesting input to the 4th World Conference of Historical Cities, held in 1994 in Kyoto, came from Kraków, Poland. The International Cultural Centre in Kraków has described a project now called “heritage management, ” which takes historical-city urban planning beyond the preservation and conservation of existing historical sites, to the integrative reconstruction of the urban landscape as an ongoing work of history.
The tasks involved in heritage management are multiple and complex, dealing as they do with inventories of ideologically supported national cultural historical symbolism as well as valuable real estate. And nowhere are national symbols and real estate more highly valued than they are in Kyoto.
Heritage management requires that the physical and mental landscape of places and ideas be opened up to a reflexive imagination. The heritage of any city is a pluralistic one, and the future of this belongs to all of residents of the city. So it is important that heritage management is done transparently, in a democratically determined arena where conflicting ideas are available and where the outcome remembers this conflict.
Whether or not there is the political will and the public financing necessary to accomplish the physical tasks of heritage management is a large question.
As a recent issue of
Kenchiku Bunka [Modern Culture] (February 1994) reveals, there is no lack of informed concern and design skills available locally to accomplish the physical/design end of the project. It is on the other end of the task, on the cultural/symbolic side of heritage management, where there is need for new approaches if Kyoto is going to escape becoming a mere simulacrum of itself. There is, for example, a real issue in determining just how much “historicity” is good for the present.
What is historicity? To begin with, it is the living continuity of practices through time.
What is historicity? To begin with, it is the living continuity of practices through time. Historicity resides only thinly in the stones of the streets, the tiled temple roofs, and the screened windows of the remaining old houses in Kyoto. It dwells more deeply, and precariously, in the chorus of the feet that walk these streets, in the hands that build the screens, and the mouths that chant beneath these tiled roofs. If we use “historicity” in this sense of practices or places with continuity
43 to the present, we can leave other types of urban history to paleontologists and curators.
Any city desiring to preserve its historicity must find some mode of dealing with its various histories.
Any city desiring to preserve its historicity must find some mode of dealing with its various histories. The problem is to bring a healthy coherence to this deal. As Michel de Certeau, surveying Manhattan from the top a skyscraper noted;
“Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding.” (1984, 91)
For de Certeau, Rome is a city content to built upon its own history, while New York represents not only the modern impulse to build, but the modernist impulse to dismantle its past in the process.
de Certeau’s comment about the difference between New York and Rome applies internally and paradoxically to Kyoto, a city in the process of dismantling itself in the name of tradition. The outcome of this irreconcilable conflict in civic intention is that Kyoto is neither Rome nor New York, nor, eventually even Kyoto, as what it dismantles is not replaced by a conscious will to build. Kyoto is rapidly becoming simply another suburb of Osaka, a place that will, if conditions continue, be known mainly for its proximity to Nara
44.
Kyoto, as much as other historical cities, should know that simple age
45 does not make for historical interest. It is the living continuity of the past in the present which gives the present its tenuous hold on the long beard of history. So too, it is the grasping of the present for the future that determines the arena of cultural fashion.
But Kyoto seems confounded by the conflicting desire to be both completely traditional and also
au courant. Or rather, one notices a concern that “tradition” and “fashion” (or innovation) have become mutually exclusive markets, and that all of Kyoto’s cultural eggs are most precariously perched in only one of these baskets. Precarious, because tradition itself is no longer treated with the measure of “traditional” respect that Kyoto had grown to enjoy.
In Kyoto the present and the past are never on very good terms. We have to consider that a major problem for Kyoto’s desire to maintain its historicity is directly due to the modernist impulse to reject history and tradition as the primary warrants for the value of practices and places in general. And so, for Kyoto to preserve the heritage of its past, it must first come to some decision about the nature of its present.
The supermarket of the present
The present found at any place is an outcome of that place’s past, and so these are all singularly different. The existence of local varieties of “the present” once provided the charms of travel (and thus, tourism) and the central project of anthropology: to explore—and commodify—this plurality
46.
Where formerly “a present” held its geographical singularity on a basically local scale (much the same way that “local time” once ruled the clocks), there is now “the present,” a new place/time available on a much more distanciated scale. This is the present of CNN and MTV, and of currency markets, the great urban metropolises (now linked by digital information nets and standardized construction codes), and globalized consumer commodity desires.
As Gavatri Spivak once noted, there are still places and peoples on the margins, and sometimes increasingly so, of this global cosmopolitan network. In Kyoto the desire to belong to a globally validated life-style is very strong. And the more this desire grows, the more it preempts locally validated cultural production. Buying in to the global present requires opting out of purely local cultural critiques.
The point here is that heritage management is extremely problematic in the context of a modernizing global present. To preserve historicity one must protect the value of local historic practices for people today. But you also have to accept that antiquity has precious little exchange value in the global supermarket of our common present. And so, if the task of preserving history is not simply to be handed over to those who would profit from establishing a market for local antique wares (i.e., to the museums and collectors) then we need to find some other reason to value the past as a local property.
