Is your daily paper transvaluing values?
Jan. 15th, 2009 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusAs 2009 dawned, I found myself rearranging my newspaper bookmarks. The website of UK newspaper The Guardian has been my main -- almost exclusive -- newspaper site for years; I hit the front page several times a day. But this year, for various reasons, I've felt the need to see whether I can replace The Guardian with something else. I turned to two rather odd newspapers, The International Herald Tribune and the Japan Times.
These papers are odd because they're, in some way, parachuted into the cities they're based in, Paris and Tokyo. They're both English-language papers in non-English-speaking capitals, and there's a blurriness and precariousness in their identity which I find, actually, very valuable, and which matches something in my own. I also like a certain quietness and restraint in their manner. Until fairly recently, the culture section of the Japan Times, for instance, was dominated by a column on yakimono pottery.
The International Herald Tribune (the only newspaper I've ever heard David Bowie endorse, incidentally) may speak English, but its outlook is cosmopolitan. It's linked with Monocle magazine and The New York Times. But it also covers Paris rather well; there's an interesting video story today (very much in the style of the video reports on the Monocle site) about the progress of new Paris art centre Le CentQuatre. The lead story on the paper's front page this morning was a style story: In the lap of luxury, Paris squirms. The focus was on how the recession is impacting luxury fashion brands, but I liked the way writer Elaine Sciolino presented this: "The recession brings anxiety to France but also a welcomed values debate on the French way of life."
"Only in France is the recession lauded for posing a crisis in values," writes Sciolino. "There is... an underlying satisfaction here that an era of sometimes vulgar high living is over and that a more bedrock French way of life will emerge. Some French intellectuals want to go much further, calling for the death of the entire luxury industry as a sort of national ritual of purification. "Since the ancient Greeks, luxury goods have always been stamped with the seal of immorality," said Gilles Lipovetsky, a sociologist who has written several books about consumerism. "They represent waste, the superficial, the inequality of wealth. They have no need to exist."
This is a post-materialist message, and it's something I don't find much of in the Anglo papers, even The Guardian. On the front page of The Guardian today we had Dan Black, one of the paper's music tips for 2009 -- a somewhat annoying young man who sounds like an estate agent doing karaoke versions of Britney Spears numbers -- telling the paper that in ten years time "I'll either be swimming in a swimming pool full of champagne and diamonds or crying in a gutter trying to get ten pounds to buy a bag of skag." Black, like Britain, is still oriented to America, to consumerism as a selfish "guilty pleasure", to money-as-drugs, to bling. His vision of his future in Britain is a parody of a high Gini coefficient; he'll either be massively wealthy or homeless.
The cultural coverage in the Japan Times is much more to my taste. In the art section we have Donald Eubank on Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and his work with Brazil's catadores, people who recycle rubbish for a living: "An estimated 3,000-5,000 people live in the dump, 15,000 derive their income from activities related to it, and some that Muniz met in Jardim Gramacho come from families that had been working there for three generations. "These people are at the other end of consumer culture," he says. "I was expecting to see people who were beaten and broken, but they were survivors." His aim — besides the creative challenge — was to see... if the experience of creating art could change people".
There's a sense in both The International Herald Tribune and The Japan Times that the papers know what time it is; that they realise a "transvaluation of all values" (in Nietzsche's phrase) is necessary at this point. Even while it reports David Miliband's important public recognition that the War on Terror was a mistake, The Guardian doesn't seem to have taken this transvaluation thing on board. For instance, a story about a minister who said she saw "green shoots" in the UK economy basically takes for granted that green shoots mean economic growth, and that that's good, and its absence bad. There's no actual green perspective in the green shoots story -- it lacks the angle Sciolino wrote into her IHT story about how economic downturn is an opportunity to rethink priorities.
Another Japan Times story I love today is Antiforeigner discrimination is a right for Japanese people. Here, Gregory Clark plugs -- without mentioning him by name -- the ridiculous Debito Arudou (David Aldwinckle), who has plagued his host country with lawsuits alleging discrimination against foreigners (in, for instance, barring him from certain bathing houses frequented by troublesome Russian sailors). Clark boldly says something I've long believed too: "Japan girai — dislike of Japan — is an allergy that seems to afflict many Westerners here... It is time we admitted that at times the Japanese have the right to discriminate against some foreigners. If they do not, and Japan ends up like our padlocked, mutually suspicious Western societies, we will all be the losers."
What I enjoy here is that an article by a foreigner in a foreign newspaper takes the side of Japanese against foreigners. That seems to express very well the complexity and ambivalence of these cuckoo newspapers, and the awareness, typical of sensitive foreigners, of one's own fragility and awkwardness. This guilt, for me, is at the root of consideration for others. It transcends selfishness, and to achieve it you have to be slightly decentred, as these odd expat papers are. I think their willingness to transvalue values is all tied up with these newspapers' transplanted, lateral, parallax positions in foreign cities.
