The spirit of WA
Feb. 14th, 2006 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Last week I debated some people about the ideas of liberal feminist Betty Friedan, who recently died. Friedan came out of a Marxist intellectual tradition, but by the time she published her most famous book -- "The Feminine Mystique" -- in 1963 she had renounced recognizably communist ideas, like collectivism or mistrust of the market. Instead, her book advocates individualism and the market as the solution to the sense of boredom, alienation and frustration that 1950s women felt, trapped in suburbs and expected to live up to impossible images of happy housewifery.My critique of Friedan (which shares many points with Germaine Greer's critique of her; it was Greer's "The Female Eunuch" which sat on my mother's bookshelf, not "The Feminine Mystique") accused her of believing that the following values were unproblematical: the market, the masculine gender, freedom of choice, individualism. Congruently, Friedan thought that the following values were problematical, entirely made up or ready to be broken down: staying outside the market, the feminine gender, a sense of obligation to others, collectivism.
I've discovered that it's almost impossible to find an American, no matter how left wing, who believes that collectivism is a virtue. In fact, debating gender issues with Americans is enormously frustrating because many of them will challenge any statements made of any level intermediate between "the individual" and "everyone in the world". Any statement about a group of people (the Japanese, women) is immediately condemned as generalization, "essentialism", or stereotyping. Taken to extremes, this involves the absurdity of Americans trying to debate women's issues without any definition of who or what women are. "Women" don't exist. (Oddly enough, though, Americans are never in any doubt that men exist.)
When Americans look at the woman question and when they look at Japan, their anxieties about groups, their love of individualism and faith in the market make them see the same tendencies: women and the Japanese are leaving group orientations, becoming more individual, entering the market. Hurrah!
Here, for instance, is an American communications academic called Todd Holden looking at images of subjecthood in Japanese TV commercials:"Identity in commercial communications is not just about "we Japanese" any more. Increasingly, messages of identity are about the personal search, encouraging individuals to find their own way, to live for themselves, to seek, express and receive affection, to become more self-centered and personally goal-directed. Such themes reflect a departure from the past - where identity was often mediated by the group and/or conferred by products. Multiplied, and reproduced in numerous situations in conjunction with a variety of stars and social practices, such messages possess the potential to reorient members of Japanese society in ways that already appear to be emergent in the larger life world. [sic] The author suggests that such "adentifications" carry the prospect of exerting considerable sociological effect on the Japanese nation and its culture in the years to come."
It looks so reasonable, doesn't it, so liberal? People are being set free from groups, led to the market where they're free to be individuals rather than cogs in a wheel, mere objects. But these "liberal" values are actually neo-liberal. What about freedom from the market? Why deconstruct the group but not the selfish, atomised individual? What about the ways the market objectifies people? What about the virtues of collective living?
What if collectivism is such a core value to Japanese culture that attacks on it are attacks on Japan, even when couched in the language of "liberating" individuals from the onerous chores of group life? I came across an account of Japanese collectivism by Chen Zhuo which gives a much more positive view of Japan's group-mindedness than any American account I've read, and which doesn't consign collectivism to the past.
"Japanese Core Cultural Values and Communicative Behaviors" lays out a model of Japanese attitudes and values which rings very true to me. This is a Japanese mind- and feeling-set that I know, respect and love. What's more, we don't even have to be "essentialist" to agree that these values matter: "interpersonal competence," says Zhuo, "should not be understood as a static concept or list of characteristics but rather as a quality which arises in the process of interaction". In other words, the behaviors listed below (and shown in Zhuo's diagram) are summoned and re-inforced by our interactions with Japanese people, whether we're Japanese ourselves or not.
WA:harmony, unity, sharing; this is collectivism's sun. It's the desire to be one with those of your group. People are not one thing, but WA highlights the aspiration to be one. To feel, see, think and live together rather than apart. Of course people are different individuals, but it's best when they want the same thing. The unity and harmony of the group takes priority over individual responsibility, authority, or initiative.
ENRYO:
the effort to avoid explicit opinions, assessments, or other displays of personal feelings in order to prevent others from thinking badly of one.
SASSHI:
refers to the listener's ability to guess or understand the speaker’s meaning even before he's finished saying it. There's a line in a song on my new album which expresses it: "Someone says what we're all already thinking, and we laugh."
AMAE:
is mutual dependency, the kind of relationship in which one person belongs to a group and depends on another’s love.
AWASE:
the ability to adjust to the changing situation or circumstances so as to solidify and maintain the benefits of the group, not the self.
KENSON:
negation of individual ability in order to maintain the nature of the social collective relationship and to avoid individual heroism which would disturb the group interests.
TATEMAE:
the outward surface of a building, a metaphor for concern for what can be seen by others.
GIRI:
a type of obligation felt toward others who have done something good for the person and a sense that one will be forever in the other’s debt.
JOUGE KANKEI:
respect and honor in Japanese hierarchical society. Almost everyone can find vertical relationships that are viewed as good and natural in everyday life.
KATA:
a form of standardization. For Japanese, when people do things in the same way and one knows what to expect, it is believed much easier to develop WA.
Marxy as usual has an individualist conspiracy theory to explain Japanese collectivism; he thinks that collectivism in Japan has been imposed from the top. In other words, he thinks that collectivism serves the interests of hidden individuals (aristocrats in the past, presumably, or shadowy figures now):
"Throughout time, Japan always had collectivism enforced by a very small ruling class, and it is only recently that there have been equal rights (both political and economic) mixed with the collectivist instincts. Debate still exists whether elitism still guides the system, but Japanese collectivism is not an ahistorical, apolitical problem detached from economics or social structure.