Historical legitimacy and cultural value
Additionally, the wider historical problem we are faced with is actually quite the reverse of what we have proposed; it asks us to following: how do we escape those histories that seem to plague us? Histories of totalitarianism, of intolerant nationalism, of official cruelty, of war and genocide; and the smaller histories of families which holds their own violences. How can we expunge these from the present in a manner that does not invite their eventual resurrection in the future (even if, as Marx noted, this comes as farce)? How can the present strengthen its grip on the beard of the past while loosening history’s fingers from its own hair?
The desire to simply forget, when history makes us uncomfortable, is a desire to avoid justice, to skip out when the bill comes due (it is the desire that
someone else will forget). It was Henri Lefevbre who noted, “silence is not the same thing as quietus.” Keeping quiet about this has never once resolved a history of oppression. For this history, as Connerton (1989) [after Foucault and Bourdieu] reminds us, is inscribed in language and space, and embodied in flesh and stone.
In short, there are plenty of “traditions” around us that we might not want to preserve, and we have to have a way of disentangling these from those we do. The modern distrust of “tradition” as a blanket warrant for the value of practices makes all histories (including its own) subject to devaluation. This opens up an arena for the discussion of historical legitimacy and innovative intervention. It reminds us that the mere continuity of any practice does not signify its legitimacy. Finally, the main advantage of heritage management as a practice is lost if we are simply, and without recourse to critical intervention, stuck with all the history we’ve inherited. If that were so, I would be the first to say bring in the bulldozers.
To create the kind of historicity that the future might want as its past, we have to dance on the grave of injustice. And for this we have to re-place the sites of oppression. Such sites are not always memorialized on the ground somewhere (not even by their forgetting). This is because oppression also is carried in the body, the person: i.e., its subject. Preserving the heritage of Kyoto’s historicity matters little if this does not create a new personal heritage for all of Kyoto’s city-zens. In fact, heritage preservation, at its best, offers a space of therapy, of person-place identity, of continuity, of selfhood.
Spaces that work
One could, of course, assert that every Kyoto institution, practice, and object has its own history, and that these are intertwined into larger flows with durative episodes and also ruptures, and, finally that some even larger matrix contains the sum of what we could call Kyoto’s “history.” However, when the time comes to consider heritage management, it does not help us much to note that everything is, in this way, historical and connected to everything else. Kyoto's city-zens need a much firmer grasp on history. In fact, we require a grip somewhat stronger than the one history has on us, if we are going to begin to manage Kyoto’s heritage.
Heritage management must sort out what to manage and what to leave to its own future. For this, it uses historicity as a theoretic-practical lever to pull from the historical field those practices and institutions that have (or that we want to have) cultural/economic value in the present, and to examine the reasons why value exists or, conversely, why practices that once had value have lost this.
Adding value
This use of historicity engages heritage management in the larger power arena of cultural production, valuation, and consumption. Here is where heritage management decisions will ultimately succeed or fail. Heritage management proposes to add value to the cultural assets of a city. It can do this in either (or both) of two ways: by legitimating the antique value of the thing being managed, or by adding value its current manufacture. The former, antiquarian, impulse—the desire to produce monuments, historical parks, and museums—is generally (mis)taken as the main strategy for heritage management. And in Japan, where new building construction is viewed as a type of urban panacea, this impulse is particularly attractive to city leaders.
Rather, I want to suggest here that heritage management should look first to support practices which unify the place and its past with its everyday life in the present. This unity signals the active resonance a place has with its history.
As Henri Lefevbre noted, nowhere is this unity more evident than in Venice, Italy:
“Venice, more than any other place, bears witness to the existence, from the sixteenth century on, of a unitary code or common language of the city. This unity goes deeper, and in a sense higher, than the spectacle Venice offers the tourist. It combines the city's reality with its ideality, embracing the practical, the symbolic and the imaginary....Here everyday life and its functions are coextensive with, and utterly transformed by, a theatricality as sophisticated as it is unsought, a sort of involuntary mise-en-scène. There is even a touch of madness added for good measure (1991, 73-74).”
The space of Venice is still being reworked as a vital cultural matrix for the lives of its inhabitants; Venice is a live performance where the curtain never comes down. Lefevbre is setting up Venice in contrast to other cities where, regrettably, the show has already closed for the season.
Lefevbre’s radical critique of modern notions of “space” is useful in determining the proper arena for heritage management. For Lefevbre, a space is either the result of production or the result of work. “Production” refers to a process of marshaling labour and other resources, and the making of a “product.” Products (from VCRs to skyscrapers) share a common history as they are all outcomes of this production process.
making products instead of works
The scope of
production has greatly enlarged in the last two hundred years to include not only household appliances and vehicles but streets, houses, office and municipal buildings and their sitings. Entire cities are now produced (e.g., Chandigar or Brazilia). And spatial production extends across the landscape in the form of highways and railways.
In a city, there are two possible types of spaces: the space-as-product
47 and the space-as-work. A space-as-product dominates the imagination. It announces itself completely. A space-as-product is not lived, but only used—and used in ways determined solely by the product. Museums and historical monuments transform all of their visitors into tourists. And cities that manage their own urban spaces as historical sites turn their own residents into tourists, who, like the residents of Kyoto (and Japan—although not foreign tourists) wishing to visit to Old Kyoto Imperial Palace, who must wait for that one day a year when the gates open and the guards are ready to make sure that nobody gets too close to the woodwork.