These papers are odd because they're, in some way, parachuted into the cities they're based in, Paris and Tokyo. They're both English-language papers in non-English-speaking capitals, and there's a blurriness and precariousness in their identity which I find, actually, very valuable, and which matches something in my own. I also like a certain quietness and restraint in their manner. Until fairly recently, the culture section of the Japan Times, for instance, was dominated by a column on yakimono pottery.
The International Herald Tribune (the only newspaper I've ever heard David Bowie endorse, incidentally) may speak English, but its outlook is cosmopolitan. It's linked with Monocle magazine and The New York Times. But it also covers Paris rather well; there's an interesting video story today (very much in the style of the video reports on the Monocle site) about the progress of new Paris art centre Le CentQuatre. The lead story on the paper's front page this morning was a style story: In the lap of luxury, Paris squirms. The focus was on how the recession is impacting luxury fashion brands, but I liked the way writer Elaine Sciolino presented this: "The recession brings anxiety to France but also a welcomed values debate on the French way of life."
"Only in France is the recession lauded for posing a crisis in values," writes Sciolino. "There is... an underlying satisfaction here that an era of sometimes vulgar high living is over and that a more bedrock French way of life will emerge. Some French intellectuals want to go much further, calling for the death of the entire luxury industry as a sort of national ritual of purification. "Since the ancient Greeks, luxury goods have always been stamped with the seal of immorality," said Gilles Lipovetsky, a sociologist who has written several books about consumerism. "They represent waste, the superficial, the inequality of wealth. They have no need to exist."
This is a post-materialist message, and it's something I don't find much of in the Anglo papers, even The Guardian. On the front page of The Guardian today we had Dan Black, one of the paper's music tips for 2009 -- a somewhat annoying young man who sounds like an estate agent doing karaoke versions of Britney Spears numbers -- telling the paper that in ten years time "I'll either be swimming in a swimming pool full of champagne and diamonds or crying in a gutter trying to get ten pounds to buy a bag of skag." Black, like Britain, is still oriented to America, to consumerism as a selfish "guilty pleasure", to money-as-drugs, to bling. His vision of his future in Britain is a parody of a high Gini coefficient; he'll either be massively wealthy or homeless.
The cultural coverage in the Japan Times is much more to my taste. In the art section we have Donald Eubank on Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and his work with Brazil's catadores, people who recycle rubbish for a living: "An estimated 3,000-5,000 people live in the dump, 15,000 derive their income from activities related to it, and some that Muniz met in Jardim Gramacho come from families that had been working there for three generations. "These people are at the other end of consumer culture," he says. "I was expecting to see people who were beaten and broken, but they were survivors." His aim — besides the creative challenge — was to see... if the experience of creating art could change people".
There's a sense in both The International Herald Tribune and The Japan Times that the papers know what time it is; that they realise a "transvaluation of all values" (in Nietzsche's phrase) is necessary at this point. Even while it reports David Miliband's important public recognition that the War on Terror was a mistake, The Guardian doesn't seem to have taken this transvaluation thing on board. For instance, a story about a minister who said she saw "green shoots" in the UK economy basically takes for granted that green shoots mean economic growth, and that that's good, and its absence bad. There's no actual green perspective in the green shoots story -- it lacks the angle Sciolino wrote into her IHT story about how economic downturn is an opportunity to rethink priorities.
Another Japan Times story I love today is Antiforeigner discrimination is a right for Japanese people. Here, Gregory Clark plugs -- without mentioning him by name -- the ridiculous Debito Arudou (David Aldwinckle), who has plagued his host country with lawsuits alleging discrimination against foreigners (in, for instance, barring him from certain bathing houses frequented by troublesome Russian sailors). Clark boldly says something I've long believed too: "Japan girai — dislike of Japan — is an allergy that seems to afflict many Westerners here... It is time we admitted that at times the Japanese have the right to discriminate against some foreigners. If they do not, and Japan ends up like our padlocked, mutually suspicious Western societies, we will all be the losers."
What I enjoy here is that an article by a foreigner in a foreign newspaper takes the side of Japanese against foreigners. That seems to express very well the complexity and ambivalence of these cuckoo newspapers, and the awareness, typical of sensitive foreigners, of one's own fragility and awkwardness. This guilt, for me, is at the root of consideration for others. It transcends selfishness, and to achieve it you have to be slightly decentred, as these odd expat papers are. I think their willingness to transvalue values is all tied up with these newspapers' transplanted, lateral, parallax positions in foreign cities.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-16 03:23 am (UTC)Look, I think you have a point. The rule of law and basic principles are important, and it's not super-cool to allow elites to make their own laws for their own circumstances. I'm not going to type out a rabid disagreement to what you've stated above.
