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imomusThe productive two-year dialectic -- a battle for the soul of Japan, or at least a persuasive general definition of the nation -- between Click Opera and Neomarxisme may well have reached a sad end. Yesterday, infuriated by Marxy's refusal to offer any criticism of his own culture or any comment whatsoever on the war raging in the Middle East, I concluded that "by refusing to be relevant about what's going on outside Japan, you are unable to be relevant about what's going on inside it".
Marxy's response sounded weary and sad: "To be honest, I don't feel like getting sucked into this conversation or even trying to deconstruct your highly aggravating debating techniques. Sadly I am probably losing to your assault, but the constant barrage of this kind of unfair rhetorical sucker punching just makes my life worse and me more unhappy."
I apologized and, in a post-skirmish dialogue with a more sympathetic poster called Brown, ended up quoting Thomas S. Kuhn: "Advocates of mutually exclusive paradigms are in an insidious position: Though each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing... neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proof."
It's certainly true that, although we seem to get on fine in real life, Marxy and I have different basic intellectual paradigms. But I wonder if proof is really completely irrelevant? Take one of our earlier, more polite skirmishes. Back in October 2004 Marxy responded to a Click Opera piece on postmodernism with a Neomarxisme piece called Post-modernism in retrospect. Its provocative, reductive and ethnocentric tone seemed guaranteed to enrage me. Contradicting my claim that "Japan is the society currently most at ease with postmodernism", Marxy told us that "Japan's postmodernism has always been accidental... Japan is a nation without content... All the great treasures of content-based Postmodernism - meaningful bricolage, subversive irony, and creative sampling - don't exist in Japan... The good parts of American culture lead to a certain kind of elevated dialogue or at least put people into camps to argue about the work's value. Japanese popular culture leads to no dialogue."
In the comments section, I responded to this outrageous claim with what now seems like admirable moderation: "Personally I don't think The Simpsons is a "better" postmodernism than Oh! Super Milk Chan or Oh! Mikey."
Well, Kuhn be damned, there is "proof" that the Japanese are totally able to do postmodernism in a completely non-accidental way. Directed and written by Yoshimasa Ishibashi, Oh! Mikey has been in production for just over four years. It's a brilliant series of short sketches revolving around the Fuccon family, American ex-patriots James, Barbara and their son Mikey. They've been sent to live in Japan, where they've morphed into a sort of surreal, satirical stereotype of what Japanese people are like.
Played throughout by showroom dummies wearing fixed grins and liable to erupt at any moment into manic, sinister, unbridled laughter, the Fuccon family are in a sense the absolute inverse of the sweet Japanese families we see in Ozu films. Here, everyone is horrifically rude to each other and appalling hypocrisies are rife. By using gaijin characters who act exactly like Japanese, Ishibashi manages to critique Japanese behaviour and Western decadence and selfishness at the same time (his point could be that Japanese have become this way because they've started to resemble Westerners the way the Fuccons have started to resemble Japanese). I'd say there's a closer parallel with Ren and Stimpy than the Simpsons, because this is more than social satire; it goes into much artier, more uncomfortable areas. I'd put it on a par, for sheer surreal nihilism, with David Lynch and Todd Solondz.
But I've probably said too much already. Got a couple of hours to spare? Here's a ton of Oh! Mikey, courtesy of YouTube and Google Video. You'll be laughing as you watch this stuff, I promise, but stick a couple of Post-It notes on either side of the screen saying "Japan's postmodernism has always been accidental" and "Japan is a nation without content" and you'll laugh even harder.
Let's Go for a Drive
Mikey's Future
Mikey's Diary
The Love Surgery
The Papillon Cafe
Saori the Lady Driver
Saori the Lady Driver Part 2
The Papillon Cafe Part 2
The Return
Mikey Peeps
Mikey Being Kidnapped
A Marital Dispute
Moving Away
Growing Mikey
Mikey's Illness
Mikey's Exorcism
The whole of Oh! Mikey Series 2 (35 minutes long)
Marxy's response sounded weary and sad: "To be honest, I don't feel like getting sucked into this conversation or even trying to deconstruct your highly aggravating debating techniques. Sadly I am probably losing to your assault, but the constant barrage of this kind of unfair rhetorical sucker punching just makes my life worse and me more unhappy."
