Was it "the sublime" talking through me -- or the Darjeeling?

[imomus]

I want to pick up one tiny -- but very interesting -- footnote to yesterday's discussion about punk. A comment signed "Michael and Kiyomi" asked:

"re: punk rock--is it not possible we're falling into a modernist trap; that is, by overly periodizing it, we also strip it of any transcendent (or sublime) value it may have? either that, or perhaps i've had too much darjeeling today..."



I answered:

"Some people think things have whatever longterm value they do by being rooted, precisely, in their epoch. I tend to cluster the idea of "transcendental" with ideas like disembodiment, or the idea that what's ultimately real is elsewhere, or that freedom lies outside of society, or that individuals should somehow step outside of their social context to realize themselves most fully, or the idea that there are universal human rights. What all these ideas have in common is some notion that things have more value the more they're detached from the specifics of their creation and their context, detached from society. And I believe the opposite."

Before I go more into the ideas in that, I want to pause -- appropriately enough -- to look at the embodiment -- the situatedness and specificity -- of "Michael and Kiyomi"'s comment. First, it's signed by two people, a Western male and a Japanese female. It's a comment from a couple, presumably the ones illustrated in the accompanying picture, seen visiting a Japanese temple. This points out to me that Michael and I share an interest in Asia, an interest that's expressed right at the very heart of our social lives and the core of our sense of self, because it's reflected in our choice of partner.

And yet, despite the united front, we have to assume it's Michael who's speaking. The idiom is American ("periodizing"), and the first person is used. Michael defuses the tension which might, possibly, be created by sounding a cautionary note with a joke -- some people might have made an assertive statement then said "but it's early in the morning" or "I may be on drugs", but Michael may have had "too much Darjeeling today".

Okay, this isn't exactly Sherlock Holmes. And I'm sure Michael (and Kiyomi) will be along themselves to give us far more profound insights into their lives and motivations. We could learn a lot more just by clicking on the link to their journal. The very first line I read there is "I'm dreaming of California, even while I'm here in California". Which is very interesting in itself, very much on-theme.



But I want to go back to my comment. It's an anti-metaphysical stance, somewhat contrarian, and I think I've come to it by visiting Japan and seeing how very different things are there. As I tried to point out in my essay on Superlegitimacy, I noticed that in Japan personal fulfillment is very much tied up with assuming one's social role, being invested 100% in what one does. I notice this just about every time I look at anything Japanese. For instance, last night I watched this little report on Tokyo Kawaii Wars:

[Error: unknown template video]

Look at how fanatically the girls are invested in being girls, how the people selling clothes by shouting through megaphones seem to be giving their stupid jobs absolutely all they've got, and drawing some glow of joy from the responsibility. That's more or less the earliest impression of Japan's utter difference I had when I first visited in 1992, and it's also my "latest" impression, reconfirmed last night when I watched the Kawaii Wars video.

Superlegitimacy means that what's real is here and now, under our noses. It's what society tells us is real. So you don't hold back from your time, your place, your rank, your gender, your job, your lot. You don't try to keep your personal life out of your theorizing. You don't make appeals to some absent-yet-utterly-real God. You don't see freedom as something nebulous and negative, tied up with reluctance and refusal. You don't try to shun your own body, or feel disgust and alienation from its natural processes. You're not a detachable soul, stuck in the "charnel house" of a body against its will.

Almost everything we believe in the West is challenged by the superlegitimacy and situatedness of the Japanese. Plato, Christianity, the body-mind split, our idea of freedom and transcendental value, even our idea of universal human rights. And it's fascinating to see what happens when people start to edge towards more Asian ways of seeing. I'd say the most Asian thing Michael says is "perhaps I've had too much Darjeeling today". Because it punctures his own point about punk's potential to be a "transcendental sublime" with a very down-to-earth view that "you are what you eat". I'd even see something Asian in his line about "dreaming of California, even while I'm here in California". Because it acknowledges that fatal split we encourage in the West between the ideas of things and their embodiment.

It strikes me that there's something all the things I'm interested in have in common. Materialism, atheism, an interest in embodiment, situatedness, art and "culturalism" all share an interest in seeing what happens when you refuse to abstract things. A work of art, or a culture, invite us to take them for what they are. A sculpture lists its materials because it is its materials. It's embodied, irreducible, unique. Cultural arguments do the same. Rather than focusing on logical or ethical or financial arguments like "We do this because it's practical, or right, or profitable", they focus on "We do this because we do this. It's our culture". Value is inherent, in this argument: "If one thing matters," as Wolfgang Tillmans titled one of his books of photographs, "everything matters". (And what better justification for the very specific, limited and embodied piece of information we call a photograph? If this glimpse of a shoe matters, everything else we might glimpse in the world matters too.)

