Absent without leaving
Dec. 27th, 2009 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThe greater Tokyo area has just under 36 million people living in it; it's still the world's most populous metropolitan area. If this monster of cities runs remarkably smoothly most of the time, and even feels like a rather relaxing place, it's because of the particular, even peculiar, habitus of presence which prevails here. Tokyo people are very good at being absent without leaving.
Tokyo's inhabitants, especially in their transitions on public transport, maintain a minimum degree of presence. Crushed against each other or spread out on seats, with lowered eyes and the virtual escape-environments of books, newspapers and electronic gadgets, they're there but not there. They're (it's Howard Devoto's phrase) absent without leaving.
A certain amount of discretion and self-minimisation exists amongst commuters all over the world, of course. But the Japanese are more discreet, and minimise themselves more politely and considerately than anyone else I know. Even their houses seem to avert their gaze; you can pass down a heavily-built Tokyo street with the sense of being completely unobserved, thanks to the frosted glass in the windows, just as you can sit in a crowded train carriage and not find a single eye meeting yours. It can feel uncanny at times, like being an invisible man. Most of the time it's very reassuring, though. You soon miss it in other cities.
Adjectives I'd use to describe this minimised public presence: discreet, considerate, polite, apologetic, cold, withdrawn, inward, socialised, repressed. And there we begin to hit on an interesting paradox: you withdraw into yourself in the interests of the collectivity. Your absence is highly social, even when it resembles a semi-autistic withdrawal. You turn inward to facilitate outward smoothness. You make yourself ghostlike out of courtesy to other people, who do the same.
When you get to your destination, of course, the sublimation and repression can stop. You can suddenly elevate your presence, like the glum silent queuer finally reaching the nightclub, checking his coat, greeting his friends, ordering a drink. What's the maximum degree of presence? Perhaps being a celebrity would represent that: a celeb is a super-individual, someone whose mere presence makes our day, our month and our year. Quick, take a photo! The celeb is being asked his view on this and that, and listened to respectfully. The celeb has engineered his life so that there's no dead time, no self-repression. Like a Romantic poet, we imagine his life filled with moments of maximal intensity. We wish our lives were like that.
The other person like that, weirdly enough, is the madman or homeless person, who lives completely in the moment because he uses the spaces of transition as his places of residence. The street or the train is the homeless person's destination; no need to sublimate, save up intensity for later. This is it; grumble, chatter, joust, laugh, be yourself, right here on the street, right here on the train! It doesn't matter! You're going nowhere! You're mad and you're homeless! The obligation to be self-effacing and considerate doesn't apply to you! Be intense! Live in the moment! Make every second count!
For the rest of us, though, self-repression is a daily fact of life. Especially in conditions of urban density; we could say that density and intensity are at odds. The more dense the urban conditions, the less intense we want people to be as they transition through public space, the more ghostlike we require each other to be. Don't talk on your cellphone! I know it makes you feel like a celebrity, feel more alive and intense, but please don't do it! What if we were all celebrities in this carriage? What if all 36 million of us in this city were super-intense individuals at every moment! What a nightmare! Let's all stay ghosts, please, at least until we reach our destination!
Japan being Japan, of course, has developed aesthetics of non-presence, turning something negative into something positive with its own etiquette and its own subtle beauty, and giving non-presence a sort of presence. Iki describes something muted, sombre, restrained, apparently-unselfconscious, half turned-away, "an aesthetics of the back, of the nape of the neck. It can't be face-to-face. It's an aesthetic of obliqueness and peripheries which avoids focus and despises intellectual analysis". A woman whose seductiveness has an iki quality would, paradoxically, turn her turning-away towards you as she dropped her gaze and revealed her back, her shoulder, the nape of her neck. An absence becomes a presence; it's something I see enacted by women on Tokyo trains every day.
A related aesthetic might be Naoto Fukusawa's idea of the super normal; self-effacing, slightly bland goods that blend comfortably with others are better than loud, flashy, unique, individualistic goods. "Super normal design means design which, instead of trying to stand out by making a statement or being "stimulating", blends into the background, becoming unobtrusive but indispensable."
You might seek maximum intensity in an affair with a lover, perhaps, but smooth, unobtrusive consideration in a longterm relationship with a spouse; the perfect spousal togetherness might approach a discreet, doubled aloneness, whereas the perfect affair intensity would be the unbearable tangle of two celebrities, two Romantic poets, or two mad homeless people.
At the tragic end of intensity is the individual who becomes intolerable when his quirks get amplified by too much attention: "everyone loves you until they know you," as John Lydon sang. At the tragic end of self-effacing consideration is the self which disappears and can't come back, even when the destination-requiring-presence is reached. So we get the otaku, unable to emerge from the pages of his manga, or the hikikomori, who can't even leave home in the first place, and who's taken consideration to its ultimate degree of absence: that barricaded room where the self both disappears from the world and becomes the world.