Lives and Works
For Lefevbre, “work” maintains its singularity, and its outcomes, such as “works of art,” are never actually finished. An artist (or a worker, in Lefevbre's sense) always has the right to redo a work and change this. However, works also become products, individually when they are sold, and as an opus, on the day their worker/artist dies. If these products maintain their market, they will gain value as antiques.
A space-as-work is a site of ongoing creations, interventions and appropriations. It is an affirmatively anti-antique space, full of surprises and open to change. The “village square” in many different societies is (or, too often, was) such a space-as-work. Through it flows a panoply of festivals, markets, executions, rallies, and games.
A space-as-work is the outcome of a spatial logic that refuses to be reduced to a single dominant use. A space-as-work is not definable as the square, or the street, or the building itself, but rather it includes the daily life of these. A space-as-work opens itself up to the imaginations of individuals who enter this. This effect, of course, requires some careful upfront design-work.
From Bauhaus to Maihômu
Modernist architects in the beginning of the century attempted to release the imaginations of those who live or work in their buildings by freeing their designs from static canons of ornamentation, scale, and construction. However, the proliferation of modern architectural products—those countless buildings in every city in the world (including Kyoto) that were constructed without serious architectural intent—heralded the failure of modern architecture (at least in its “international style” mode). Whether this was a failure to adequately articulate its own logic of design, or a more radical defect in this logic, is still being debated.
Instead of “less is more,” (a modernist credo) the world has discovered that “less” regularly means exactly that. And cities that settled for less are now saddled with it: hulking drab cubes with vacuous open floor plans and façades worth not even a first glance. These spaces-as-products, excreted from the same modernist design process, make up the great majority of post-war construction in Kyoto. By their graceless presence, and their lack of historicity, they are destroying the living unity of Kyoto.
The design task of heritage management is to utilize local spatial logics and vernacular construction skills to repair or rebuild buildings-, streets-, neighborhoods-, and cities-as-works that are lived, that are theatrical and festive. A city where people want will want to live, work and play. A place, in fact, much too good for tourists (which makes it that much more attractive to them).
The limits of cultural planning
Before getting to more specific ideas about heritage management in Kyoto, there is one caveat that needs to be aired. A central predicament of urban planning is as follows: planning, because it is “product oriented,” produces cities that are products rather than “works.” The more that planners attempt to create a total environment, the more that their plans become totalizing: closed to further creative appropriation of the spaces so planned—and the more the city becomes a product, which is similar to other products, to other cities. In terms of historicity, this means the more a space is planned, the more it acquires the history of the planners and less it can maintain any
sui generis local historicity. This limit to planning will become much clearer when we talk about festivals, but it applies just as well to buildings and parks as to parades (See also:
Imagine the festival as a building.).
Good urban planning is intentionally partial. It provides the seed that starts the life of a city-as-work. This germinal effort must plan-in a load of complexity, ambiguity and, perhaps, even a little madness, as surprises for those who will live with these spaces throughout their lives. After all, any culture that does not delight its owners is better off forgotten. And so, heritage management must relinquish the desire to create a turn-key heritage landscape.
Festivity — laissez les bons temps rouler!
Here we have the final challenge for heritage management: how to conserve the performances of a local culture. Again, the tendency (in Kyoto and other “historic cities”) has been to treat all cultural performances as ritual dramas, and to repeat these, as much as possible, precisely as they were done the time before. In this way, performance becomes a product, separated from its initial creative inception, and its space-as-product is but a dark, cold sarcophagus.
Every year in Kyoto, this sarcophagus is opened and the corpse of some former cultural work (now a helpless antique) is made to dance the very same ritual dance it has staged for far too many years. They call this event “Jidai Matsuri” or “Aoi Matsuri” (the two are, at times, as indistinguishable as they are undistinguished). Then the costumed body is sealed back up for another year. The tourists are sold on the authentic antiquity of what they are shown, which only serves to make them embarrassed by their own yawns.
The boredom of onlookers who wait through traffic interruptions and other delays to watch the spectacle of Kyoto’s biggest festival, Gion Matsuri, is a sad commentary on an event with a history of active festivity. Depictions of this event in prior times (the Edo period) show clowns and dancers engaging the onlookers who are themselves in danger of being in the path of the giant
yamaboko floats.
photo by author
The festival-as-product can never improve on itself, it can only fail (a horse throws its rider, a costume is worn backwards, someone forgets to light the sacred fire).
Today, many of the participants of the Gion Matsuri perform their stylized roles with barely concealed boredom.
Photo by author
Instead of laughter, such an event comes loaded with excuses (it was raining, the sound tape broke, they don’t make’ em like they used to). But then, a festival-as-product is not actually a festival. A festival-as-product begs the question: “Are we having fun yet?” The answer, as you already know, is this: “Not if you have to ask.”
Vital signs
As I noted in relation to its repertoire of neighborhood festivals above, overall, the civic festivals in Kyoto suffer from what might not inaccurately (if perhaps too glibly) be called “cultural sclerosis,” caused by a hardening of the artistry which once created the events. The major civic historical festivals of Kyoto (the Aoi Matsuri in May, the Gion Matsuri in July, and the Jidai Matsuri in October) are mostly well supported and competently managed, in the sense that they begin and end on time and look nearly the same as the did last year. And with some more careful looking the amount of artistry that went into an earlier construction of these events becomes evident in their costumes and appurtenances.