I apologized and, in a post-skirmish dialogue with a more sympathetic poster called Brown, ended up quoting Thomas S. Kuhn: "Advocates of mutually exclusive paradigms are in an insidious position: Though each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing... neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proof."
It's certainly true that, although we seem to get on fine in real life, Marxy and I have different basic intellectual paradigms. But I wonder if proof is really completely irrelevant? Take one of our earlier, more polite skirmishes. Back in October 2004 Marxy responded to a Click Opera piece on postmodernism with a Neomarxisme piece called Post-modernism in retrospect. Its provocative, reductive and ethnocentric tone seemed guaranteed to enrage me. Contradicting my claim that "Japan is the society currently most at ease with postmodernism", Marxy told us that "Japan's postmodernism has always been accidental... Japan is a nation without content... All the great treasures of content-based Postmodernism - meaningful bricolage, subversive irony, and creative sampling - don't exist in Japan... The good parts of American culture lead to a certain kind of elevated dialogue or at least put people into camps to argue about the work's value. Japanese popular culture leads to no dialogue."
In the comments section, I responded to this outrageous claim with what now seems like admirable moderation: "Personally I don't think The Simpsons is a "better" postmodernism than Oh! Super Milk Chan or Oh! Mikey."
Well, Kuhn be damned, there is "proof" that the Japanese are totally able to do postmodernism in a completely non-accidental way. Directed and written by Yoshimasa Ishibashi, Oh! Mikey has been in production for just over four years. It's a brilliant series of short sketches revolving around the Fuccon family, American ex-patriots James, Barbara and their son Mikey. They've been sent to live in Japan, where they've morphed into a sort of surreal, satirical stereotype of what Japanese people are like.
Played throughout by showroom dummies wearing fixed grins and liable to erupt at any moment into manic, sinister, unbridled laughter, the Fuccon family are in a sense the absolute inverse of the sweet Japanese families we see in Ozu films. Here, everyone is horrifically rude to each other and appalling hypocrisies are rife. By using gaijin characters who act exactly like Japanese, Ishibashi manages to critique Japanese behaviour and Western decadence and selfishness at the same time (his point could be that Japanese have become this way because they've started to resemble Westerners the way the Fuccons have started to resemble Japanese). I'd say there's a closer parallel with Ren and Stimpy than the Simpsons, because this is more than social satire; it goes into much artier, more uncomfortable areas. I'd put it on a par, for sheer surreal nihilism, with David Lynch and Todd Solondz.
But I've probably said too much already. Got a couple of hours to spare? Here's a ton of Oh! Mikey, courtesy of YouTube and Google Video. You'll be laughing as you watch this stuff, I promise, but stick a couple of Post-It notes on either side of the screen saying "Japan's postmodernism has always been accidental" and "Japan is a nation without content" and you'll laugh even harder.
Let's Go for a Drive
Mikey's Future
Mikey's Diary
The Love Surgery
The Papillon Cafe
Saori the Lady Driver
Saori the Lady Driver Part 2
The Papillon Cafe Part 2
The Return
Mikey Peeps
Mikey Being Kidnapped
A Marital Dispute
Moving Away
Growing Mikey
Mikey's Illness
Mikey's Exorcism
The whole of Oh! Mikey Series 2 (35 minutes long)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 09:54 am (UTC)You've never declared yourself on that "unalienable human rights" thing. So there: "by refusing to take a stance on the issue of universal human rights, Momus is unable to even write about the colour pink without raising the suspicion that he supports torture."
der.
Postmodernism WikiFolklore
Date: 2006-08-06 10:00 am (UTC)Wikipedia, with its open, potentially limitless forum, is an example of the postmodernist fluidity of knowledge. This then brings problems of control, legitimisation and verification.
The role, proper usage, and meaning of postmodernism remain matters of intense debate and vary widely with context. See, for example, the discussion of Japanese postmodernism in [imomus blog]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism#Connotations
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 10:17 am (UTC)I believe that there aren't any universal human rights, but that as fictions go it's not a bad one if it's used well. Unfortunately, in the era of Blair and Bush, human rights are as likely to be used as the pretext to invade a sovereign nation as to save people from suffering. And if you counter that it's a double-edged sword which can be turned against the people who misuse it, I'd say a double-edged sword is always going to be more useful to people with a lot of power (the Angrael regimes) than people with a little (the UN, the ICC, and so on). In summary, I prefer the concepts like "above all, do no harm" or "thou shalt not kill" to the concept of universal human rights.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 01:03 pm (UTC)Because I believe that's a much more dangerous fiction than human rights.