Momus appears tonight between 6 and 8pm as The Unreliable Tour Guide at Now Idea, Omote Sando.
Tokyo's inhabitants, especially in their transitions on public transport, maintain a minimum degree of presence. Crushed against each other or spread out on seats, with lowered eyes and the virtual escape-environments of books, newspapers and electronic gadgets, they're there but not there. They're (it's Howard Devoto's phrase) absent without leaving.
A certain amount of discretion and self-minimisation exists amongst commuters all over the world, of course. But the Japanese are more discreet, and minimise themselves more politely and considerately than anyone else I know. Even their houses seem to avert their gaze; you can pass down a heavily-built Tokyo street with the sense of being completely unobserved, thanks to the frosted glass in the windows, just as you can sit in a crowded train carriage and not find a single eye meeting yours. It can feel uncanny at times, like being an invisible man. Most of the time it's very reassuring, though. You soon miss it in other cities.
Adjectives I'd use to describe this minimised public presence: discreet, considerate, polite, apologetic, cold, withdrawn, inward, socialised, repressed. And there we begin to hit on an interesting paradox: you withdraw into yourself in the interests of the collectivity. Your absence is highly social, even when it resembles a semi-autistic withdrawal. You turn inward to facilitate outward smoothness. You make yourself ghostlike out of courtesy to other people, who do the same.
When you get to your destination, of course, the sublimation and repression can stop. You can suddenly elevate your presence, like the glum silent queuer finally reaching the nightclub, checking his coat, greeting his friends, ordering a drink. What's the maximum degree of presence? Perhaps being a celebrity would represent that: a celeb is a super-individual, someone whose mere presence makes our day, our month and our year. Quick, take a photo! The celeb is being asked his view on this and that, and listened to respectfully. The celeb has engineered his life so that there's no dead time, no self-repression. Like a Romantic poet, we imagine his life filled with moments of maximal intensity. We wish our lives were like that.
The other person like that, weirdly enough, is the madman or homeless person, who lives completely in the moment because he uses the spaces of transition as his places of residence. The street or the train is the homeless person's destination; no need to sublimate, save up intensity for later. This is it; grumble, chatter, joust, laugh, be yourself, right here on the street, right here on the train! It doesn't matter! You're going nowhere! You're mad and you're homeless! The obligation to be self-effacing and considerate doesn't apply to you! Be intense! Live in the moment! Make every second count!
For the rest of us, though, self-repression is a daily fact of life. Especially in conditions of urban density; we could say that density and intensity are at odds. The more dense the urban conditions, the less intense we want people to be as they transition through public space, the more ghostlike we require each other to be. Don't talk on your cellphone! I know it makes you feel like a celebrity, feel more alive and intense, but please don't do it! What if we were all celebrities in this carriage? What if all 36 million of us in this city were super-intense individuals at every moment! What a nightmare! Let's all stay ghosts, please, at least until we reach our destination!
Japan being Japan, of course, has developed aesthetics of non-presence, turning something negative into something positive with its own etiquette and its own subtle beauty, and giving non-presence a sort of presence. Iki describes something muted, sombre, restrained, apparently-unselfconscious, half turned-away, "an aesthetics of the back, of the nape of the neck. It can't be face-to-face. It's an aesthetic of obliqueness and peripheries which avoids focus and despises intellectual analysis". A woman whose seductiveness has an iki quality would, paradoxically, turn her turning-away towards you as she dropped her gaze and revealed her back, her shoulder, the nape of her neck. An absence becomes a presence; it's something I see enacted by women on Tokyo trains every day.
A related aesthetic might be Naoto Fukusawa's idea of the super normal; self-effacing, slightly bland goods that blend comfortably with others are better than loud, flashy, unique, individualistic goods. "Super normal design means design which, instead of trying to stand out by making a statement or being "stimulating", blends into the background, becoming unobtrusive but indispensable."
You might seek maximum intensity in an affair with a lover, perhaps, but smooth, unobtrusive consideration in a longterm relationship with a spouse; the perfect spousal togetherness might approach a discreet, doubled aloneness, whereas the perfect affair intensity would be the unbearable tangle of two celebrities, two Romantic poets, or two mad homeless people.
At the tragic end of intensity is the individual who becomes intolerable when his quirks get amplified by too much attention: "everyone loves you until they know you," as John Lydon sang. At the tragic end of self-effacing consideration is the self which disappears and can't come back, even when the destination-requiring-presence is reached. So we get the otaku, unable to emerge from the pages of his manga, or the hikikomori, who can't even leave home in the first place, and who's taken consideration to its ultimate degree of absence: that barricaded room where the self both disappears from the world and becomes the world.