Indeed, with all of this activity and splendor it is even more curious, and rather sad, to note how completely many of these historical festivals fail to exhibit either historicity or festivity. Given the resources currently made available for festivity in Kyoto, there is little reason to be pessimistic about the potential for Kyoto to reinvigorate its festival production. All this would take is some new creative imagination.
All production and no play
What Kyoto’s planners lack (and this lack is widely shared among urban and civic planners in other cities around the world) is an adequate grasp of some rather fundamental predicaments of historicity and festivity. The concept of “historicity” is far too often confused with “antique value,” even though these are roughly antithetical. So to, the notion of “festivity” is often confused with its “spectacular” appearance. As if looking festive was enough.
These two mistakes are often combined into events called “historical festivals,” but which are, actually, “antiquarian spectacles:” pageants-as-products. I would suggest that festivity is related to its spectacle component much as a good meal is to its written recipe. There is an undeniable connection between the two, but which would you rather find on your plate?
In precisely the same way that a good cook and a great recipe work together to produce something awfully tasty, the city space and its community need to work in concert to make a festival “festive.” It is the transformation of physical and social space during this work that gives festivity something to do. That makes festivity worth the attempt. Later in Part Two I will be focusing on festivity itself, here I will simply mark out some performative parameters that define “festivity.” From these, we can begin to notice where this does not occur, might occur, should occur (but doesn’t), and, most of all, probably will occur any time now. We can, within certain limits, begin to plan for festivity.
In
The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald noticed that, during a party (any good one) there is a special moment when the party actually begins, despite the minutes or hours before this moment when people were also dancing, drinking, and laughing. At that moment a transformation occurs, a boundary is crossed. Gatsby’s town is, of course, Hollywood:
“The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.”
Erving Goffman in his book
Frame Analysis (1974, 262) used this quote to note how events such as parties (and here I would certainly include festivals) are planable only to a certain level, after which the organizers can only hope that their event, like an inspired infant, takes it to mind to stand up on its own and begin to boogie.
New suggestions for heritage management
In a special “1200th Anniversary” edition of the
Kyoto Journal, I suggested the briefest of outlines of a basic plan for city-wide heritage management in Kyoto. I also convinced the
Kyoto Journal to allow me to approach the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, to ask its students to participate in a design project centered on a reexamination of the Kyoto Gosho—the site of the Imperial Palace before the Emperor moved to Tokyo. Here is the outline I suggested in 1994:
At the physical end of the task, heritage management must come down to the street level, to those remaining buildings and sites of any antiquity in Kyoto. The following plan represents the least intervention sufficient to reconstruct an historic living urban physical landscape for Kyoto.
As with any preservation scenario, this one starts with a moratorium on the destruction of buildings older than, say, seventy years in Kyoto’s downtown wards (Kamigyo, Nakagyo, and Shimogyo) and the conservation of these structures. But the more interesting task comes in the re-imagining and realization of the Kyoto streetscape itself as an historical site. Architectural review using a vocabulary of historically grounded design parameters needs to be instituted for all new construction. Finally the reconstruction of a contiguous street façade based upon some agreed upon historical period will require the condemning and demolition of some modern buildings.
Historicity Pathways
Kyoto deserves to be strolled through; to retell its own stories in the echoing footsteps of the casual pedestrian. This is its true scale and rightful future. The major emphasis for heritage management should be the creation of pathways through the city. A selection should first be made of certain avenues that will serve as historically conserved pathways connecting cultural, retail, and commercial nodes. Along these historicity-pathways actual period (wooden construction) buildings could be assembled, having been moved from their current sites in and out of the city. Fortunately, the typical Edo-period city-house (machiya) is relatively easy to move and reassemble. The control of auto traffic and other measures designed to enhance the experience of these pathways, including the retail mix, will need to be determined in consultation with the people who will live on these streets.
The historicity-pathways should be managed as social and cultural residential/retail cooperatives, and used to attract a variety of artists into the city. This will help stimulate a creative mixture of art forms that have long local traditions, together with others that might inform new traditions. Some of these houses should also be made available to those city-zens of Kyoto who are now living in areas of the town that are subject to Japan’s unique form of residential racism. To reduce the effects of gentrification, these properties should be held as a public trust, with managed rents and careful attention to their conservation.
Still other sites need to be looked at to provide civic spaces for recreation and cultural production in addition to their value as historical places. And there is a need for hundreds of small-scale projects each aimed at enhancing a corner here, a building there, or a river course, in order to articulate the pluralistic desires and histories of individual neighborhoods. There it is, at its most programmatic level: a basic plan to jumpstart Kyoto's heritage management effort. But where to actually begin?
Central Park Kyoto
In Kyoto, the central space that most needs rethinking is the Gosho, the grounds of the Old Kyoto Imperial Palace, which is geographically and culturally the central place of the city, and should be opened up for multiple uses by the local residents. The Kyoto Journal is proposing a redesign project for the site of the Old Kyoto Imperial Palace (the Kyoto Gosho). This project, called “Central Park Kyoto,” will improve the economic and cultural value of the site in several ways, while returning this (or much of it) to all the city-zens of Kyoto.