"If you don't care where your collectivism is created (there surely must be some social or cultural structure that induces collectivist urges, no?), than sure, Japan is "collectivist." Otherwise, you have to at least note that 95% of Japan's existence featured collectivism for the bottom working for those at the top... I doubt that every single Japanese person enjoys collectivism more than individualism, but am not in a position to make a universal statement about which is more satisfying. (Although I've overreached in the past, clearly.)"As a foreigner, can you really go on about how great collectivism is when you've only experienced it as a free product? One reading of Momus' philosophy would clearly be: I enjoy collectivist Japan because it doesn't infringe on my super-individualist lifestyle."
Of course, although I can feel myself being collectivized every day I spend in Japan, and although I think collectivist behaviors (if only ultra-politeness, or consideration, or the avoidance of selfishness) are "summoned and re-inforced by our interactions with Japanese people, whether we're Japanese ourselves or not", I can't entirely dismiss Marxy's point. The closest I've come to experiencing full collectivism was going to boarding school, and I didn't enjoy that much.
What I will say, though, is that Marxy's ad hominem route straight to my bad motives and my supposed exploitation of collectivism, rather than to its virtues, simply shows how much he's a part of his own American culture; not only are ad hominem arguments the result of an over-emphasis on individualism, they share with conspiracy theory a fascination with shady motives benefitting only the subject, or some small minority, and an obsession with bad vertical power relationships -- minorities exploiting the majority. This is one side of every coin, but to look for it in everything isn't just cynical, it's boring. And it makes you wonder whether the people who search for this kind of reading don't actually want it to be the case; aren't actually in love, secretly, with self-interest and domination, and don't actually find them rather reassuring.
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collectivism...
Date: 2006-02-14 07:30 am (UTC)I imagine that part of the problem is that you use the term collectivism. America is a shyster nation before it is anything else, so most people who have been around the block see any sort of politically idealistic pitch as some sort of scam (which they usually are here). When it comes down to it, the ideals are usually about directing money & maintaining control. This is on all sides of the political wheel. People who make attempts at collectivism usually don't take these things into account, & are quite often taken in by manipulative con-artists. This country is unbelievably immature philosophically & otherwise, largely because philosophy & political ideology are card games for students, that distract from the cold-hard facts of economic pragmatism.
Because these philosophical experiments aren't tested by those that would be fit to conduct such experiments, these ideas haven't been thoroughly experienced in their many cycles... they have been read about & discussed, but the actual application hasn't occurred.
What has also gone on is the passing of the "proletariat torch" from white male industrial workers to white women, to blacks, to mexicans, to queers, as each group becomes the vehicle for a destructive, anti-tradionalist, culturally communist (yet pragmatically capitalist) analysis that just isolates the individual from the group & integrates the individual into the middle class.
The keystone of collectivism, the family, is the perfect example of how the American "pursuit of happiness" & "following one's bliss" & "finding oneself" continue to disintegrate the non-economic pillars of our society. & the American left, while perhaps having Socialist leanings doesn't do so out of some great desire to serve mankind, they pursue Socialism out of a fear of hurting people's feelings, laziness & desire for an imagined simplicity.
p.s. "Oddly enough, though, Americans are never in any doubt that men exist." I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, i've never heard Americans discussing women not existing, however, i've hear American women discuss on many occassions that real Men, do not exist.
Re: collectivism...
Date: 2006-02-14 07:39 am (UTC)---ls
Re: collectivism...
Date: 2006-02-14 08:01 am (UTC)Yes, good point! Bill Gates is right to compare it to communism! (http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/05/bill_gates_free_cult.html)
Re: collectivism...
Date: 2006-02-14 08:04 am (UTC)---ls
Re: collectivism...
Date: 2006-02-14 07:58 am (UTC)An American in the conversation about Betty Friedan quoted Donna Haraway (from "The Cyborg Manifesto") saying:
"There is nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as 'us' in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called 'us', and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women's dominations of each other... The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity."
Now this sounds to me very much like the deconstruction of women, being female, femininity to me, rather than the deconstruction of a pesky binary. The person who quoted it to me explained:
"Any attempt to define a "natural" state of what female qualities are -- what women are like, what women want, etc -- is a normalizing exercise that marginalizes those who do not comply to the definition. The problem with feminism in trying to achieve a cohesive "female" identity, it's simply using the same binary strategy and in doing so, fragmenting the collective it attempts to unite."
I then asked: "What collective is it attempting to unite, then?"
Re: collectivism...
Date: 2006-02-14 08:18 am (UTC)this person seems to acknowledge this, but is still yearning for the benefits of the american system i imagine. or somethi ng along those lines.
interesting question about what collective feminism is attempting to unite, it always makes me want to more clearly define what is male, in order to save said identity from definition by bitter feminists.
of course, male female is a binary relationship, but it doesn't have to be exclusionary, just exclusive from the central binary theme. there are other people who fall into other categories like interior decorator, female impersonator, librarian & folk singer, but they are more complicated composites of the pure binary expression of these energies. few people could even hope to be the pure expression of male or female!
valentine de saint point puts it like this, " Women, like men, are not responsible for the fact that those who are truly young, filled with lymph and blood, are stuck fast. It is absurd to divide humanity into women and men: it is composed entirely of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, however epic he may be, every genius however powerful, is the amazing expression of his time only because he is composed simultaneously of feminine and masculine elements of femininity and masculinity - he is a complete being."