The Specular Self
Nov. 7th, 2004 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusOnce I wrote a song about an actor. And, as writers writing about actors are wont to do, I attacked him for being 'all image' and 'all front'. The song was 1998's 'Harry K-Tel' and the lyric describes the narrator's disgust at method actors who think they can
...hit on any girl in the world without denting your fronts
As if morals themselves are simply image
Like you've got this gold-plated credit card charisma to cover all the damage
The idea of charm, charisma and image being a dangerous and superficial distraction from substantive personal qualities like integrity, morality and depth is a familiar binary in western culture. It lies behind a lot of misogyny and homophobia; women and gays cannot be 'moral' because they rely too much on their appearance and on seduction. They use their 'cosmetics' and 'wiles' to charm and beguile us rather than winning us over with good conduct and consistent character. Gay writers have been as fascinated with this idea as anyone else, although they've treated it with more ambivalence, from Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray to 'Three Month Story', Gary Indiana's book about gay confidence trickster Andrew Cunanan, killer of Gianni Versace.
'Don't judge a book by the cover,' we're told. 'Beauty is only skin deep!' 'Handsome is as handsome does!' Western culture consistently denigrates the visual, seeming to agree wholeheartedly with Groucho Marx: 'Why believe your own eyes when you can believe me?' In a metaphysical tradition that goes back to Plato, we believe that ultimate reality is something absent and invisible. Christianity names this ultimate reality 'God' whereas Plato names it 'the Ideas'. But in both traditions it's equally absent, and equally invisible. You acknowledge reality with words, the verbal: 'in the beginning was the word'. Visual representations are frowned on in Christianity as in Islam, which, when it reached Indonesia, forced the puppet-makers to disguise their puppets as monsters to contravene the ban on the representation of human forms.
I've become convinced that the people who denigrate Japan are people who feel uneasy with its visual orientation as well as its collapse of western notions of surface and depth. In many cases, these are the same people who mistrust visual professionals like designers and architects, and have, at the very least, mixed feelings about women and gays. Postmodernism and Japan both, to these people, seem to threaten the established western hierarchy which puts the verbal above the visual. The verbal is seen as a direct route to reality, whereas the visual is mere distraction. The verbal is reassuringly universal, the visual misleadingly specific. A photographer in the West has to title his book (as Wolfgang Tillmans did) 'If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters', almost as if to apologize for the specificity of photographs, to give each snap of each specific thing the kind of link to univerals that language automatically has (in fact, language's reductiveness is the key to its effectiveness as a means of communication -- it strips away specificity until we all think we're talking about the same thing).
The other day a Japanese person posted a comment after my entry on ethnocentric Japanology mentioning Lacan's statement that Japanese could never be successfully psychoanalysed: Lacan suggested that the Japanese language is so complex and polyvalent that the Japanese have their unconscious on the surface all the time, or have no unconscious, perhaps. It's true that to this day there are almost no western-style psychoanalysts in Japan. But the idea that the unconscious might be on the surface of Japan's culture rather than hidden in 'depths' which only psychoanalysts and priests have access to is a fascinating one. It ties in with a similar idea about the different way guilt works in Japan. In 1946 anthropologist Ruth Benedict published a book called 'The Chrysanthemum and the Sword'. The book divided the world into 'shame' and 'guilt' cultures. In guilt cultures there's a personal sense of morality deep in the individual which makes him feel guilty if he transgresses against God's law. In shame cultures everything is on the surface, out in public. Shame only results when the community condemns someone, and only for as long as it keeps condemning.
Wilton S. Dillon of the Smithsonian Institute read Benedict's book and it changed his life. In the late 40s he was a civilian on General MacArthur’s staff during the occupation of Japan. 'As part of the Allied demilitarization effort,' he writes, 'I was supposed to help make the then 90 million Japanese feel guilty for the war. Ruth Benedict’s book offered a reality check by distinguishing between “shame” and “guilt” cultures. I gave up the guilt quest and embraced anthropology as a vocation aimed at reducing my naïveté.'
Britain's Chief Rabbi, Professor Jonathan Sacks, sees postmodern Britain turning from a Judeo-Christian guilt-based culture into a Japanese-style shame culture:
'It seems to me that Britain, once biblical in its values, has now become a shame culture. What counts today is public image - hence the replacement of prophets by public relations practitioners, and the ten commandments by three new rules: Thou shalt not be found out, thou shalt not admit, thou shalt not apologise. It's a bad exchange. A shame culture turns mistakes into tragedies. A guilt culture turns them into learning experiences. I know which I prefer.'
But of course in Japan, as everyone knows, there is no end of apologising. Or is it just the appearance of apology? And if it is, is there anything wrong with that? If the unconscious is on the surface, and virtue is on the surface, why not apology too? Doesn't it all make for a fabulously vibrant and spectacular public life?