The current Kyoto Gosho buildings and grounds are neither very old (by Kyoto’s standards), nor very interesting in terms of their political history. This palace was mainly occupied during the time of political rule by various Shoguns. Japan’s real “capital” during this period was Niji Castle and later Edo Castle. At the time of the Meiji Restoration, the Kyoto Gosho was hastily abandoned in favor of the Edo (Tokyo) palace. The various existing buildings and their furnishings—which are absolutely worth saving—would be carefully moved and rebuilt (perhaps on the site of the Tokyo Palace or on the grounds of Nijo Castle). One might note that Kyoto also has a long history of such re-sitings.
The current realities of the absence of the Emperor from Kyoto, and the new democratic political system of Japan, have turned this cultural work into another antique—into a product of history. Without the actual august personage in residence (and with the purse to make the cultural performances roll) the palace is only another period-style building. But the Gosho site, by its scale and geography, and its connection with the history of the imperial court, lies close to Kyoto’s heart. It is a mirror of the city’s self-image. And so the Gosho will be the centerpiece for any heritage management in Kyoto.
To explore the potential for redesigning the Gosho, the
Kyoto Journal enlisted the help of graduate students of the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. In its proposal, the
Kyoto Journal outlined the project in this way:
“The task for your students would be to redesign the Kyoto Imperial Palace grounds to emphasize multiple uses for this site...: [1] a new residence built to accommodate members of the imperial family...; [2] a public historical monument to the imperial history of Kyoto; and [3] a “central park” for Kyoto with maximal open space, and which is connected to the surrounding residential and business districts.”
The intention is to add value to this site for use by the city
and the city-zens of Kyoto.
32 Institutional reflexivity
Giddens proposes that (post-traditional) late modernity can be described as a period of increasing
institutional reflexivity, combined with a high level of individual reflexivity (e.g., in relations with expert systems). This increase is proposed in comparison to earlier modernity: not to pre-modernity. The relatively low level of individual reflexivity evidenced in early (“classical”) modernity was not a hold-over from earlier, traditional times, despite the popular perception of “tradition” as inflexible and intolerant to change—this perception describes, at most, the conditions of some traditional practices after these were subject to modern (and modernizing) discourses.
Here I would have to agree with Habermas and Bakhtin (in one of the few issues where they agreed with one another) that we need to find a way to look historically at the lifeworld before this was penetrated by the systems of modernity if we are to find how traditional practices
48 created normalcy in everyday life.
“...it is usually the case that normal appearances, typical appearances, and proper appearances are much the same,...
...impropriety on the part of others may function as an alarming sign. ...;conventional courtesies are seen as mere convention, but non-performance can cause alarm”
(Goffman 1971, 240-241).
It is sufficient here to suggest that normalcy in pre-modern times included a number of necessary skills, which, because they were skills, allowed people to become more or less skill-full—based on their own initiative and talent. These skills opened up normalcy to the individual capacity for innovation and caprice. Both Giddens and Habermas see subsequent, modern, conditions of the
Umwelt as characterized by a general trend of deskilling. While Marxists have looked mainly at deskilling in the arena of what Giddens called “allocative power,” e.g., in the means of production (including, as Bourdieu would remind us, cultural production), cultural theorists, often led by feminist theorists, are exploring deskilling in “authoritative powers”: particularly in the reflexive reappropriation of these, i.e., the power to become one’s own author.
Similar to conditions that Willis (1977) recorded in England, there are two exit criteria which junior-high school students in Japan face, and that play into their desire to monitor their own behavior in schools. Those students who are preparing for university entrance must work toward the examination, and also be aware that their general behavior is being monitored and recorded by their teachers on reports that they will never see, but will be made available to high-schools and colleges. For these students demeanor and performance requirements are quite severe.
Other students who are not preparing for selection into universities have less of a need to conform to the codes of correct behavior, and are freer to explore work-place style behaviors that may include a necessary show of toughness
49. They are, in Willis’s terms, “learning to labor.” In Higashi-kujo, where there is a higher percentage of day labor (
hiyatoi roudou), and where the daily tussle for work requires the maintenance of a physical presence among one’s fellows, toughness is just a part of the résumé.
“Where's your camera,” she asked, shouting over the noise of the post-Madang party.
I was wedged into a vinyl padded booth of a restaurant that could have been a Dennys, except that on the floor next to the counter a dozen Korean drummers were pounding out a beat that sent a hundred revelers into dancing wherever they were standing. The restaurant's staff had retreated to the kitchen, and took turns peeking out through the swinging doors. Near the front picture windows, a long buffet table stood emptied of its Korean fare, and the latest of many cases of 750ml bottles of beer was nearly gone.
“My camera?” I shouted back, “I'm out of film.”
She looked at the pockets of my utility vest. “Tape recorder?”
“Battery's dead,” I replied.
She smiled at me. It was the first time in fourteen months of meetings and rehearsals and performances that she'd shown anything but cool distrust of my presence in her neighborhood. Trust was a scarce commodity between this neighborhood and outsiders. Most people who lived somewhere else would not even walk through this part of Kyoto. And when outsiders came here with video cameras, as NHK (Japan's PBS) does every decade or so to produce another documentary about its gritty underclass conditions, the residents already know its not done for them.
