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imomusI 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?
"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?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 11:59 am (UTC)Er, a rip-off for me, and a Rolls for 'im?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZquqWEgjhU
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 12:05 pm (UTC)"Lads, lads, if only it were so simple... Bring the electricity, Slater."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 12:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 12:31 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 12:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 12:34 pm (UTC)I'm currently learning it from here (http://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/english/index.html).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 12:36 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 12:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 01:02 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 01:03 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 01:23 pm (UTC)Oh dear, I'm cutting off my "no"s to spite my face here!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 01:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 01:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 01:36 pm (UTC)Thank you, for helping my brain not atrophy here in the land of saccharine and intellectual sloth.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 01:46 pm (UTC)Isn't this just the West up until the last century? A Stuckist Society.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 01:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 01:57 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 02:02 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 02:02 pm (UTC)Thought provoking essay though, thanks...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 02:03 pm (UTC)It's the earl grey
Date: 2007-02-28 02:14 pm (UTC)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?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 02:21 pm (UTC)Its little less business-y than the NHK site, and quite thorough.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 02:27 pm (UTC)I just don't understand why you need to reduce such an interesting argument to this odd and narrowly-defined view of femininity.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 02:29 pm (UTC)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:
Date: 2007-02-28 02:33 pm (UTC)