Ah, that word 'spectacular' -- Guy Debord of course wrote The Society of the Spectacle to condemn a west which was turning from a verbal culture into a visual one. In his post-Marxian analysis, spectacular visual cultures can't be criticized or challenged. Spectacle becomes a means for power to put itself beyond all criticism and attack. But Debord died before the advent of the internet and digital culture. The spectacular society he saw developing was a highly centralised one in which media professionals were well ahead of the general public. But what if everyone mastered the skills of visual presentation? What if everyone developed the 'front' that only actors have so far been able to manipulate? What if everyone became Japanese, a kabuki actor? Catholics and Italians are already halfway there -- the concept of bella figura, confession, and 'the theatre of everyday life' are familiar examples of 'specular' and 'shame' culture in Italy. In the US, mediatised therapy culture and a Nietzschean theatre of self-improvement and self-PR have joined in the form of spectacular public confessions, both in celebrity interviews and on shows like Oprah and Springer and on 'reality TV'.
Timothy Leuers, a psychologist based in Japan, thinks there are still major differences between the emerging American 'spectacular self' and the long-established Japanese 'specular self'. For a start, Americans seem to believe their own hype:
'Most Americans think that they are in the top quartile of social intelligence and creativity. Americans will make false claims of self consistency as in the "I told you so" bias. Americans will tell you that they have knowledge that could not possibly exist (since it is knowledge about non existent events) and get angry when this fact is pointed out to them. In short Americans have a selective attention - they will ignore negative information about the self and concentrate on their positive, socially desirable aspects. Indeed, the only Americans that have given neutral self appraisals are undergoing treatment for depression. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, there is nothing surprising about this. This selective attention, editing, ignoring, and creating a positive self image is nothing other than the ego at work. However, all the above measures of self enhancement show neutrality or even self depreciation when applied to the Japanese.
'My own work on "visual self enhancement" suggests however that the Japanese do have a positive self regard when it is confined, literally, to the regard or the gaze. I claim that they enhance their self-image, or the imaginary representation that they maintain of themselves. Give a Japanese a piece of paper and ask him to write about himself and he will portray himself as the same as the next guy. Give him a camera and he will suddenly become appealing, positive and upright. There would seem to be a much greater importance placed on the visual sign rather than the phonetic. From this data I have suggested the existence of a mature "specular self" in Japan.'
The specular self, a lightly floating element in a 'shame society' where guilt as we know it doesn't exist. A society where you apologize with a deep bow, but never have to prove that you're 'really' sorry 'deep down'. A society in which morals themselves really are just image, but where image isn't denigrated but treated with the utmost respect. A society in which the unconscious is up on the surface for all to see and share, where the unconscious is not structured 'like a language' but appears as a sequence of pictures. A society where personal life and public life are one and the same thing. A society without shadows or metaphysics or God. What's not to love?
...hit on any girl in the world without denting your fronts
As if morals themselves are simply image
Like you've got this gold-plated credit card charisma to cover all the damage
The idea of charm, charisma and image being a dangerous and superficial distraction from substantive personal qualities like integrity, morality and depth is a familiar binary in western culture. It lies behind a lot of misogyny and homophobia; women and gays cannot be 'moral' because they rely too much on their appearance and on seduction. They use their 'cosmetics' and 'wiles' to charm and beguile us rather than winning us over with good conduct and consistent character. Gay writers have been as fascinated with this idea as anyone else, although they've treated it with more ambivalence, from Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray to 'Three Month Story', Gary Indiana's book about gay confidence trickster Andrew Cunanan, killer of Gianni Versace.
'Don't judge a book by the cover,' we're told. 'Beauty is only skin deep!' 'Handsome is as handsome does!' Western culture consistently denigrates the visual, seeming to agree wholeheartedly with Groucho Marx: 'Why believe your own eyes when you can believe me?' In a metaphysical tradition that goes back to Plato, we believe that ultimate reality is something absent and invisible. Christianity names this ultimate reality 'God' whereas Plato names it 'the Ideas'. But in both traditions it's equally absent, and equally invisible. You acknowledge reality with words, the verbal: 'in the beginning was the word'. Visual representations are frowned on in Christianity as in Islam, which, when it reached Indonesia, forced the puppet-makers to disguise their puppets as monsters to contravene the ban on the representation of human forms.
I've become convinced that the people who denigrate Japan are people who feel uneasy with its visual orientation as well as its collapse of western notions of surface and depth. In many cases, these are the same people who mistrust visual professionals like designers and architects, and have, at the very least, mixed feelings about women and gays. Postmodernism and Japan both, to these people, seem to threaten the established western hierarchy which puts the verbal above the visual. The verbal is seen as a direct route to reality, whereas the visual is mere distraction. The verbal is reassuringly universal, the visual misleadingly specific. A photographer in the West has to title his book (as Wolfgang Tillmans did) 'If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters', almost as if to apologize for the specificity of photographs, to give each snap of each specific thing the kind of link to univerals that language automatically has (in fact, language's reductiveness is the key to its effectiveness as a means of communication -- it strips away specificity until we all think we're talking about the same thing).