She was a person, like many of her friends, trapped in the middle of a load of troubles with no good way out and few expectations of any significant changes for the future. But then she was also participating in change by helping to organize the Madang.
It was nearing midnight on the day of the Madang. I had been up since 5 am finishing the photography exhibit. I had my own part to play within the Madang drama, and I was playing the role of ethnographer for a Yomiuri Television crew, who were using my interest in the Madang to create a feature news story. They were shooting me shooting the event, and I was also shooting them shooting me shooting the event. And now I was completely shot.
The Madang rolled to a close around seven, and then we all worked to get the tents down and the equipment packed and the trash collected and carted off, so that the schoolyard was neater than it was when we set up the day before. Last year, the PTA complained that the Madang had left a mess behind (which it hadn't, but someone just had to complain about something). So this year the schoolyard got an extra-thorough cleaning. This normally severe schoolyard, not much more than a rectangular expanse of gravelly dirt, which today had contained, but barely, the festival commotion, had finally been returned to its disciplinary mode.
When the last truck pulled out, the mood picked up. It was time to celebrate. The party began around nine, and hit its stride an hour later. Those who relied on public transportation would began to drift away by eleven-thirty.
I had stashed all my equipment at a locker at Kyoto Station. Like I said to her, all of my film and tapes and batteries were used up, and so was I. Now, after three hours of serious drinking (this was not a crowd to let a glass go empty) the uphill bicycle ride home was looking less and less attractive. The drummers had switched rhythms, pushing the tempo. People were dancing on the empty buffet table.
She gave me a second smile and poured beer into my glass.
“You came here anyway,” she shouted.
“Mochiron,” I said. “Of course I did.”
“Welcome to the community!” she said and put her hand on my shoulder.
“Thanks.” I returned the smile. “Nowhere else I'd rather be.”
She nodded and headed away.
The party was hitting its limit. The drummers pushed the tempo further, louder. Everyone was dancing, jumping to the beat. Bodies touching, faces stretched into grins that verged on some permanent rearrangement of tissue. The crowd pressed itself together. And me without a camera.
It occurred to me that here was another moment to the day's festival, a moment not less significant by its intimate scale—the entire year of festival preparation and then today's festival performance were also rehearsals for this moment. This party was not the end of this year's event, but the budding communion that would assure the next. Here was fecund moment drenched in body sweat, and sweetened by a heady abandon.
Suddenly, with a sharp report, one of the drumheads broke. The crowd whooped its approval of this signal that their passions had torn through some unspoken barrier. The other drums used the sound to signal their coda, and slowed to a final measure.
Some days later, I asked her one of my standard questions, “What's the worst scenario you can imagine for what Higashi-kujo will be like in twenty years,”
“The worst?” she replied, “is to stay exactly like it is today.”
Thinking back on the party, I reflected that she need not worry about Higashi-kujo remaining the same. Already, the Madang had opened a space for comment, for reflection, and for social therapy. In one year the neighborhood had already changed.
Democracy also requires places that are
private, hidden from view, unmarked on the map. These are spaces of hiding
from the state——places that give the externality of civil society its physical presence. I call such places spaces of “civic privacy
50.” At its most basic level, civic privacy is performed by the curtain on the voting booth, where privacy assures the anonymity of the voter, freeing her from personally directed political reprisal. But the right to hold meetings in private opens up a shared space of privacy. Society decides not to use its x-ray, spy satellite, radar imaging on this or that place, conversations are not recorded, and some meetings not constrained by the visible presence of surveillance. While public space is generally perceived as the space of democratic action, actually, places of civic privacy and public-ity co-articulate the working space of democracy. But we have to be very careful in determining where and what types of hiding can be legitimated.
The “right to privacy,” is a right that can only be legitimately exercised within a civil society: no other locations support this right; it does not exist within the state nor the marketplace. “Official secrets,” “black projects,” “covert operations,” and “trade secrets” are compromises made to purchase a localized strategic advantage of certain information against the designs of enemies and competitors. The grudging acceptance
51 of these practices should not be confused with the granting of a “right to privacy.” All information within the state or in corporations should be accessible to outside oversight organizations, and usually the courts fulfill this role (although, in Japan, the courts do not have an active history of doing so). The lack of oversight organizations in Asia Pacific nations, such as Japan, supports a “culture” of hiding, and marks a weakness in civil society's purview vis-à-vis the state or the market throughout the region.
What about openness within civil society? Above I noted that civil society is the arena for places and practices of “civic privacy.” Civic privacy is a necessary moment in a process of articulating views that are external to the state. The privacy protects individual participants against personal reprisals. Apart from this type of privacy, civil society organizations should reflect the same internal level of openness and transparent decision making that they expect of the state. The very issues of delegation
52 and representation that are often the focus of reform agendas brought by civil society organizations against the state are also active within civil society organizations themselves. Alexander Kluge's (1988) work on the process of democratization of production for a counter-public sphere gives us a good example of a reflexive attempt to marry theory and process within an organization.
However, today, even an acknowledged “right of privacy” does not ensure absolute civic privacy. The general conflict between the desired protection of individual member privacy and the need to be inclusive, to openly recruit members, generally means that a civil society organization cannot today assume that the contents of its meetings are actually unknown to the state
53.
