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?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 11:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 12:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 12:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 12:21 pm (UTC)Ha.
Date: 2004-11-07 12:21 pm (UTC)== Adrian ==
(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)Re: Ha.
Date: 2004-11-07 12:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 01:05 pm (UTC)Just earlier today my boyfriend had said to me, "It's strange...you seem to be able to acknowledge that stability/integrity/morality are good values, but you don't seem to care about them!"
I couldn't answer why at the time, but this entry has been incredibly eye opening!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 01:18 pm (UTC)The concept of "saving face" in Asian cultures is both realted to morals and to appearances, as if the two cannot be separated.
In my limited abstract investigations, I have come to the conclusion that ethics and aesthetics go hand in hand, and whatever conclusions one can make about one also apply to the other.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 01:30 pm (UTC)Why aren't I big in Japan yet?
Re: Ha.
Date: 2004-11-07 01:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 02:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 02:34 pm (UTC)I think the tragedy of Wilde's life is that he spent his rise amusing his British public by insulting them with this sort of sow's ear trick, then his fall paying the price, weathering their most terrible revenge. He died, of course, in France, but that really wasn't far enough away. He believed that his love for Bosie could happen in a paradisal bubble, far from the pigs with their piggish ideas. But he reckoned without the family ties that bound Bosie, through his dad, to some of the most important swine in the piggery. Those days have long gone, of course, but swine like Bosie's dad are still with us. Some of them just won power in the US.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 02:43 pm (UTC)Since you're speaking of Debord: what do you think of brand management? It seems to me big corporations (say Nike, Gap, etc) are just companies who manage their own brand, their own image, and let the "dirty work" (producing the shoes, the clothes, etc) to subcontractors. And talking to various people who are employees, it seems the way forward (for big or small companies). So we have 1) a Christian separation of the mind and body, the holy and the vile; and 2)a split of a "body" (the company) into several units who just perform one task (say a company of secretaries, a company for H.R tasks, etc), with just the image/brand company to manage less or more the whole thing, leading to everything being just a resource, including "humans". How do Japan works with capitalism? Are they superflat about their economy or is it like in the west, a nice image hiding all the dirt?
What's not to love?
Date: 2004-11-07 03:07 pm (UTC)When the government says, "We have to take over mainland Asia now," and everyone says, "Ok."
As much as you denigrate the metaphysical soul, I would argue that the Westerner is more likely to look deep within himself to say what is right or wrong, instead of looking to his neighbor. Bush looked within himself and found the answers in invading Iraq, so the system obviously has its flaws, but without guilt, Japan's moral stability depends on external guidance. And those higher authorities always lead with their own particular goals in mind.
Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 03:26 pm (UTC)We were discussing Tracy Emin over dinner last night and I told my friend about "Everyone I Ever Slept With" the song, so I figure it's best not to take things at face value sometimes?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 03:30 pm (UTC)Though it seems that the personal life is still one that remains unaddressed, not tended to, in favour of the upkeep of the public one. Arguably it could still be the same thing, if not for the fact that a majority of Japanese women still remain somewhat discontent with their relationships, even though by all counts the public aspect(successful boyfriend, husband, good family) continues to blossom. Or *appear* to be merely doing just that. It's very peculiar that Lacan would postulate an absence of the unconscious, much like a garden I think our components are the same, and some are tended too, while some are tended too a bit more. Either that or a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I should draw any conclusions at this point.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 04:00 pm (UTC)Needless to say, a gentleman never reveals what his sister
really didmay or may not have done. But it's worth pointing out that the disgust in that song is camped up for comic effect. From my current stance, I have nothing against consensual phone sex, or even morals themselves being 'merely image'. But being a method actor, now that's inexcusable. What, after all, is method but the rockism of acting?Re: What's not to love?
Date: 2004-11-07 04:21 pm (UTC)hahahaha. It's funny 'cause it's true. Mostly.
There does need to be some cultural context for this, though. Even today, but moreso through the end of the Tokugawa up to WWII, Japan was very much a culture of ancestor veneration. The emperor was also considered a divine figure. In that context, defending the homeland is seen as the absolute good.
And just like today's talk of Iraqi Freedom, the attempted conquest of Asia was talked about in terms of liberation. To make Japan safe, we must make Asia safe. To make Asia safe, we must expel the colonial powers. Asia for the Asians!
Just like today, people were shocked! Shocked! When the manchurians, as the Fallujans, were less than appreciative.
Given that this whole pan-Asianist doctrine that was the "humanitarian" justification for Japan's conquest of Asia was specifically modeled after the monroe doctrine, were the Japanese only mirroring a fundamental moral defect of western culture?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 06:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 08:11 pm (UTC)W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 08:18 pm (UTC)Here is an article critical of Barney's work: http://www.eserver.org/bs/38/vanproyen.html
An excerpt which might provide interesting debate:
Looking at Barney's work...we can feel comforted that we are somehow in the presence of "issues" and perhaps even a "radically transgressive practice," when in fact we are only witnessing a mannerist exercise in elaborate and perhaps extreme decoration. Granted, it is grotesque and sometimes even shocking decoration. But it is really only the latest example in a long line of self-conscious appeals to the para-aristocratic deity of dandyism that was advanced in the 19th century by Beau Brummel, Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire. Barney's work presents the decoration of self-as-decoration, yet another calculated and ingratiating appeal for "special" attention from the parents of the world, carrying with it a refusal to act in reality or fantasy as a parent of the world. Like other variants of the narcissistic position, dandyism, whether in the form of modernist elegance or post-modern freak show, is essentially a display of the dandy's investment in his own infantilism and his eager availability for cynical, administrative manipulation and exploitation.
Wakefield's oxymoronic playing with the words "psychological" and "unbounded" reveals the naiveté that underlies the artworld's epidemic of Barney-mania, and it speaks well of the suspension of disbelief that Barney's work achieves. Who could actually believe that desire could be unbounded — that is, unframed by the objects of desire as well as the uncontrollable motives of those objects and the complex conditions in which they are encountered? Only one whose object choice was limited to him or herself, for that is the only object that knows itself well enough to trust itself even as it experiences itself in a state of self-inflicted isolation. The fact that many of Barney's narratives involve themes of combat and escape attests to this dandified drama of self-desire, and in this Barney is not alone among contemporary artists. From Marcel Duchamp to Cindy Sherman, and from Andy Warhol to Orlan, contemporary art is rife with images of self-spectacle, all parading under the conveniently vague banner of "identity." Essentially, they overdress themselves to compensate for the inner dread of their own emptiness and their potential for social absence — "the living death of common anonymity" as a character in J.K. Huysmans' novel A Rebours puts it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 09:07 pm (UTC)Now that is utter bollocks. Is your head on upside down? Western culture is enthralled by the visual. Japanese too? Maybe that's why so many of them need glasses ;-)
Jimmy from Glasgow
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-07 09:26 pm (UTC)I think the extent to which we're actually in 'the society of the spectacle' has been over-rated. For instance, when the candidates in televised presidential debates bring sketch pads, and use them more than they use words, then I'll believe we're really in an age which has elevated the visual over the verbal.