Of course, this "embodiment" view of the world -- bolstered by superlegitimacy -- isn't risk-free. It can be anti-intellectual. It can be conservative (one definition of "Cosmic Toryism" is that "Whatever is, is right"). It can undermine the whole logic of activism, reformism, and liberalism by dismantling the underpinning logic; the idea that there are universal human rights -- and wrongs.

The thing is, it's very hard to see the Western idea of liberalism in the same innocent way once you've been to Japan. For instance, if you've been brought up with Western feminist slogans like "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle", it's hard not to be impressed by an entirely different gender politics, a politics of negotiated interdependence rather than pretended independence. And it's hard not to wonder -- in the face of an obvious deep delight in being female in Japan, an obvious glow, a dolly swagger -- whether the desire of some Western feminists to shun their own gender-specificity doesn't spring from a combination of detachment and disgust?

It's exactly this sort of mistaken Protestant conception of freedom as a kind of detachment -- at its simplest, the ability to say "No!" -- that also makes us Westerners see our own bodies as charnel houses. Many Western reporters on Japan imply -- or say quite explicitly, without apparently noticing how patronizing and rude it sounds -- that Japanese women are "behind" and are "only now starting to catch up", but it may be that, by refusing refusal, they've put themselves far ahead. (Actually, I hate that whole idea of one society being "behind" or "ahead" of another, but I suppose I mean by "ahead" something like "a difference that others may end up emulating".)

Refusal -- of our era, our situation, our society, our logistical system, our gender, our jobs, our bodies -- is an enormous waste of time. There is no neutral space to step back into, no high ground from which everything can be seen, no God, no "outside", no "above", no "universal", no "justice". Just here, just now. Can you hear the sound of your own breath? How does that Darjeeling taste?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

"How does that Darjeeling taste?"

Er, a rip-off for me, and a Rolls for 'im?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZquqWEgjhU

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"Lads, lads, if only it were so simple... Bring the electricity, Slater."

[tyrsalvia.livejournal.com]

I think embodiment only gains value when someone has a choice on what to embody. Where I have a problem with it is when I feel forced into a choice by society, a choice that I don't personally like. Am I embodying femininity when I (as an embodied female) express butchness? I value embodiment, but I value choice more.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Already you set up a model in which there are choices, a free agent to make them, a self separate from society, able to examine it from some contemplative niche outside it.

Let's try another model. In this model, there is just one gender and its "other". There is "man" (the word also designates "everybody") and his unnamed other, known as woo-man because man woos her and that creates everybody.

Because there is just one gender and its exoticized other, Freud talks about "penis envy" and Lacan says "woman does not exist". And because there is just one gender, you want to be more man and less woo-man. You want to be more "actual it" and less "exoticized other". But because there is only one gender, is there really choice?

Now, I don't say there's really a choice in Japan either. What we see in that Kawaii Wars video is:

1. Women being cute is war. Perhaps a much more important war than the ones men fight. Women being cute is also commerce.
2. Women are the other for themselves as well as for men.
3. It would only be self-alienation for a woman to be exotic to herself if she were not a woo-man, in other words if her self were not tied up with the way men perceive her. Being the other is the way she relates to the it. Embodying the other is what makes her herself. That's what makes these women look at other women's (altered) bodies so hysterically. Their pleasure is entirely their own, and yet also entirely dependent on embodying the other for man.
4. Society is not offering us the luxury of a choice. There is basically only one gender, and its "other". In other words, whether you opt to act like a man or a woman, there is only man.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in the fact that in the West we tend to want to separate people's arguments from their social lives -- except when we accuse people of hypocrisy. For instance, the story (http://www.itv.com/news/world_9aee1eac67e675c2289f0d6e0135d28d.html) that broke yesterday about Al Gore's household electric and gas bills being several times the national average.

That way around, a link between personal life and over-arching message is considered legitimate. And yet an argument based on purely personal details wouldn't be. That would be too embodied. To put it another way, Al Gore's body can be used to say "No" to Al Gore's ideas. But his body wouldn't be considered enough of a basis for generating his ideas.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It was a good opportunity for me to lay out -- making myself supervulnerable, really -- some of my most contradictory beliefs. Because I'm very much a product of a post-Protestant Western belief system (that includes transcendentals, and negation, and cynicism, and detachment, and radicalism and all the rest of it), but drawn to a very different social model.