A civil-society group
can expect that its “private” meetings are not subject to public-sphere media distribution, and that the state's use of its information about private meetings is constrained and monitored. Laws that protect the state against organized efforts to overthrow it are legitimated as strategies against the potential of violence against the nation's citizenry, but they also serve the interests of the state against the citizen's rights of civic privacy, and these must be subject to external (e.g., legal) review.
1Dissatisfaction is expressed, but in private, or when drinking, as the drink becomes an excuse for shifting the frame of conversation beyond the limits of self control. In Kyoto, drinking is a ready alibi for raised voices, exaggerated expressions, and behaviors that would usually be frowned upon in public—anecdotally this includes punching out your boss. Getting drunk means never having to say your sorry. It is an extremely useful social solvent in Kyoto, but its use as such is restricted to males.
2“Visit to a Green Star” is a short story that was included in
Here is Japan, as an allegory of a visit to Japan. The self-distancing of this place, this Japan/Green Star, from the Earth narrativizes the nativist movement in Japan, that has in many ways tried to separate the archipelago from the Chinese mainland, and then from the West.
3There is no “Japan’s Brother: The Boy.” A male who does not achieve a career as a skilled worker, or better, a
salaryman (white-collar) position, has failed to enter into a valued position within the national family.
4More than half of the students in my classes in fairly prestigious private Japanese universities (Ritsumeikan and Doshisha) were profoundly disappointed in their failure to be accepted to their first-choice level universities (such as Tokyo or Kyoto universities). By the time they were sophomores, they knew precisely which companies would be recruiting them, and for what type of jobs. Their future life-styles were fixed beyond their control. By 1994, however, most companies were cutting back on hiring, and so a proportion of these students would soon find themselves in the limbo of having graduated and not being employed.
5The names used to designate local persons who advised me or participated in the event and who desired to remain anonymous are chosen randomly from English names. Why English names? I have avoided using Korean names as these tend to be few in number (Kim, Lee, etc.) and might resemble an possible name. Many of the Koreans I worked with in Japan have a Japanese name they use when this is convenient. But these names are also loaded as signifying the inability to use the real, Korean name. English will have to do.
6The advantage that these modern instrumentalities provide to the state is one of the principal reasons why
State-nation modernity is as durable as it seems to be.
7The Japanese government food agency made a reported profit of more than US$4 billion on the sale of foreign rice at greatly inflated prices. They succeeded in reducing the demand for Thai rice to the point where they had too much on hand when the next harvest proved bountiful, so they exported this rice as a part of their ODA to African nations.
8Before WWII, the emperor spoke on behalf of the Japanese people, and the position of the emperor as synecdoche for Japan as a nation and a people was far stronger than what survived Japan’s defeat and subsequent occupation. But where the emperor’s discursive position was vacated, a democratic public sphere did not emerge to acquire this position. There is a discursive vacuum today at the top, and even the Prime Minister will refuse to claim to speak for the Japanese public: as Hosokawa after offering apologies for Japanese aggression in WWII on a state visit in Beijing returned to Tokyo and stated that his apologies were his own, and not meant to represent Japan.
9 Susan Pharr’s (1990) work on conflict management in Japan is a very good case in point. Her arguments are most convincing when they point to specific programs and instances of status conflict and state responses to this, and much less credible when she credits blanket cultural bases for these actions.
10One of the primary referents to democracy in Kyoto is “equality” as exemplified by a commonly held notion that the range of affluence between the rich and the poor in Japan has narrowed appreciably since the 19th century.
11Paternal “games”, as Goffman (1974, 99) noted, requires the management of the subject’s ken in a way that hides the mechanics of this management. The “dupe” is told what the pater believes is good for him to know, and is shown what the pater believes is good for him to see. But at a more subtle level, paternalism is also a delegation of expression. The pater speaks for the family: for that socius over which his authority has been granted.
12Of course, such an admission may mark the student as different from their classmates in terms of their taste, much as an admission of liking classical music might in a Junior High classroom in the US. But then these were university students, and this is the primary period of their lives when they have the free time to acquire new tastes.
13As
(Hansen 1993, xi-xii) notes: “If these and similar questions are perceived today as part of the problematic of the public, it is itself a measure of major changes in the constitution of the public sphere, in the very fabric and parameters of experiential horizons.” A critique of the public sphere based on the opening this defends for practices of protest is itself a conscious re-visioning of the public sphere (in a practical utopian manner).
14Although reports of the actual salaries of executives of top Japanese corporations show that their monetary income is not so much greater than that of the skilled factory workers, the executive’s access to non-salary, monetizeable and non-monetizeable resources (houses, transportation, golf-course memberships, entertainment, etc.) push this inequality into a range that is difficult to figure, but certainly comparable to that of top executives in American corporations. And it includes an addition feature: the non-monetizeable resources (including personal connections) are non-taxable and also heritable.
15The fact that capital makes some people “more equal than others” in the marketplace still does not legitimate the influence of wealth in the political process and the public sphere, as President Clinton has discovered in his campaign finance debacle.
