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: 2004-11-08 08:27 am (UTC)1. On this thing about the Japanese interpreting punk as a fashion, I think the people who get punk wrong are people in Berlin or San Francisco. Assuming punk was a radical sectarian alternative lifestyle, these people dropped out of society to live in punk squats. This act was 'metaphysical' in the sense that it was based on the idea that 'reality is elsewhere' than society. In dropping out, though, all these punks ended up doing was becoming homeless, battling illness and the police. There was no 'punk infrastructure' to support them; no 'punk hospitals' or 'punk landlords'. What's more their punk garb, worn to this day as if it were not fashion but some kind of tribal folk dress, looks increasingly ridiculous. These 'lifestyle punks' have not stepped outside history, they have merely frozen a moment in its flux.
2. I also wanted to say that I find it very interesting that Alex Kerr is gay, and that his critique of Japan is largely visual. Or rather, that he starts with things he hates visually about postmodern Japan, like all the concrete, then tries to find the institutional 'problems' that generate it, like the 'corrupt bureaucracy'. Kerr is like a psychoanalyst: he gets to define what Japan's sickness is, then he gets to 'find' its source in an unexpected and hidden place. This is a 'paranoid critical method', some ghastly collision of metaphysics and conspiracy theory, which believes there is a hidden 'key', a plot, an unlikey, absent yet hugely important reality underlying every manifest thing.
3. In my essay Metaphysical Masochism of the Capitalist Creative (http://www.imomus.com/thought110100.html) I said that fetishist perverts and 'masochistic' creatives were the only western people to understand the Japanese way of thinking, because they go 'beyond the call of duty' and treat postmodern trash (pop records, graphic design, sex fetish) as if it were some sort of holy calling. This might be seen as a deviation, but it's a salutory one; the west is ruled by two 'conspiracies' or 'paranoias', the idea that everything is about money, and the idea that everything is about god. People who resist these 'paranoias' and actually focus on what's in front of them as if it really mattered for its own sake are, to me, heroes.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-08 09:03 am (UTC)I think the motivations behind 'Dogs and Demons' may be quite different from the ones that have been discussed here. Perhaps his claim (in interviews he has given about the book, and in the preface, I think) that he was prompted to write the book by Japanese friends is, in fact, true. Perhaps it's aim is constructive - to stimulate criticism aspects of the social system which are in crisis. It is certainly having that effect outside of Japan, and amongst resident foreigners. I heard that Kerr's popularity in Japan plummeted with the publication of this book. Criticism is taboo in Japan - but on the other hand it is listened to and responded to. In the recent media he has appeared in a more positively light again, and he is saying positive things about Japanese culture.
But I find myself defending a book which I don't really like myself - mainly because it seems to frame the criticism as a kind of implicit comparison with the USA. The USA is in much, much worse shape than Japan in most respects - we've certainly seen that is the case over the last week.
America-bashing
Date: 2004-11-08 10:20 am (UTC)America also has amazing examples of New Urbanism (like Seaside, Florida) where the concept hasn't even come to Japan yet. Nothing is perfect anywhere, but at least there are some people who are trying to move forward and correct past mistakes. 48% of the population did vote against Bush. How many Japanese people actually vote against the LDP?
Re: America-bashing
Date: 2004-11-08 10:39 am (UTC)There are many things to admire about the USA, but agressive economic and military policies are not two of them.
Thanks for the pointer to Seaside, Florida. Interesting, but it looks like a designer gated community.
Re: America-bashing
Date: 2004-11-08 10:51 am (UTC)In fact, where I live looks disturbingly similar to Seaside, Florida, with the important difference that it is fed by a train line instead of a freeway. I already spend all of my free time in the much higher population density urban environment where my girlfriend lives.
Re: America-bashing
Date: 2004-11-08 11:29 am (UTC)Re: America-bashing
Date: 2004-11-08 12:27 pm (UTC)A couple of years ago the place I work replaced all the toilets with those super-high-tech ones with heated seats and adjustments for water jet and air jet speed and direction.
I missed the old setup which gave one a choice between wa-fu (squat toilet, much more hygenic and a good stretch for the lower back) and simple yo-fu. The change eliminated the traditional Asian squat toilet, but Japanese co-worker reasoned that the heated toilet seats were profoundly Japanese because of the locality of the heating device.
The toilets were someone's genius idea for a way to blow some of the excess fiscal-year end budget.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-08 10:03 am (UTC)This review of Kerr's D&D book, A. Kobayashi, claims that Kerr's point of view is too Japanese:
"The trouble with being Japanaese is that your fellow Japanese won't understand what 'constructive criticism' means. Sadly, when someone points out what is wrong with today's Japan, it usually comes from non-Japanese writers, and this is yet another case in point. This book disappoints anyone who seeks root causes of Japan's ills today. Kerr is actually quite nice to the Japanese people by saying that it is Japan's inflated and constipated bureaucracy that is slow to adjust to modern society. People on the streets are largely spared of criticism. In fact, they are silently fuming over the stupidity of contructing worthless monuments and stadiums (Kerr should have waited for World Cup 2002, as Japan built dozens of useless football stadiums in the middle of nowhere). As Japanese myself, however, I would love to read something more about ordinary Japanese people, from whom the bureaucrats are recruited.
On the whole, however, this book elegantly sums up the reality of frustratingly inept public services in the coutry. I even wondered in the middle of reading this book whether Kerr is actually Japanese. His rather condescending American tone can easily be that of a typical Japanese rhetoric, pointing out how things are better in the (advanced) western countries (therefore we must change things in order to 'catch up' etc. etc.). However, Kerr is American obviously, and his criticism of modern Japanese architects shows his personal love for ancient Japan. It is this personal taste that is largely offended by 'Modern Japan' - he doesn't explore the possibility that Japan may be in transition from sharp focused modernisation/westenisation to creating something entirely new out of hitherto poorly executed east-west cultural mix. Doesn't any country pass an ugly cultural phase in its history? A lack of this kind of discussion undermines this book, even though I personally agree with what he is saying.
In fact, I can think of a large number of Japanese individuals who would heartly welcome Kerr's arguement. What is unfortunate is that this book reads more or less like cheap Japanese journalism, bashing lazy and selfish civil servants, who hold real power in Japan. Kerr has apparantely gone native."
Gay scholars of Japan
Date: 2004-11-08 10:15 am (UTC)Re: Gay scholars of Japan
Date: 2004-11-08 10:21 am (UTC)I suspect you have to be either gay or an alcoholic (or both) to have close male friends in Japan.