But I agree with you that Japan isn't non-transcendent. It's better described, perhaps, as micro-transcendent. Making a cup of tea becomes -- even without reference to anything "beyond" itself -- an incredibly sublime and transcendent act. And so on.

[(Anonymous)]

No God. There are moral judgements, though. Otherwise, why not have security cameras absolutely everywhere? Is Britain advancing superlegitimacy even beyond Japanese standards - labelling those not wishing for a paranoid state as ‘refusist’? Asking them what their problem is, when the problem might be the questioning, the engrained mistrust? How do I ‘assume my social role’ as a mistrustee?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If superlegitimacy existed in Britain, there would be no need for security cameras. People would obey the dictates of society (their god) joyfully at all times.

[uchuufuku.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to get all caught up in one point, but what you say loses some of its weight when you continue to insist that being "female" is somehow intrinsically linked to such awful extremes of consumerism and self-obsession.

Do you really think the joy these girls are apparently experiencing while unquestioningly pawing through this week's prescribed clothes really comes from being in touch with the essence their femininity? That's an awfully dim description of the female population.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, here you have an idea of "the female population" which is independent of the females we observe in this video. What's more, the magazines seen here are Japan's biggest selling, Can Cam for instance. So you're doing what Michael does when he says he's in California, but still dreaming of California. You're confronted by women, but are still dreaming of women.

[mme-furiosa.livejournal.com]

I just want to thank you for giving me a place to go (a refuge from my midwestern college town nightmare wasteland) and actually read things that force me to think.

Thank you, for helping my brain not atrophy here in the land of saccharine and intellectual sloth.

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

Superlegitimacy means that what's real is here and now, under our noses. It's what society tells us is real. So you don't hold back from your time, your place, your rank, your gender, your job, your lot.

Isn't this just the West up until the last century? A Stuckist Society.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I was thinking that Buff Medways video someone posted last night was quite superlegitimate, actually!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hey, you keep deleting your comments and putting them lower down the page after I've answered them!

Aha, interesting, it was Basho in there! Feeling natsukashii. Which I suppose is the bittersweet feeling that overcomes us when distance and presence are felt simultaneously. The difference between that and the Western conception of happiness as a kind of distance is that in Japan it wouldn't be a question of choice. You're compelled by the passing of time to feel natsukashii. In the West, we'd see the possibility of distance -- the kind implied in our ideas of freedom and individuality -- as the precondition of choices. What makes me happy, apparently, is the ability to choose.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

You've given me a lot to mull. Living in ideals and total abstraction is like refusing to live life - in the West it goes all the way back to ancient Gnostic Christian heresies and all that other good stuff, seeing the body and the world as the creation of the true agent of suffering and evil; the real, good world being the invisible inner light of the universe. Salvation is through denying our physical incarnation which was created out of evil and is in itself an agent of only suffering and misery, and achieving a oneness with the abstract, true, good light of the universe.

Yes, this stuff influenced so much of Western Christianity it's crazy. There's nothing wrong with embracing our bodies ... and you know ... there's nothing wrong if something feels good ... just let yourself relax and go with it. That's it.

It's the earl grey

[(Anonymous)]

I feel this was one of your best writings on japan as an idea and it brought up several questions as I read it.

First I am not sure that Japanese woman being viewed as "behind" comes exclusively from outside the country. As with the recent Yanagisawa (...baby-making machines...) issue, the outcry came from within Japan and was brought to the international press by japan (specifically minshuto) as a way of adding pressure to the situation.

Seeing the way many prominent women reacted at that time I think it would be equally patronizing to say these Japanese women have been taught to feel "behind" because of their western educations. Perhaps they simply see something in western woman's independence/power that they want to emulate for themselves - namely a greater public role in society. Though it is important to say that they want this in true wakon-yosai fashion.

The other question that your article leads me to is why all the interesting artists live outside japan? Art in Tokyo does lead one to conclude that the japanese as a whole are ...behind, or at least just not showing up.

Does being a Japanese artist require that one actually leave the social shell? I guess that would be a superlegitimate way of being an artist, but it would also seem that detachment is freedom for the artist in/from japan.

And since success as an artist in Japan almost certainly requires being a success abroad first, isn't it Japan's faith in the outside and and a neutral high-ground that leads it to refuse its own culture of here and now in favor of a here and now rooted in an almost absurdly devotional consumerism?

Re: It's the earl grey

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Those are interesting questions. I'm still turning all this stuff over in my mind too. The problem is that you can invent your own meanings for things ("freedom" is not freedom, I must remember that I really mean "futile detachment" when I say freedom!) and then forget you did it and revert to the old, good meanings of the words. It's a bit like being a bad liar and forgetting to make your lies consistent!