But. This reminds me of that old chestnut, "human rights". People are keen on them, but they contradict each other so often that they don't provide a useful framework for real law. Real law itself has to leave huge gulfs of undecided territory to the discretion of judges and officials, because it too can only crudely predict the right course of action in any situation.
This -- the Russians banned from onsen thing -- is a more intimate sort of issue, more akin to when you have a feeling that someone's "screwing up the neighbourhood". The "no foreigners" rule discussed in Clark's article was introduced by an onsen operator who was allegedly near bankrupt as a consequence of his business's problems with drunken Russians. One operator, looking for an ad hoc measure that would actually work -- note the article suggests quite persuasively why various other types of bans would have been ineffective.
Note the rather evident lack of a system of apartheid or a slave class.Well, I think it's bogus that you think locking drunken buffoons out of a bathhouse in Japan because they're ruining the atmosphere and driving away the custom is the same as barring blacks from a diner in the Deep South because you think their great-grandparents should never have been freed. It's a stupid argument to be having: you're not even close to apples and apples, you've picked a dumb fucking analogy because it's a much stronger platform from which to argue your point than, you know, the real situation we're discussing. So, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave it alone.
Society, as well as being built on the rule of explicit law as you mention above, rests even more firmly on a fragile and nuanced web of implicit relations and concordant expectations. Instead of wanting to be the white guy who gatecrashes the onsen drunk and not knowing the protocols, how about working a little so that someone Japanese actually wants to invite you in? Staying at a Japanese ryokan or minshuku for the first time you don't have the faintest idea of appropriate behaviour, but it's certainly fascinating to learn about.I like to think of it as more like yoga -- you know, with an emphasis on flexibility. But "a society" -- what society are you talking about here? How does what I want have anything to do with it? I'm not in Otaru! I can tell you one thing though, if you arrived at my doorstep with your top-down-imposition-of-the-roughest-possible-societal-blueprint and demanded entrance to my living room I might say no :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-16 04:26 am (UTC)I think the real question we have, and which the broad strokes of "equality" don't really allow to be asked, is to what extent justice is done if we kick down the doors to this onsen with the iron fist of law.
If the condition for allowing peaceful foreigners to use the onsen is that we also have to allow the unruly Russians who instigated the ban in the first place, then we have merely taken the justice from one trough and transferred it to another. We have not achieved any objective increase in justice, and I think we need to ponder this instead of whitewashing it with the self-congratulation of "scoring one against the racist natives," as Arudou seems inclined to do.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-16 12:04 pm (UTC)The fair thing to do would be to throw people out if they dont behave -- the way it works everywhere. You dont bar an entire race because a few people who look like them were rude.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-16 12:00 pm (UTC)It is because not all whites are drunken buffoons and dont deserve to be treated that way. If you cant see that, you have a screw loose IMHO. I believe youre being intellectually dishonest if you refuse to acknowledge the reasons why we outlawed racial discrimination. We never put these laws in place as some kind of token gesture of compensation for bad behaviour against black people, we put these laws in place because we decided that holding someone in a negative regard purely for the colour of their skin is wrong. You know this, I know this.
"Instead of wanting to be the white guy who gatecrashes the onsen drunk and not knowing the protocols, how about working a little so that someone Japanese actually wants to invite you in? "
Thats a little hard when if your host doesnt want to deal with you period because of the colour of your skin. I know the protocol of an onsen, to automatically assume the character of someone because of their race is nonsense.
" I can tell you one thing though, if you arrived at my doorstep with your top-down-imposition-of-the-roughest-possible-societal-blueprint and demanded entrance to my living room I might say no"
Business premises are different to private property. What you're essentially trying to argue now is that people should be allowed to refuse to serve people because of their skin colour or race. You cant justify that, not to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-16 02:06 pm (UTC)2. I'm not being intellectually dishonest. I've considered my opinion and expressed it.
3. Pulling apart your phrase "we never put these laws in place as some kind of token gesture", (a) I didn't say that "we" did, (b) there is no "we" that includes you, me and Japan, (c) if there were such a "we" it wouldn't be responsible for a single body of law that applied to all of us.
4. The Clark article is about justifying an exception to the application of a wider principle. I liked it and accepted its justification based on my own incomplete knowledge and the information it provided. You didn't. Perhaps you'd be better off refuting the arguments laid out in the article.
5. I think you would probably accept that sometimes when dearly held ideals meet with situations in the real world exceptions can be made, e.g. in the case of the right to free speech.
6. There are all kinds of spaces and privileges that you will be denied on every day of your life, for all kinds of reasons fair and unfair. I suggest that perhaps these onsen "straddle the boundary of public and private" and all you can do is start a bookkeeper's argument about how everything is either public or private and there's nothing in between. I think public / private is more of a continuum than a binary.