Momus appears tonight between 6 and 8pm as The Unreliable Tour Guide at Now Idea, Omote Sando.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-27 02:59 am (UTC)Regret
Date: 2009-12-27 03:02 am (UTC)Your ponderings will be sadly missed when you hang up your blogging shoes.
Whatever shall we do ?
I for one wish you would turn your hand to some kind of situationist guide book to Tokyo, or perhaps a novel set there.
Please do inform us what you will do with all the valuable free time being blog free will gift you, and whatever you do don't waste it !!
Best wishes.
Strange
Date: 2009-12-27 03:04 am (UTC)Howard
Date: 2009-12-27 03:12 am (UTC)We would also like to know your 4 favourite Devoto discs ?
Many thankings
&_&
Date: 2009-12-27 03:12 am (UTC)You've gone over Iki a few times, and the people leaving comments have smashed it to utter boringness in their thorough examination and re-examination of it's sublties and origins, but I still find it, in its very nature something, in the end, not translatable and only experienced. the image you painted of the woman offering this, will always make my heart young. This idea is echoed through out their lives... and even in the process of making love it's self.
(Why did you end it the way you did... the last paragraph seems a bit tacked on, and not of the same energy or perfection. It's meant to balances things out, but... its sort of glassed over and not well connected with the themes repeated several times in the rest of the piece.)
Re: Regret
Date: 2009-12-27 03:29 am (UTC)Yes, weird about the Situationist references coming up in both our comments, but I was already thinking of a certain celebrity associated with Situationism while writing the piece. The John Lydon line I quoted might be a jibe at this celeb, who married a friend of the people I spent Christmas day with.
Now, this celebrity is full of very interesting ideas and anecdotes, but one can't help imagining that the very things that guarantee "no more dead time" for his interviewers guarantee quite a lot of dead time for a spouse who's heard them a hundred timed before. And it so happens that this celeb (filled with what Howard Devoto has called "deadening intensity") is a pivotal character in Western cultural history, a modern-day Svengali connecting Romanticism, Situationism, Punk Rock and New Romanticism. I like and admire this person a lot, but he takes individualism and self-performance into semi-tragic areas. He condemns "karaoke-celeb culture" but exemplifies a Romantic conception of the celebrity as pure authentic (and "deadening") intensity.
Re: &_&
Date: 2009-12-27 03:35 am (UTC)Yeats
Date: 2009-12-27 03:38 am (UTC)while the worst are full of passionate intensity
Too Many Peaks!
Date: 2009-12-27 03:54 am (UTC)Re: Regret
Date: 2009-12-27 04:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-27 04:38 am (UTC)Re: &_&
Date: 2009-12-27 04:47 am (UTC)I'm aready envisioning something from a Japanese horror movie... perhaps you'll be stuck up in an attic with only a little peep hole with which to view a lovers embrace with drunken suiters...where at some point you'll be driven to wits end and do away with these scoundrels in some knee-deep in gore way, or perhaps, something much more mundane... either way...
====
yes celebs, what a confused bunch.
Homeless Hikikomori
Date: 2009-12-27 04:54 am (UTC)Bong Joon-ho’s episode in the movie “Tokyo” featured a Hikikomori person too:
spectres de marx
Date: 2009-12-27 05:10 am (UTC)also a reaction to being "entertained" by the media, etc. make art, don't consume it, that kind of thing... it's more media-marxist than you're giving it credit.
Re: Yeats
Date: 2009-12-27 05:12 am (UTC)Yeats
there's nothing wabi sabi about workaholics
Date: 2009-12-27 05:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-27 05:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-27 05:51 am (UTC)i see what you mean - tokyo does certainly seem intense in its own way.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-27 06:51 am (UTC)Was it Malcolm McLaren?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-27 07:25 am (UTC)These words have absolutely no meaning in English! Taking their sounds and transcribing them into
katakanaitalics without any accompanying meaning is a well-known trick thatthe JapaneseEnglish speakers use!!; )
Re: there's nothing wabi sabi about workaholics
Date: 2009-12-27 08:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-27 09:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-27 11:24 am (UTC)I was wondering what one line in 'What Will Death Be Like' meant.
It's 'Death will be unlike the wedding guest's story, the ship drifting lost and the dead sailors sighing'.
Is it some kind of literary reference?
Greetings,
M
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-27 02:09 pm (UTC)Taylor Coleridge!
Re: &_&
Date: 2009-12-27 02:36 pm (UTC)" [...] the hikikomori, who can't even leave home in the first place, and who's taken consideration to its ultimate degree of absence: that barricaded room where the self both disappears from the world and becomes the world."
I've been in this state of mind for a very long time but I'm working on being less reclusive.
FrF