I just asked Hisae if she thought Japanese women were "behind" and she said no, the reverse. They're ahead. Japan is not a fighting, competitive society, she says.

I suppose whether one agrees with that perspective depends on whether one thinks an advanced consumer society like Japan is a better place for women because women are, in many ways, exemplary consumers who set the standard for products like the keitai telephone (the world's most feminine portable phone)... or whether you think a highly militarized society like Israel is a better place for women because women serve in the army there. Obviously I'd say the former, because there's more expression of femininity in a keitai phone than a machine gun. But I'm more of a femininist than a feminist!

I think it makes little sense to say that women in any society have a lesser role than men, because that sort of thinking relies on us defining society too narrowly. This is an issue I have with Betty Friedan's 1950s style feminism, which defined the world of women as a place with not much happening, and the world of men as the place where all the action was. That cooks the books, it seems to me. Was what happened in 1950s suburbs (unpaid) really less "real" than what happened in 1950s offices (paid)? Is what people do for love and in order to reproduce less "real" than what people do to turn a buck? Why should throwing people out into the labor market "liberate" them?

I think the art question is difficult, but it may be that art's sense of having a little critical ledge outside society, a place it can edge out onto, and make precarious judgements, is a Western conception that makes little sense. It's vastly compensated by the huge respect for, and exposure to, design in Japan. Design of course doesn't need (the illusion of) a little ledge outside of -- or above -- everything. It's right in there with the everyday, with society. It has no problem with commerce, and it doesn't insist on the concept of individual genius.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"whether the desire of some Western feminists to shun their own gender-specificity doesn't spring from a combination of detachment and disgust?"

Ah, you´re getting old, my friend.

Also: NO. it´s because non-gender specificity is fun! Or it would be, if people didn´t keep whining about it. Christ.

PS:

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Girls are scary! Throw theories at them!

Re: PS:

[(Anonymous)]

I am a girl and I am most scared and intrigued when boys talk calculus and trigonmetry. It confuses me! I am smarter than boys unless they talk math and they I get confused and think about my best iPhoto images. Because ultimately I like my images more than my boyfriend's calculus. If he could only illustratrate calculus like music and then we would have the great coming together that einstein fantasized about!

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I generally agree with you, but you pick some weird examples. Like, where are you finding these "Western feminists" who want "to shun their own gender-specificity"? I think the idea of doing that was a bit of rhetoric from the beginning of second-wave feminism, but no one aside from confused freshman liberal art students do that anymore. (The only women I know why want to shed the signifiers of their gender are the trannies, and they all do so by pretending to be fratboys!) And really, the "androgynous" style, from the 20s for instance, has become a fashion mainstay.

I also think it's interesting that, in all of this, you place yourself very carefully outside things, as an observer of society rather than a participant in it, no? How does culture change, how is it created?

Anyway, I wrote something kinda similar about punk rock last week:

"While you can argue that, say, Beethoven was 'punk in spirit,' his music did not prominently feature electric guitars playing two strings in the interval of a fifth in an eighth-note pattern with drums playing a straight 4/4 rhythm with kick on the 1 and 3 and snare on the 2 and 4 and electric bass playing eighth notes in the root of the chord and a singer yowling about unfairness. So calling something or someone 'punk in spirit' requires ignoring the art, since the art isn't usually punk, and focusing entirely on social concerns, or else looking like a dingus. Alternately, because "punk in spirit" has a positive connotation, it gets planted on things as a way of not just saying 'this is good,' but what looks punk is merely cluelessness, or stupidity, or jerkiness. You can be an asshole and be punk in spirit, but you can't just be an asshole."

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

In their worldwide Religion II survey in 1998, the International Social Survey Program found that 55% of people in Japan consider themselves Buddhist, 26% 'neo-religious', 13% non-religious and 3% Christian.

While these are the lowest rates of religious belief in a Western country, they still show a substantial investment in 'transcendental' values and ontology.

If there is something like 'superlegitimacy' in Japan, then it is despite widespead religious belief. Well, I say despite, but of course the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Unpack the baggage (verbiage?)