The other day a Japanese person posted a comment after my entry on ethnocentric Japanology mentioning Lacan's statement that Japanese could never be successfully psychoanalysed: Lacan suggested that the Japanese language is so complex and polyvalent that the Japanese have their unconscious on the surface all the time, or have no unconscious, perhaps. It's true that to this day there are almost no western-style psychoanalysts in Japan. But the idea that the unconscious might be on the surface of Japan's culture rather than hidden in 'depths' which only psychoanalysts and priests have access to is a fascinating one. It ties in with a similar idea about the different way guilt works in Japan. In 1946 anthropologist Ruth Benedict published a book called 'The Chrysanthemum and the Sword'. The book divided the world into 'shame' and 'guilt' cultures. In guilt cultures there's a personal sense of morality deep in the individual which makes him feel guilty if he transgresses against God's law. In shame cultures everything is on the surface, out in public. Shame only results when the community condemns someone, and only for as long as it keeps condemning.
Wilton S. Dillon of the Smithsonian Institute read Benedict's book and it changed his life. In the late 40s he was a civilian on General MacArthur’s staff during the occupation of Japan. 'As part of the Allied demilitarization effort,' he writes, 'I was supposed to help make the then 90 million Japanese feel guilty for the war. Ruth Benedict’s book offered a reality check by distinguishing between “shame” and “guilt” cultures. I gave up the guilt quest and embraced anthropology as a vocation aimed at reducing my naïveté.'
Britain's Chief Rabbi, Professor Jonathan Sacks, sees postmodern Britain turning from a Judeo-Christian guilt-based culture into a Japanese-style shame culture:
'It seems to me that Britain, once biblical in its values, has now become a shame culture. What counts today is public image - hence the replacement of prophets by public relations practitioners, and the ten commandments by three new rules: Thou shalt not be found out, thou shalt not admit, thou shalt not apologise. It's a bad exchange. A shame culture turns mistakes into tragedies. A guilt culture turns them into learning experiences. I know which I prefer.'
But of course in Japan, as everyone knows, there is no end of apologising. Or is it just the appearance of apology? And if it is, is there anything wrong with that? If the unconscious is on the surface, and virtue is on the surface, why not apology too? Doesn't it all make for a fabulously vibrant and spectacular public life?
Ah, that word 'spectacular' -- Guy Debord of course wrote The Society of the Spectacle to condemn a west which was turning from a verbal culture into a visual one. In his post-Marxian analysis, spectacular visual cultures can't be criticized or challenged. Spectacle becomes a means for power to put itself beyond all criticism and attack. But Debord died before the advent of the internet and digital culture. The spectacular society he saw developing was a highly centralised one in which media professionals were well ahead of the general public. But what if everyone mastered the skills of visual presentation? What if everyone developed the 'front' that only actors have so far been able to manipulate? What if everyone became Japanese, a kabuki actor? Catholics and Italians are already halfway there -- the concept of bella figura, confession, and 'the theatre of everyday life' are familiar examples of 'specular' and 'shame' culture in Italy. In the US, mediatised therapy culture and a Nietzschean theatre of self-improvement and self-PR have joined in the form of spectacular public confessions, both in celebrity interviews and on shows like Oprah and Springer and on 'reality TV'.
Timothy Leuers, a psychologist based in Japan, thinks there are still major differences between the emerging American 'spectacular self' and the long-established Japanese 'specular self'. For a start, Americans seem to believe their own hype:
'Most Americans think that they are in the top quartile of social intelligence and creativity. Americans will make false claims of self consistency as in the "I told you so" bias. Americans will tell you that they have knowledge that could not possibly exist (since it is knowledge about non existent events) and get angry when this fact is pointed out to them. In short Americans have a selective attention - they will ignore negative information about the self and concentrate on their positive, socially desirable aspects. Indeed, the only Americans that have given neutral self appraisals are undergoing treatment for depression. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, there is nothing surprising about this. This selective attention, editing, ignoring, and creating a positive self image is nothing other than the ego at work. However, all the above measures of self enhancement show neutrality or even self depreciation when applied to the Japanese.
'My own work on "visual self enhancement" suggests however that the Japanese do have a positive self regard when it is confined, literally, to the regard or the gaze. I claim that they enhance their self-image, or the imaginary representation that they maintain of themselves. Give a Japanese a piece of paper and ask him to write about himself and he will portray himself as the same as the next guy. Give him a camera and he will suddenly become appealing, positive and upright. There would seem to be a much greater importance placed on the visual sign rather than the phonetic. From this data I have suggested the existence of a mature "specular self" in Japan.'
The specular self, a lightly floating element in a 'shame society' where guilt as we know it doesn't exist. A society where you apologize with a deep bow, but never have to prove that you're 'really' sorry 'deep down'. A society in which morals themselves really are just image, but where image isn't denigrated but treated with the utmost respect. A society in which the unconscious is up on the surface for all to see and share, where the unconscious is not structured 'like a language' but appears as a sequence of pictures. A society where personal life and public life are one and the same thing. A society without shadows or metaphysics or God. What's not to love?
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 12:23 pm (UTC)i think people are getting too lazy to read words.
Indeed
Date: 2004-11-07 12:25 pm (UTC)