16Meiji was an elite-led reform in which status was “shared” with other classes with the stated end of ending class distinctions, but without an effective public oversight of this process.
17The
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives the following definition: “1. Like in nature or kind; similar; congruous. 2. Uniform in structure or composition throughout.” The second meaning of the English term more resembles the Japanese term “
kakuitsu” [uniform], while the main meaning has lost the etymologically available sense of “same beginning” [Medieval Latin:
homo-geneus].
18In Frits Staal’s sense. Staal looked at ritual as a pure syntax of action, that is, action without meaning. The notion of ritual as meaningless action is joined with a concept of risk: ritual action is designed to reduce risk. The results of ritual action are thus guaranteed by the proper sequence of action itself. And so, ritual action is meaningless but not chaotic. Staal also looks at ritual as being prior to myth, as being the outcome of bodily actions that are relatively old in that they predate the formation of language and culture (as we know it). While at the present, this notion serves to isolate what Staal is doing from what others do—others study ritual that seems, if anything, overcoded with meaning—I believe that in the future a typology of ritual will be developed in which this will anchor one end of the scheme and cultural performances will anchor the other (with various types of dramas and ceremonies holding up the middle, I suppose).
19This expectation chooses to forget that, in the current world market, much of the comfort that nations with high-percentage middle-class populations enjoy is paid for by the lack of comfort of the populations of other nations and other groups within the nation.
20A few states, such as Norway, have natural resources (e.g., oil) that they sell to fund social services. This represents a temporary, artificial, situation. China’s recent move to incorporate market capitalism within state-nation modernity is the most recent attempt to create hybrid state-nation/nation-state.
21As such it resembles the conservative/liberal (there is some debate about who “owns” this position) distrust-of-government discourse at times, and it also includes a more radical critique state-like authority in all organizations and groups, including families, e.g., a counter-paternalist discourse.
22For example, on March 31, 1998, due to a seven-year decline in stock prices, and a local practice of major banks holding large stock portfolios of related manufacturing firms in Japan, up to 16 of the 19 largest Japanese banks found themselves at or near insolvency at the end of the 1997 fiscal year. To avoid (or delay) a banking crisis, the Japanese Ministry of Finance simply changed the rules of accounting in Japan to allow the banks to evaluate their net-worth by the book value (the amount they originally paid for a stock) rather than by its actual market value. Such accounting legerdemain was not unnoticed by international financial ratings organizations, and will further erode international confidence in Japanese banks. But the government was able, by fiat, to keep the lid on a crisis for which its own management policies must, one day, accept responsibility.
23Even the most “democratic” of democracies (wherever these may be found) struggle with questions over where and when a democratic logic should apply. The notion of democracy within the family in the U.S. is an example of this debate, as is the notion of democracy within the military.
24This type of modernity is also a current feature in debates internal to countries such as Great Britain and the United States. While both the left and the right have expressed concerns about state control, the left still looks to expand the state interest in social welfare intervention into the economy and society, and the right seeks to expand state cooperation with national economic/corporate interests. However, where these debates are carried on within the public sphere, few suggest that the state be given more control over the media or the courts. These controls occur only within conditions of state-nation modernity or some other form of modern nation-state (e.g., colonial governments) that has suppressed role of the public sphere.
25However, economic growth has been much more elusive for other nations that share this type of modernity, and so it is really not possible to make any prediction about the economic consequences of state-nation modernity. The lack of transparency in the relationship between the state and the nation’s economic institutions (banks, insurance companies, and corporations) possible within state-nation modernity opens up a space for cooperation that can be used to promote overall economic growth and it can be used to hide gifts and favors that increase the transaction costs within the economy and hinder economic growth.
26If this strikes the reader as a position closer to the “conservative” side of current debates, this is mainly because of another “liberal” concern—a suspicion of corporations and of the marketplace as a source of economic control. It is about the role of the state as a check on the market and on corporations where “liberals” and “conservatives” (at least in the US and in Great Britain) as most at odds.
27It is not inconsequential how judges and juries are selected, and at restrictions on access to courts. State control over the proceedings of and access to criminal and civil courts is a hallmark of the state-nation.
28Such changes can result from the influence of strong multinational market interests rather than from a strengthening of non-governmental civil society institutions to replace state-welfare programs, and so these services (housing, food, health care) may simply disappear as “rights” and be recoded as “commodities” available for a price.
29For example, US semiconductor companies have looked to the Japanese government/corporate research practices and have pushed for similar practices at home.
30I would have the opportunity to participate in my neighborhood's annual festival three times while I was living with my family in Kyoto. The first year, my 10 year-old son helped to carry the
kodomo-omikoshi (children's portable shrine) around our
chou (neighborhood). In the second year the house where I was living became the temporary local resting-spot (
otabisho) for the main festival procession, and the temporary shrine for one of many representations of the regional deity. The third year, I mainly took video of the event.
31Kyoto is surrounded by hills on three sides, and every summer, at the end of the yearly Buddhist period of ancestor worship, fires are lit on these hillsides to encourage the visiting souls a successful return to their abodes. [Ancestor worship is most prominent accommodation between Indian Buddhist thought and family funerary practices in East Asia. The very notion of ancestors (and graveyards) runs counter to the original idea of this-world reincarnation. But today, in Kyoto,