[kquijote.livejournal.com]

Interesting post, on the whole. Methinks I detect a crucible of conflated and contradictory messages in this line however: "the desire of some Western feminists to shun their own gender-specificity". Putting the questionable validity of the premise aside ;-) (and arguably you cover your a** by saying "some", which is almost always safe to say - about some things ;-)

I'm stuck with a chicken-and-egg dilemma. From whence cometh gender-specificity? Isn't part of the point of feminist theorizing and other theorizing that includes some focus on identity-formation and power relations that dominant societal role demands can swing extremely and debilitatingly, e.g, Madonna-Whore. In part there is the impossibility of ever clarifying the "appropriate" gender-specific role, no? Let alone conforming to "it". Though you seem to detect some specific (essential?) femininity that Japanese women (on the whole?) embrace (?!?) Hmmm. Can you paint us a picture?

Aren't you positing an idea or universal of gender-specificity in saying that it can be shunned? So the critique of (some) Western women is itself snarled in Western dichotomizing.

And whether one critiques or embraces one role or another aren't we always already "just here, just now" anyway? Doesn't seem to me to be something we can control ;-) What am I missing?

Abrazos,
K.

[maybeimdead.livejournal.com]

"And it's hard not to wonder -- in the face of an obvious deep delight in being female in Japan, an obvious glow, a dolly swagger -- whether the desire of some Western feminists to shun their own gender-specificity doesn't spring from a combination of detachment and disgust?"

Is there no delight in being a female elsewhere? Can someone tell me whether this is truth?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course there is. But the girliness in Japan is something you just can't help noticing. The way women dress is totally unapologetic. I often hear Western women saying "I'd love to dress like that, but I wouldn't be able to get away with it". Or Japanese women saying "I can dress sexy in Japan, but not in the West".

[freesurfboards.livejournal.com]

This is really wonderful - it's a hard thing to explain. Intresting that you used a temporal event (what can be more temporary than a forum post) to springboard into your point. How different you've become since "Murderers, the hope of women".

But the flip side is that this attitude has been used to fuel dictatorships. What can you do when you are asked to have a role that has fear around every corner? And isn't it possible that society can ask you to rebel?

[(Anonymous)]

Q: What do you call a male tea-bag?

A: A hebrew.

[(Anonymous)]

Do they sachet around?

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

Hi Momus,

Do you believe a clitorectomy is prima facie bad? Or can there be extenuating cultural circumstances?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Doesn't "prima facie" mean "at first sight"? At first sight, clitorectomy is of course very bad. At first cut I'm sure it's even worse, and I would probably faint either to have it done, or even to see it done. On the other hand, I saw a documentary in which a Western female anthropologist was saying that the practise is widely misunderstood in the West, and that it by no means spells the end of female sexual pleasure. It's become a football in arguments about cultural relativism, especially for those who want to say that cultural relativism is A Bad Thing.

[(Anonymous)]

Excellent essay. Is there a published collection of these available anywhere?

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

http://imomus.livejournal.com/

How timely

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

Friends and I have been discussing these very matters of which you speak. It seems like such a male, pointed way to discuss what is most female.

One of my favorite things about learning about Eastern philosophies is that they experience the transcendent not as other, or outside, but as imminent, and existing in the eternal present.

Beyond the God/no God argument, which universe will have more to offer us? The one we respectfully see as sentient in its own right, or the one we see as merely a scientific study?

I eagerly await the day when we realize science and spirituality do not need to be enemies, but complementary arts of the human mind. We will only see this when we have no other choice.

Re: How timely

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< I eagerly await the day when we realize science and spirituality do not need to be enemies, but complementary arts of the human mind. We will only see this when we have no other choice. >>

What? Plenty of thinkers understand science+spirituality. Wasn't Einstein a pretty spiritual guy?

<< We will only see this when we have no other choice.>>

What? I think we see this now.

Culture is not your friend.

[(Anonymous)]

"Culture is not your friend."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOy3H4yyocQ

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

I'm moving to Okinawa, where the girls are WAY different than on the mainland. It'll be refreshing to get away from the hypercute, irritatingly nasal women of Yamatoo.

[(Anonymous)]

I am way too late, but I still want to lodge a complaint against the word "superlegitimacy." You are not talking about the legitimacy these people have, but instead, the obedience and responsibility they hold. Used in context of a society where legitimacy is so important for determining the correctness of action, this term gets really confusing.

I don't mean this in a bitchy way: read Confucius. You are describing a perfectly Confucian world view, where society is natural order and we all have our places in that. I think you would enjoy reading Confucius.

The next question is whether the nation-state is allowed to become the locus of social order. Are we all in service of the state? Where do we draw the lines of community? Where have you drawn yours?

Marxy

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

hi Momus,

I have a dream in which I imagine your blog in the distance and then I volunteer many insights into your thoughts in my momus imagination. Does that mean I'm stalking you.