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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)
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The lovely, hyper-confidence of youth
Date: 2006-08-06 05:07 pm (UTC)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".
...................
This is very interesting.
I'm a regular reader of both Click Opera and Neomarxisme – both offer unique, and often very valuable insights.
Over time however, I started to grow a bit annoyed with Marxy's criticisms of the Japanese economy and iron plated insistence neo-liberal maneuvers would provide a decisive halt to what he then termed Japan's “terminal decline”.
From time to time I would comment that it was impossible, really, to have a truly comprehensive understanding of the challenges Tokyo faces without taking China's meteoric rise into account. My own personal Asian contacts are with family members (through marriage) in Seoul, S. Korea some of whom are quite knowledgeable professionals working as financial analysts. Again and again they stress to me the impact China's explosive growth as an exporter and manufacturing center has had on the region's (and indeed, the world's) post World War two configuration.
But Marxy, oddly, seemed to brush this aside in favor of a Japan-only critique. It was as if there wasn't a global economic system, just a fumbling Japan foolishly resisting the inexorable logic of neo-liberalism (which, it was implied, made the United States a lantern unto the nations, a shining example of economic perfection).
About which...
Later, I became involved in a very lengthy debate with Marxy and long time commenter chris_b about neo-liberalism's failures. Specifically, I used David Harvey's “A Brief History of Neo-liberalism” as a touchstone – the best analysis to-date I believe of the high flying promises and (mostly) failed reality of the neo-liberal program.
Chavez's popularity is a direct result of his government's dismantling of Venezuela's disastrous implementation of “Washington Consensus” style neo-liberalism.
The point being, how could you suggest Japan adopt this destructive technique when it has done so little for so many elsewhere?
Again, the reply seemed to be that counter-examples notwithstanding, Japan was in “terminal decline” and needed a dose of neo-lib medicine.
After a while, it became clear to me that Marxy, though very smart and well-informed on a variety of topics, was doing what many (most?) people do in their 20s: make grand assertions based upon a belief that problems have “one thing” solutions.
And, to be fair, in recent months, much of this certainty seems to have fallen away. As it must if you're going to stay alert and keep learning from your surroundings.
Re: The lovely, hyper-confidence of youth
Date: 2006-08-06 06:50 pm (UTC)Then again, because Marxy's a trendy-looking musician who writes for hip magazines (my first contact with him was at the offices of Tokion magazine in New York; he also writes for OK Fred), it's easy to think of him as a bohemian art student or something like that. But he isn't really that. He's a student of marketing who's now employed, by all accounts, in a big advertising agency. I suppose some views go with that turf. Personally, I think just the fact that he's called "Marx" misleads a lot of people into thinking he's inherently left wing.
I'm so disappointed
Date: 2006-08-06 07:00 pm (UTC)Momus, you're anti-free market?
Wow, I thought you had more sense than that.
Why shouldn't I exploit capitalistic ideals to assert my own non-consumer, non-materialist agenda? There's nothing stopping me. And that's what's great about Angrael.
I'm going to go hang with Marxy for a while now.
Re: I'm so disappointed
Date: 2006-08-06 07:55 pm (UTC)Our generation is so lame - our sole form of expression is the bottom line, both in the creative and business fields. It's like saying, Why go for a nice, relaxing walk down a beautiful trail, when there's no set destination at the end of the road? Aren't you tired of the excessive "What's in it for me?" mentality that's in our writing, our art, in everything?
Re: I'm so disappointed
Date: 2006-08-06 08:04 pm (UTC)Define excess work? I can navigate the pto web site with my eyes closed, like 90 seconds. Whose excess work do you mean?
Re: The lovely, hyper-confidence of youth
Date: 2006-08-06 11:40 pm (UTC)You're also comparing Japan, which has solid property rights laws, to Venezuala, the country with the worst property rights laws in all of Latin America. You can have the most free market in the world, but it won't matter a bit without decent property rights laws and a solid legal structure to back them.
Why are property rights laws important? Let's say somebody wants to start a business. Most businesses have start-up costs that are high enough to require the owner to take out a loan. while that person may "own" a house -- he paid for it and occupies it -- he doesn't actually have a deed to that house. People don't tend to loan much money to people without collateral. This is the whole point of Hernando de Soto's "Mystery of Capital."
You criticize Marxy for "making grand assertions based upon a belief that problems have "one thing" solutions. And you chalk this up to age. Meanwhile, Momus is almost twice his age and still holds on to the idea that Socialism would save the world.
-henryperri
Re: The lovely, hyper-confidence of youth
Date: 2006-08-07 02:45 am (UTC)And regarding de Soto...
You have me at a disadvantage for there is not world enough nor time to fully dissect the problems I have with that fellow's rhapsodies about property which fly on gossamer wings far, far away from the lived experience of billions.
Re: The lovely, hyper-confidence of youth
Date: 2006-08-07 01:28 am (UTC)My greatest issue is with statism/oligopoly/elitism/cronyism/nepotism, which I believe to be the main driver of the Japanese economy, now anchoring it to the 20th century. A more "liberal" market policy is one solution to that problem, although I do not hear many solutions from the other side. Supporting the status quo is not the "socialist" position.
Marxy
Re: The lovely, hyper-confidence of youth
Date: 2006-08-07 02:54 am (UTC)Something we're very unlikely to see if current trends towards hyper-militarization are any indication of future prospects.
Of course, in the meantime, there are surely things that could be done better on the domestic Japanese econ scene.
The question, as always, is who decides what this "better" is?
The hyperconfidence of YOUTH
Date: 2006-08-07 03:01 am (UTC)Any confusion?