By the way, would you like to renounce your human rights with me? I've got pink uniforms for both of us if you're game!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 01:17 pm (UTC)The sovereignty of nations is a fact in today's world, the universality of human rights is not. I disagree with your implication that the sovereignty of nations is what causes war. I think Nietzsche has a better account:
"No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests." Nietzsche, Daybreak
By the way, would you like to renounce your human rights with me? I've got pink uniforms for both of us if you're game!
What universal human rights do we actually have? Guaranteed by whom? And backed up by who else, should the first guarantor change its mind or forget? Where would we actually go to renounce them? And how would our lives be any different the day after?
You can see what "we hold these truths to be self-evident" is such a cunning piece of writing. It gets you off the hook of specifying what actually guarantees rights. References to a deity, and this-world calculations based on reparations to be made in a netherworld afterlife, do the same thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 01:54 pm (UTC)I hadn't figured you to be such a pragmatic on this subject, but you've got a good point! To what degree is national sovereignty a reality, though? There are many threats: war, international law, territorial disagreements, rejection of authority by individuals...
Nietzsche's account still depends on the assumption that the world is divided, and that there is a "neighbor". His explanation can be read as the "how" of my implication's "what". I'd also suggest that a world where national self-defense is rejected would have to be a world where borders were rejected.
As for human rights, none are universal. And I don't think they ever could be.
I'm not suggesting a one-time renunciation, but a continual vocal rejection of them whenever they are offered.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 02:00 pm (UTC)Not sure if Nietzsche was anti-nationalist in quite the way you're suggesting. I think that, like me, he'd see nations as things which make things possible as well as things which restrict us.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 02:01 pm (UTC)i always wondered if this is why there is such a prevalence of baseball bats in some of my neighbours cupboards
and now i think of it...why baseball bats?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 01:50 pm (UTC)Kind of agree with you there. But your preferred concepts are actions rather than rights. In that sense, yeah, I agree. I've always had a suspicion we should be always pair "universal human rights" with "universal human responsibilities". As in, the current thinking might be "these are your rights" and there is no real mention of what actions you must take - your responsibilities - in order to ensure those rights for others. In that sense, there's a cart-before-the-horse kind of feel to it.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-06 02:09 pm (UTC)Like byzantine copyright legislation, unenforceable limits to private behaviour and the tyranny of lawyers on a smaller scale, human rights serve only to make everyone a valid target. It reminds me of the horrible christian doctrine of universal sin.
When everyone is a sinner, the winners aren't the virtuous, but the strong.
This bothers me
Date: 2006-08-06 07:04 pm (UTC)Momus, you must be younger than I am, because you have not yet figured out that:
NO ONE THINKS THEY ARE DOING HARM WHEN THEY'RE DOING IT
To say "do no harm" is insipid, meaningless, hippie-ish. Humans rationalize every single decision they make. Mussolini thought he was doing the correct thing for the human race.
So get a better slogan, okay?
Re: This bothers me
Date: 2006-08-06 07:09 pm (UTC)Close but no cigar; in fact "above all, do no harm" is one of the most famous sayings of Hippocrates, the father of medicine. History does not record whether he wore a kaftan and beads, but he probably did have a lot of white robes.
Re: This bothers me
Date: 2006-08-07 02:57 am (UTC)What you are saying when you speak in generalisms is that you're either going to ignore reality and forge ahead with your fantasy or you're going to not fix the problem and just try to not make things worse like Hippocrates recommended.
I find both of those quite poor for a self-styled intellectual activist.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 08:49 am (UTC)Right. Because those aren't in any way corollaries of the right not to be killed. And clearly they don't need any justification. I guess you hold them to be self-evident.
How is it that if we are discussing Realpolitik, you go all PoMo on us, and if we are discussing theory, you go Realpolitik?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 09:18 am (UTC)der.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-07 10:24 am (UTC)(See also the "no proof is possible (so shut up) but just by the way, I have one" special move.)